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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.

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

Steve Jobs refused testing. James Dyson, and Dietrich Mateschitz did pre-test but fortunately ignored the reports that told them their ideas wouldn't work. And Apple, Dyson and Red Bull respectively, created revolutionary products and dominated entirely new categories.

Disruptive ideas rarely pass because they’re benchmarked against norms of average old ideas, not revolutionary new ones. For example, the Red Bull test failed to measure the emotional value of wild parties and exciting sports to come, the future keys to the brand’s success.

Intuitive leaps are not always right. But testing online provides an invaluable chance to gauge real behavior and apply logic after the fact, where it is most helpful.

When you measure actions not words, you are measuring the hidden emotions that drive responses.

Let Execution Inform Strategy The industry standard for testing positioning concepts involves stripping them of emotional executional elements often in the form of “white card” concepts. The goal is to isolate the single functional benefit that best drives sales. This doesn’t make sense, nor does it work. It emphasizes the rational reasons to justify purchase, not the emotional motivation to buy in the first place.