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Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends.

weekdays provide 14% more engagement than weekends, so this is definitely one you’ll want to test on your audience.

retweets have been shown to be highest around 5pm.

For click-throughs, the best times seem to be around noon and 6pm.

Twitter did an interesting study of these users and found that they are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute.

They’re also 119% more likely to use Twitter during school or work hours.

10pm–6am: This is the dead zone, when hardly any emails get opened. 6am–10am: Consumer-based marketing emails are best sent early in the morning. 10am-noon: Most people are working, and probably won’t open your email. Noon–2pm: News and magazine updates are popular during lunch breaks. 2–3pm: After lunch lots of people buckle down and ignore their inbox. 3–5pm: Property and financial-related offers are best sent in the early afternoon. 5–7pm: Holiday promotions & B2B promotions get opened mostly in the early evening. 7–10pm: Consumer promotions are popular again after dinner.

 23.63% of emails are opened within an hour of being received, this is something we definitely want to get right.

For more general emails, open rates, click-through rates and abuse reports were all found to be highest during early mornings and on weekends.

In a different study by MailChimp open rates were shown to be noticeably lower on weekends.

open rates increased after 12pm, and were highest between 2pm and 5pm.

A GetResponse study backed this up by showing that open rates drop off slightly, and click-through rates drop significantly on weekends. GetResponse found that Thursday is the best day for both open rates and click-throughs.

70% of users say they read blogs in the morning More men read blogs at night than women Mondays are the highest traffic days for an average blog 11am is usually the highest traffic hour for an average blog Comments are usually highest on Saturdays and around 9am on most days Blogs that post more than once per day have a higher chance of inbound links and more unique views

Although Google Plus and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals, they bring in some of the best visitors: Google Plus users, on average, find themselves spending north of three minutes diving into things shared by connections in their circles. They also visit 2.45 pages during each visit, and bounce only 50.63 percent of the time. LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click, viewing 2.23 pages with each visit and bouncing 51.28 percent of the time. Although many sites see minimal traffic from both Google Plus and LinkedIn, now may be the time to invest in building communities within those networks if engagement really matters to your business.

A referral from Twitter is as good as a referral from Facebook — at least, in terms of bounce rate, pages per visit, and time on site

Pinterest isn’t exactly the social media golden child we all play it up to be: Coming in sixth, pinners bounce as often as Facebook users and tweeps do, but view fewer pages per visit (1.71), and they spend considerably less time on site (64.67 seconds) than almost all of its counterparts, with the exception of StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon drives the least engaged referrals: Post-click, users view a meager 1.5 pages per visit and spend 54.09 seconds on site. It would appear that StumbleUpon’s click-heavy — to “stumble,” “like,” or “dislike” — focus makes users trigger-happy to a fault. Users stumble onto the next thing rather than immersing themselves in the webpage StumbleUpon recommends.

Facebook charges brands less to promote content with high engagement rates than it does for sub-par content. “Content that doesn’t get any play and is optimized out of Newsfeeds is more expensive to promote to more people,” he said. “That’s good for [people] because they are seeing relevant content, and it’s good for brands because we’re encouraging them to create engaging content.”

Brand growth, they maintain, is attained not by reaching a few loyal fans but a larger number of light and medium buyers. In this understanding of the marketing and media worlds, social is just another media channel useful for its reach rather than any notion of engagement.

Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers rather than the more casual shoppers that a brands needs to reach in order to grow

there is still no reliable way to measure the return on investment. Analytics companies are getting better at tracking whether engaged fans eventually make a purchase decision, but brands are still, by-and-large, forced to look at the number of clicks a brand page feeds to its website.

The ComScore report is littered with the phrase “Fans and Friends of Fans,” signaling the strong emphasis successful brands are taking to cater to the people who can implicitly endorse them to others. If one of your friends is a fan of Starbucks, you’re more likely to be exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook. And if you’re exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook, you’re 38% more likely to make a purchase in the next four weeks.

“The idea behind amplification is that Fans who are reached with brand messages can also serve as a conduit for brand exposure to Friends within their respective social networks,” the report said. “Because the average Facebook Fan has hundreds of Friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens of Friends with earned impressions through their engagement with brand messages.”

“While this research adds weight to the importance of social media, it also brings an important questions to the forefront – are the elevated spend levels among Fans and Friends of Fans the result of the messaging or a predisposition among these segments?

In other words, am I spending more at Best Buy because my friends like it, or because I hang out with people who are into tech gadgets? Am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks in the next four weeks because I saw a friend liked the brand on Facebook, or am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks because I run with people who like Starbucks - whether or not they choose to publicly declare so on Facebook?

Most likely, it’s a combination of both, as well as other factors including traditional advertising and proximity. In my case, I end up drinking more Starbucks than I’d like because it’s the only passable coffee shop within walking distance to my house. It’s a decision that I feel better about, perhaps because so many of my friends implicitly endorse Starbucks by liking the company on Facebook.

Favorites increased quite a lot. Along with Retweets in the graph below, this shows a lot more engagement with the Tweets themselves. Clicks, on the other hand, show engagement with the original content. This could explain why clicks didn’t increase as much--if Twitter is hoping to increase engagement on average with Tweets within your stream, it appears it’s working from our early indications.

t can be easy to get carried away with something that shows so much promise like this, but don’t forget that your followers probably want to see some variety from your Tweets. As you can see from our analytics near the top of this post, we’re still seeing some great engagement on Tweets that include a link without an image. In fact--that screenshot shows that link-based Tweets without images can get even more click-throughs that those with images.

There's no way to compare the results to people's views on standard banners, because Harris didn’t ask respondents about that format. It did, however, ask the same questions about infomercials and print advertorials, with similar results.

We’re not saying native doesn’t have a place in a marketing mix. We’re saying, that’s not the most effective way to build a brand.”

Of course, there are issues with self-reported surveys, especially one that requires participants to be honest about their views about something as divisive as advertising.

It’s also worth noting that Harris showed respondents generic examples of sponsored stories, not examples of actual sponsored stories people are served on their own Facebook news feeds, where the ads are aligned with their personal experiences and preferences.

“Engagement rates with sponsored stories are substantially higher than other ads on the site, and typically, [people] engage with things they find relevant and interesting,” Bruich said. “We do not see any evidence that they negatively impact people’s experience on the site.”

the results also conflict with joint research by Nielsen and Facebook that found that overall, social ads—those served to Facebook users whose Facebook friends are fans of, or interacted with, the advertised brand—generated a 55 percent lift in recall over non-social ads.

a new survey due out today by Harris Interactive for MediaBrix, a social and mobile ad firm, says otherwise. Harris asked online adults what they thought about three native ad formats—Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Sponsored Stories on Facebook and video ads that appear to be content. According to the survey, a majority found the ads negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised.

People had the strongest reaction to sponsored video ads, with 85 percent saying they

negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand. Sixty-two percent said the same of Promoted Tweets and 72 percent of Sponsored Stories. The survey also revealed that 45 percent found Promoted Tweets misleading, while 57 percent and 86 percent said the same about Sponsored Stories and video ads, respectively.

For Twitter, try off-peak times On Twitter, swim against the stream to make your posts stand out by trying off-peak times--like weekends, when click-through rates tend to be highest.

As for timing, considering the rhythm of the day for your audience--times like lunch or before and after a meeting are when folks are likely to be taking a quick peek at Twitter, so try timing posts for the lunchtime period and for time just before or after the hour to take advantage of the post-meeting crowd.

For Google+, late morning weekdays The Google+ crowd hits the site hardest on weekdays before noon.

The crafters, cooks and shoppers of Pinterest are busiest on the site late at night and on the weekends--particularly Saturday mornings, according to bit.ly.

when it comes to Twitter: link placement and tweet length. A link about 1/4 of the way through proved best for click-throughs.

And between 120 and 130 characters was the sweet spot for optimum tweet length.

With the rise of social media, companies like Facebook have charged that the CTR is a meaningless metric for branding campaigns. Opponents of CTR as a default metric argue that you can see an ad, not click on it and still be influenced by it. After all, that's the way most advertising has worked until now. You don't interact with a billboard, but it might introduce you to a new brand or product which you eventually might try.

KPIs vary depending on what stage of the purchase funnel your target customer is at. In the beginning, you may just want to raise awareness, in which case you'd rely on surveys to gauge success. Further along, you might be looking for interaction. Did the customer watch your video? Did she interact with your ad in some way?

To set up a campaign, advertisers can choose the keywords or phrase they want to target. Next, they can set more specifics, such as the location or gender of a user, or what device he or she is using. Twitter says early tests of this new ad product yielded higher engagement rates. GoPro, for example, saw "engagement rates as high as 11%" when using keywords to target users on Twitter.

Twitter — despite the different services that it has launched to increase engagement like Twitter Music other discovery services; and despite the increased attention around its IPO — has only grown by two percentage points to 18%. Hot on its heels is Instagram at 17%. Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.

when it comes to frequency of use, the rankings change. Facebook continues to remain at the top in the daily rankings, with 63% of people accessing it on a daily basis. Instagram — last in the general rankings — is not far off and in second place, with a 57% daily use. Similarly, its weekly and “less often” rates are also close, respectively at 22%/20% and 14%/22%. (

Twitter may overall be seeing less usage in general than Pinterest but those who are on it appear more engaged: some 46% of Twitter users are on it daily for their quick fix of quips made and received. Pinterest, in contrast, has a fairly low rate of daily usage, with 23% of its users visiting on a daily basis. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also are generating a significant amount of mulitple-times-per-day use, with 40% at Facebook, 35% at Instagram and 29% at Twitter, Pew says. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has a lot of work to do, with only 13% of its users going there daily.

Pew notes that for now it looks like Facebook is partly winning because of how it has managed to appeal to a wide range of users — a pretty impressive turn for widening its reach, considering that it started out as a network restricted only to university networks. The demographic data for other networks stands in contrast to this: Pinterest “holds particular appeal to female users”, with women four times more likely as men to be Pinterest users; LinkedIn is “especially” popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram resonate with urbanites and younger adults, and non-whites. (Facebook has over 70% usage among whites, Hispanics and black users, Pew notes.) All of them, excepting LinkedIn, has its highest proportion of users in the 18-29 age bracket; LinkedIn is more popular with the 30-49 group. Among those who say they use only one social networking site, Facebook is a clear winner with 84% selecting it as their sole site, with the others lagging behind by a very far stretch: 8% solely use LinkedIn, 4% solely use Pinterest, and Instagram and Twitter each picked up only 2%

While some broadcasters are amalgamating Social TV within their own platforms; there are many, who are integrating Twitter into their Social TV platforms for enhanced custom experience and participation. Industry players such as BBC and CNN, on the other hand have signed deals with social networking players such as Facebook, as social networking companies are aggressively trying to venture into this space,”

“Social is truly emerging as a coalition of television and social media, wherein newer formats are being developed to enhance viewer engagement and encourage paid transactions.

Under this model, content strategists realise digital strategies and UX requirements as the things our users read, watch and play with. In other words, we are really the architects of experiences.

Most agencies look at content strategists as the guys who audit content, test its effectiveness and generally specialise in its strategic and editorial underpinnings.This needs to change.

Content works best when you define it as anything that occupies your brand's space. Content strategy therefore works best when it's the conduit between user experience, strategy, creative and technology.

I recently worked with a bank that wanted branded content to help bolster waning sales of a low-rate credit card. But when we looked closely at the entire experience, we realised that content would do little for card sales. The application process was complex, dated and unfriendly.My recommendation as a content strategist was "fix your website then look at content". We built out a strategy, but it focused more on constructing an ecosystem for content than content itself. Put differently, it laid out scaffolding for good, hard-working content.

users remember fun, exciting or informative experiences that go well beyond any single piece of content.

With News Feed inventory, FBX ads are in Page Post Link format, meaning they’re much bigger than before, and they get prime real estate among posts from users’ friends and pages. Additionally, News Feed-based FBX ads include options for Likes, comments and shares, which could lead to other types of engagement or even virality.