Days when the most number of viewers get on Facebook

Image courtesy: Vitrue

Most interactions happen towards midweek with the peak taking place on Wednesday.

Let’s have a look at the times in which most number of interactions happen on a weekly basis.

There are few peaks in Facebook interaction throughout a day. The peaks happen somewhere around 11.00AM, 3.00PM and 8.00PM EST and there are few factors that contribute to these peaks.

• The highest peak at 3.00PM EST coincides with noon/lunchtime PST.
• 11.00AM EST is 8.00AM PST. So East coast is taking a break presumably while West coast is coming online.
• 8.00PM spike coincides with East coast dinner time and 5.00PM West Coast checkout time.

This is actually a fascinating breakdown of social media interaction in the United States. More information can be found here at Vitrue (Be warned, you have to part with your email address). But what’s more important is how to use this information for better Social Media campaigns.

How to use this information?
It would be a good idea to share information in the morning. In fact, sharing information in the morning is 65% more effective than any time else judging by the flow of shares, likes and comments. Stats aside, sharing information in the morning makes sense because you’d have your information available for a longer time.

Contrary to what someone would expect, Social Media is not so effective during the weekend. It’s quite an irony also because social interactions are deemed to happen during the weekend but apparently not so online.

The most important takeaways are:
Optimize and schedule your posts to go out during the morning for maximum visibility and engagement.

Schedule posts a few minutes before the top of the hour. Most number of people go on Facebook during the 0-15 minutes of each hour so have your content ready for them to share soon before they get on Facebook. It gives a competitive advantage for your business if they see your posts at the top of the updates stack first thing as they log in.

Facebook interaction is fueled by what you offer to your audience to take away. Make your information juicy so the community managers out there share it with their peers. If possible, offer something back to them as tribute for following you. Simple gestures go a long way in customer engagement and customer satisfaction.

Read more of the Vitrue article here.

But with limited time being utilized for 1000 different things, how can somebody write a blog post, much less a great blog post?

Well the trick is simpler than you think! Are we talking about hiring somebody to ghost write? Absolutely not. Ghost writers don’t share the same passion as you do about your business. Writing something on your own is something that can give you immense satisfaction and it can also be a good way for you to identify weaknesses of your business and marketing approach.

OK let’s get down to business. The ideal length of a blog post is about 400-500 words. If you are wondering, this post is already 180 words long. One thing that can help you with blog post writing is writing about something you are passionate about. Take me for example. I specialize in Search Engine Optimization and whatever I write about it comes to me naturally.

Don’t try to write about really complex matters in a blog post. A blog is hardly the best place for something like that. If you have a great subject topic, break it down to manageable bits. You’ll find it easy to write, you are going to find more topics to write about and your audience will love you for an easy to read and easy to remember post.

Try to make your blog posts interesting and to the point. It is always a good idea to try to engage your audience in the first paragraph and build your case from that point on. If you know anything about the inverted pyramid model of news reporting, I’m talking about that.

Also, use a couple of images that you might find for free. Try flickr.com or photos.com. You can find images that you can use for free after giving the owners proper credit for their images.

Another important thing you can do is linking back to your older posts. This works for you in several ways.

1. You give value to blog posts that you’ve written already and get an opportunity to re-index them.
2. Gives you an opportunity to direct viewers to your old posts that could be related in subject matter and beneficial to the reader.
3. Those content thieves will be pushed hard to steal your content with their content scrapers.

So these are a few things that you can try when you are confronted with writing something for your blog. The best blog posts that I’ve written came off within 60-90 minutes like this one which has taken me about 66 minutes now.  So get cracking and share your experiences with the world (me included).

Image Courtesy – PhotoSteve101

Not considering any SEO implications, page speed is an extremely important web usability element. Consider the following example originally published on Master New Media .

• Screen 1 – The first test participant in the top gaze plot fixated a few times within the big empty color block before the content downloaded, then spent the remaining time looking at the rest of the page. This user never looked at the big promotional space after it had rendered.
• Screen 2- The second user (bottom gaze plot) happened to be looking away from the screen during the eight seconds when the promotional content downloaded. Thus, the first time he looked at the page he saw it as intended, complete with the entire promo.

The slideshow occupies 23% of the page and the user who had to endure the download delay spent only 1% of her total viewing time within this space.

In contrast, the user who in effect received instantaneous page rendering (because he didn’t look until it was done), spent 20% of his viewing time within the slideshow area.

So in essence if the page speed has been optimized, the marketing team would have seen some more traction with their well planned advertisement. But in this case, all that effort was spent in vain.

The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to website speed is “let the audience be in control”. Remember, it’s the audience who interact with the website and it’s them that matters to you or your client. Every second of delay in website speed is a negative impact on the audience and lead them to realize that they are no longer in control. In such case, you or your clients are going to lose credibility which is not helpful at all.

So it might be a good idea to start looking at page speed. There are many free tools to check speed. We use a Firefox plugin called ‘Yslow’. Google is going one step ahead and offering a Page Speed tool for free http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Check out this video from the Google dev team.

• Where to obtain small business financing

• What a small business needs to qualify for financing

• How to easily and affordable remain connected with existing customers

• Where to find new customers and how to communicate with them regularly

During this session small businesses will receive live case studies from business owners who obtained financing and are successfully marketing their businesses through multiple-channels including email marketing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and direct mail.

Speakers include small business marketing expert Lisa Sparks, Director of the SCORE’s South Palm Beach Chapter Hal Finkelstein and Certified Business Analyst Phil Scruton of the SBDC at Palm Beach State College.

When Friday, April 30, 2010, 8:30am – 12pm

Where Boca Raton Marriott
5150 Town Center Circle
Boca Raton, FL 33486

First Damian Montero will present “How to Make Your Website iPad Friendly,” showing how to leverage HTML5 in order to play videos and more on the portable device.

The second presentation is by Luciano Ibias, COO of Zila Networks, the company behind the successful Friends Around Me, who will talk about “iPad App in a Week: How To Port Your App From iPhone To iPad.”

Follow the April speakers on Twitter:
Damian Montero @damianmontero
Luciano Ibias @ibias

Please RSVP Via Facebook
iPad Crash Course

Date: Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Grove Spot
3324 Virginia Street
Miami, FL 33133

Time: 7.30 PM

If you are considering hiring a web design company to assist you in setting up your space on the internet, you should consider hiring a local web designer. There are so many design companies today to choose from and they are located all over the world. While it is fine to use a design company located far from you, it could become a problem if a face-to-face meeting is necessary in order to go over some fine details concerning your website design.

You can benefit in many ways by going local with your web designer. Maybe you would like your designer to walk through your company in order to get a good, overall picture of what you do. Perhaps some drawings on paper are necessary so that you can understand fully what the designer has in mind for your site. In both cases, having your designer located on the other side of the world are of no benefit. Just having some regular, short meetings at a local coffee shop together with your designer can help to clear things up that may otherwise take a lot of emails and phone calls to clarify.

If you need a website built for your local business, it is nearly impossible for an outsider to fully understand the nature of the people living in your area. If you hire a local web designer however, he or she will understand how your potential customers think and feel. Adding a bit of local flavor to your site’s design is always a great idea and certainly an outsider will never be able to do that as well as someone who lives near you.

Hiring a local web designer is also a great way to support the economy in your area. Communities everywhere are trying to reduce the number of jobs that are sourced out as   outsourcing can eventually lead to both social and economic collapse.  Instead of contributing to this detrimental effect, you will be helping other business people in your city or town.

Finally, if and when your website runs into problems, your web designer will simply give you a call and perhaps invite you to his/her office so that you can sit down together and hammer out a solution. On the other hand, if your designer is located far away from you  in another time zone for instance, they may stop working on your site all together until they can reach you – which will delay the launching of your site.

A good resource for hiring local talent is www.craigslist.org. Another good resource is to simply search in Google for a local designer.

Retaining a customer is by far a more difficult job since the audience keeps comparing your site to that of your competitors. If their product or service offering is better than yours, chances are that your customer may get disenchanted and eventually seek a better option. Bleak stories aside, let us see what you can do to improve the customer interaction.

Concentrate on usability

If you are not running the Smirnoff or Johnnie Walker website, the chances of your audience waiting for that huge Flash file to load is very very low. Audiences need quick relief for their needs and you as an online business need to understand that fact.  So simple is the best way to go forward. This is true for website navigation, content placement, shopping carts and gathering information.

It is also important in SEO. Neither the users nor the search engine spiders like to wait or look hither and thither for information. Keep it simple. It’s a lesser burden on your dev team as well.

Offer good, usable information

You have a great design and possibly killer marketing content that can make audiences drool. But what if your audience looks for something more than the marketing yada yada?

A buying decision is a long process. Let us refresh our memories.

1. Problem recognition

2. Information Search

3. Evaluation of Alternative

4. Purchase decision

5. Purchase

6. Post-purchase behavior

This process is something that you have to keep in mind when arranging your content. If you offer a product or a service, make sure that your audience is retained within the site on all these aspect.

Simplify the purchasing process

Most websites require a customer to register him/herself before any purchase is made. This is cumbersome and the chances are that a particular customer may not make repeat purchases unless the overall product offering is above par. So why capture all intricate details of a customer. Make it simple. EBay or Amazon having thirty odd data fields to capture doesn’t mean that you have to do the same.  Capture only the most important data to successfully process the transaction and then encourage the customer to register to get better deals or other incentives.

Writing a straight forward frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) page

FAQ is usually an accepted format of questions followed by answers, with the goal of reducing unnecessary customer interaction. FAQ sections are best done on a single page using HTML to allow readers to navigate quickly top to bottom. They can save your more savvy online customers a lot of hassle, and build business.

For more snippets on improving your online business, visit our blog regularly. Else, you can bookmark us, subscribe to our RSS feed or let us send a email once new blog post is available in our blog.  Keep reading!