Did you ever wonder how long a link you share will be relevant? Is it going to be good for a couple of hours, several hours, a day or maybe longer? It is a question that has been on the minds of many people – particularly those who are interested in Social Media Management. Sharing a link is all fine and well, but sharing a link in a manner that it actually has traction and lingers on for more than the attention span of the average 4 year old is quite a different matter all together.
That is where having an actual manager that oversees your social media campaigns comes into play. Just like the elements on the periodic table, links have a half life. A half life is the amount of time it will take for a link to peak and then begin the inevitable descent. The peak is when a link has received about half of the clicks it will ever receive. Of course there will be times that a link receives a little life support and bucks the trend, but that is the exception to the rule.
A decent social media manager knows how to lay your campaign out so that platforms that have a short link half life are weighted correctly against those with a longer link half life. While Twitter is all the rage, it is a micro-platform that has the shortest half life of any social platform available (among the major players at least). Twitter is as much a matter of perfect timing as it is having the right followers list. For a link to really take off on Twitter it requires the perfect storm, so to speak. Usually that storm will blow hard and die fast. Because it is short on stamina does not mean it cannot pack in some power.
In a recent study, it was proved that this is true. Usually the half life of an outstanding link on Twitter is one 2 hours and 48 minutes. If a link hasn’t taken off by then it usually won’t. Trying to re-tweet it out with new headers usually does nothing to improve it. It is about like giving it a 30 minute window to take off the second try. By the third try…97% of the time you are just wasting your time. It is not going to gain traction.
The point being, when it comes to depending on Twitter for your SMM campaigns, it is a good second fiddle – actually third or fourth fiddle. It is a complementary player, not a lead actor. The rate of tweets that go nowhere being lost in the flotsam and jetsam of random garbage is far too high to depend on alone. Couple that with a miniscule half life that is dwarfed by platforms like Amazon that are not even designed for social media in most respects, and Twitter is what you have. Diversify your SMM campaigns – so say the analysts and so say the social media managers – at least the good ones.
Tags: SMM, social media, social networking, Twitter
