[Thoughts] Social Media Content Lifetime Span

Visitors want your latest content and they want it now! – That’s a fact.

Within a few hours a tweet and Facebook post can be banished into the dark pits of the web and never seen again. As humans we crave the latest information and being conditioned with “on-demand” services and live feeds, this need for the latest information is only conditioning us to what newer, to the minute information and discard the information of a few hours ago.

Recent studies show that Tweets last a reportedly 24-60 minutes. Twitter moves fast and reportedly publishes half a billion tweets per day – Pretty easy to see how your tweets get swallowed up! Facebook posts last a little longer and are reportedly said to reach 75% of your audience/friends within 3 hours. Our own research has shown that on Linkedin the average post does better and has a lifespan of upto 24-36 hours.

It’s pretty interesting information, that shows the lifespan of Twitter which is commonly used for gossip/news is of a very short life time where as more professional networks such as Linkedin have a much longer lifespan.

What content works best?
Valuable content will always work best, especially when embedded into a blog post. For example my post around Web Trends and the Ecommerce Crash Course, still brings us traffic today. The key lesson is to always create valuable content that people will always want to search for, popular topics such as “Who invented the internet”, will always serve you well, rank well in Google and bring you in traffic – How relevant and how you you monitize that traffic is a different story that we shall cover later.

Compared to content that you write and publish in your blog, social media content has a much shorter lifespan.

Social media content, whilst it can be viewed on your timeline if searched for its not visible on your friends/followers timeline for very long.

It’s thought that most content is as good as invisible after 48 hours although there are some things you can do to keep it alive.
Have people engage with your content, it appears that the more people that engage the higher up on feeds it goes and when users engage with your content they tend to also see it higher up on their feed.

Leverage hashtags, shares and retweets etc – As these reach a wider audience and could be then retweeted by your followers at a later date/time giving a slight boost.

Hashtags can also help, as if they are niche they will be visible a lot longer when searched for and if it’s a popular hashtag then it could snowball and become listed in the popular trends section.

You can also schedule your content via a social media tool such as hootsuite. This will allow you time your content for maximum impact and engagement.

Remember to always share great content – it’s that content that will get the most engagement and get you the most visibility.

If you are stuck for content ideas why not re-purpose old content, find some of your old best performing posts, freshen them up and reshare it with a new message.