Every week we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were busy scheduling your tweets.
- It’s a question as old as time: When’s the best time to tweet?
To rise above the clutter of people who schedule their tweets with HootSuite and such, avoid tweeting at :00, :15, :30 or :45 of the hour, when an explosion of tweets tends to occur. In fact, it’s better to avoid multiples of 5 entirely in order to increase the chances of your tweet being seen.
Also? Don’t schedule tweets.
- What about Facebook posts? The specific time isn’t as much of a factor there, but to maximize the engagement and visibility of each post, it’s best to wait at least 3 hours in between each post.
But not so fast. That rule of thumb could be changing soon. Coming to a Facebook timeline near you: Lots of new apps that will take oversharing to the next level.
The specific nature of updates will work in favor of brands. “The action won’t just say, “Todd ran,” but rather, “Todd ran 4.3 miles with Nike+” … The new Foodily app enables people to tell friends what food they “craved,” “made” or “recommend.”
- The cost of advertising on Facebook is climbing, but click-through rates are improving too.
- Here’s Megan Garber on why publishers should pay attention to the just-released ‘Longreads: Best of 2011’ ebook:
This is the new publishing economy in action: fast and flexible and revolving around products whose logic is responsive, rather than predictive. As an industry, publishing has traditionally relied on a book-then-audience framework, an if-you-build-it-they-will-come sort of infrastructure that injected a bunch of uncertainty — and, therefore, inefficiency — into the publishing process. A book’s audience was potentially big, but also simply potential: Until sales numbers brought clarity to the situation, a title’s market was largely assumed, which is to say, hoped for.
- 5 things publishers need to know about HTML5.
- Howard Fineman explains how local Patch sites will be used to feed the national Huffington Post site:
For example, local Patches have been working on a reporting project about the role of evangelical churches in the campaigns. These articles will eventually feed into a broader Huffington Post story written by one of the site’s national reporters in New York or D.C., said Fineman. “You want the Patch editors to stay local,” he said, “but you want to try and use them in their great numbers and great local feel to give texture to national stories.”
- 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Pinterest.
- The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says that bills pending in Congress to regulate online ads may lose traction in 2012.
- U.S. online ad spending will grow by over 20 percent in 2012 to reach $39.5 billion, says eMarketer.
- Media companies with digital-only sales staff perform better, says a new Borrell Associates report.
- How well your deal sells is inversely proportional to the amount of fine print on the offer:
The more fine print a deal has, the less freedom and thus more stress the consumer has in using the voucher. In a way, it feels as if the merchant and the daily deal website are not sincere about welcoming new customers to try out their offering.
- Where might location-based advertising and deals pay off the best? The shopping mall, where people have “of their own free will walked onto the premises, you *know* they want to shop.”
- And finally, the next time someone at a party makes a crack about how “newspapers are dropping like flies” or some variant, here’s a fun fact: In the last 6 months of 2011 there was a net loss of 798 daily deal publishers worldwide that either closed up shop or were consolidated out of existence. Time to start a ‘Daily Deal Deathwatch’ site?
