7 Tactics to Write Quality Content Your Audience Will Love

The debate is over.

We’ve all bought our tickets.

Creating quality content is the most effective way to market a business.

Even the big retailers and B2Bs are on board.

But, questions of quantity and quality still linger.

How can I produce the right volume of valuable, sharable content? The truth is, you can pump out a ridiculous number of killer blog posts and still wind up with a poor conversion rate because you’re not answering your audience’s needs.

Your content has to be better. It has to stand out. And it has to strike a chord with your audience, and engage your influencers. You can’t write that kind of content consistently off the top of your head. You need research.

Here are some proven tactics that will build your knowledge base and help you write quality content your audience will love.

1. Monitor social media.

You’re probably already listening for your brand or company name mentions, which is great, but not enough. Expand your attention to pick up on trends, social cues, and weak signals. Industry topics, news, and even consumer ideas for new uses for your products.

A delicious collaboration in the works between @Oreo and @COOLHAUS!

2. Get to know your customers.

Customers are more than just faceless demographics. Chances are you’ve got a CRM chock full of information you’re not mining. Your sales staff should be entering every interaction (training may be necessary if they’re not).

Customer service notes, such as comments and complaints, are a rich source of inspiration. To spark their interest and earn their attention, get inside your customer’s head. Find service or product areas you need to address and questions you need to answer.

Content that provides in-depth answers is a powerful drawcard.

Just how powerful is customer knowledge?

According to Invesp, developing an effective  buyer persona can result in a 238% increase in conversions. Understanding your customers pays off in a big way!

3. Check out your competitors

Competitive analysis is perhaps the strongest indicator of what works. By observing what resonates with the audience of competing businesses, you can better predict what your audience will appreciate.

A competitor content audit gives you a comprehensive overview of what is working in your industry, information you can use to improve your marketing strategy and SEO.

You can document best practices, discover what type of content is most likely to be shared, and identify influential bloggers and social media influencers.

Screenshot from Rival IQ 

4. Do keyword research

Forget keyword optimization, long-tail keyword stuffing, and all the other word weirdness that used to work. It’s not only not effective, it might actively hurt your search engine rank.

That does not mean you should stop doing keyword research.  Keywords reveal what people are talking about, responding to, and sharing.

Use popular topics for inspiration and find a new angle, or combine ideas to add depth.

5. Test your titles

When running keyword research for the screenshot above, Buzzsumo yielded “Marketing Is Dead, and Loyalty Killed It,” and I was hooked. I had to stop working and read it. That’s what your title should be, an irresistible lure.

Oh, and it should contain your primary keyword. That’s still a thing.

Screenshot from Co-Schedule

The Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer gave “Knowledge In, Content Out” a B+ (This was the original headline for this article). Perhaps I should throw in a puppy. Everybody loves puppies.

6. Read the research

Last year, Buzzsumo analyzed the social share volume of 100 million posts to determine what people share and why. The results are pretty enlightening.

Key findings: longer content is more popular, images are practically mandatory, and people are more likely to share based on emotional value.

Graphic courtesy of  OkDork

Brian Carter and Marketo researched what people share on Facebook and why a few years ago, and offer practical advice on using the knowledge to better your content. (It’s super long, so it must be really good)

There are a ton of industry reports that will help you keep up, and a lot of them are free. Because industry reports are excellent content that get shared a lot. See how that works?

You can also base some blog posts on statistics. Reports can be a little dry. Blog posts written with added context to show how statistical information applies to your business are often wildly popular. Jeff happens to be really good at showing how to put statistics to use. Watch and learn!

7.  Optimize your content

You did your homework and poured your heart into a killer post with a can’t miss title… and you’re still not done. Sorry. Now it’s time to optimize your work before publishing. That requires a different kind of knowledge, on-page SEO.

If your writing has focus, your post will have all the semantic keywords and concepts it needs to make the penguin happy. No real need to obsess over that.

For solid SEO and added interest you need:

• A concise and descriptive meta description
• Sub-headers containing keywords and variants
• Links to other internal pages (to keep visitors in your site longer)
• Outbound links (to authoritative sites)
• Images (preferably with descriptive ALT text)

Adding other visual media, like videos and slideshows, isn’t a must, but will increase interest and boost the share value of your posts.

There’s no way to predict how much attention your content will get, but you have a much better chance of earning attention with a knowledge-based approach. If you consistently churn out well-written, personable posts loaded with information and insight, your audience will grow. It may take patience at first; building momentum can be slow.

Content is, in essence, your brand. What you post drives consumer interest in your company and inspires your fans to become brand advocates. The trick is to build a careful library of knowledgeable, informative content based on industry topics people search for, and present it in an understandable way. Then spiff it up with graphics and whatnot so it looks pretty.

Knowledge, presentation, and promotion. That’s what makes great content.

Now that you know my process for developing content, tell me yours.

What methods do you use to research topics and develop content?

Podcasting provided by Odovox.com

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The Biggest Social Media Science Study: What 4.8 Million Tweets Say About the Best Time to Tweet

Imagine removing all guesswork when you schedule your tweets, knowing the times that work for maximum clicks and maximum engagement.

As someone who shares frequently to social media, this info would be fantastic to have! We’re always eager to dig up new research into social media best practices—things like length and frequency and timing.

The timing element, in particular, feels like one where we’d love to dig deeper. And we just so happen to have a host of data on this from the 2 million users who have signed up for Buffer!

With a big hand from our data team, we analyzed over 4.8 million tweets across 10,000 profiles, pulling the stats on how clicks and engagement and timing occur throughout the day and in different time zones. We’d love to share with you what we found!

The best time to tweet: Our 4.8 million-tweet research study

Our key learnings

Wow, we learned so much looking at the awesome stats from those who use Buffer! Here were some of the takeaways we came up with. I’d love to hear what catches your eye, too!

• Early mornings are the best time to tweet in order to get clicks.
• Evenings and late at night are the best time, on average, for total engagement with your tweets
• In some cases, the most popular times to post are opposite of the best times to post.
• Popular times and best times to tweet differ across time zones.

The most popular time to tweet:

Noon to 1:00 p.m.

We’ve taken the data from all tweets sent through Buffer to find the most popular times for posting to Twitter. Looking at all tweets sent across all major time zones, here is an overview of the most popular times to tweet.

• Noon to 1:00 p.m. local time, on average for each time zone, is the most popular time to tweet
• The highest volume of tweets occurs between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., peaking between noon and 1:00 p.m.
• The fewest tweets are sent between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.

Here’s the chart for the most popular times worldwide, taken from an average of 10 major time zones (the times represent local time).

Here is the graph for the most popular times to tweet in each of the four major U.S. time zones. 

(We normalized the data to account for daylight’s savings in the U.S. as well.)

Here are the charts for the major time zones in Europe and Africa.

(Note: The London (GMT) time zone used to be the default time zone for new Buffer users, so our data for GMT is not as clean as we would like it to be. We’ve omitted any takeaways for GMT from the research results here.)

Here are the charts for the major time zones in Asia and Australia.

It’s interesting to see how the most popular time to tweet varies across the time zones. We’ve shared Buffer’s 10 most popular time zones in the charts above. Here’s a list of each most popular hour for the 10 major time zones.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (Pacific Time): 9:00 a.m.
• Denver (Mountain Time): noon
• Chicago (Central Time): noon
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Eastern Time): noon
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, etc. (Central European): 4:00 p.m.
• Cape Town, Cairo, Helsinki, etc. (Eastern European): 8:00 p.m.
• Sydney (Australian Eastern): 10:00 p.m.
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong Time): 8:00 a.m.
• Tokyo (Japan Time): 2:00 a.m.
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China Time): noon

For any clarification on this or the other research throughout this article, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• The most popular time to post could be due to a number of factors: This is when most people have access to Twitter (perhaps at a work computer), this is when online audiences are most likely to be connected (see Burrito Principle), etc.
• Should you post during the most popular times? That’s one possibility. Also, you may find success posting at non-peak times, when the volume of tweets is lower.
• If you have a large international audience on Twitter, you may wish to locate the particular part of the world where they’re from, and adjust your schedule accordingly. You can find the times when your audience may be online with tools like Followerwonk and Crowdfire.

The best times to tweet to get more clicks

We were excited to dig into the specific metrics for each of these tweets, too, in hopes of coming up with some recommendations and best practices to test out for your Twitter strategy.

First up, the best time to tweet for clicks.

Looking at the data, we found the following trends for maximizing your chance to get more clicks:

• Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most clicks on average
• The highest number of clicks per tweet occurs between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
• The fewest clicks per tweet happen in the morning (when tweet volume is particularly high), between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m..

The data in the below chart is the worldwide average, calculated for the local time in each time zone. So the peak at the 2:00 a.m. hour would hold true as the overall top time no matter which time zone you’re in—2:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, New York, Cape Town, Hong Kong, etc.

For the specifics on each of the best time to tweet for clicks in each of the major time zones in Buffer, here’s a breakdown.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (Pacific Time): 2:00 a.m.
• Denver (Mountain Time): 7:00 p.m.
• Chicago (Central Time): 2:00 a.m.
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Eastern Time): 11:00 p.m.
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, etc. (Central European): 2:00 a.m.
• Cape Town, Cairo, Istanbul, etc. (Eastern European): 8:00 p.m.
• Sydney (Australian Eastern): 2:00 a.m.
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong Time): 5:00 a.m.
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China Time): noon
• Tokyo (Japan Time): 8:00 a.m.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• Clicks was far and away the largest engagement metric that we tracked in this study (compared to retweets, replies, and favorites).
• Some of the recommended best times for individual time zones show thatnon-peak hours are the top time to tweet for clicks. This data may reflect some particularly high-achieving posts—some outliers—that bring up the average when the volume of tweets is lowest. Still, it’d be a great one to test for your profile to see what results you get.
• One neat thing to keep in mind is that a non-peak hour in, say, Los Angeles may correspond to a peak hour in London or Paris. The worldwide audience is definitely one to consider when finding the best time to tweet.

The best times for overall engagement with your tweet

We define engagement as clicks plus retweets, favorites, and replies. When looking at all these interactions together, we found the following trends formaximizing your chance to get the most engagement on your tweets:

• Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most total engagement on average
• The highest amount of engagement per tweet occurs between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
• The smallest amount of engagement happens during traditional work hours, between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• The best times to tweet for engagement are quite the inverse of the most popular times to tweet. (The late-night infomercial effect—tweet when fewer people are tweeting—seems to be the case here.)

The best times for retweets and favorites on your tweets

Adding together two of the most common engagement metrics, we found some interesting trends for maximizing the retweets and favorites on your tweets, especially for those with a U.S. audience.

Looking at 1.1 million tweets from U.S. Buffer users from January through March 2015, here were some of the notable takeaways we found:

• Tweets sent at the 9:00 p.m. hour in the U.S. earn the most retweets and favorites on average
• The highest number of retweets and favorites occurs between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., peaking between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
• The lowest retweet-favorite engagement happens at 3:00 a.m.

(Interesting to note, the takeaways from this data compared to the worldwide engagement data differ slightly for a couple reasons: 1) clicks represent a huge portion of overall engagement, and 2) the worldwide vs. US datasets vary.)

We’d love to make it easy for you to share these results with your audience, your friends, your clients—anyone you think might benefit from them.

>> Download every chart from this post (.zip) <<

The methodology for our research

We studied all tweets ever sent through Buffer—4.8 million tweets since October 2010!

Based on this sample set, we looked at the number of clicks per tweet, favorites per tweet, retweets per tweet, and replies per tweet, in accordance with the time of day that the tweet was posted to Twitter.

Further, we segmented the results according to time zones, based on the assumption that the learnings might be more actionable if they could be specific to exactly where you live and work.

We had an interesting opportunity to consider whether median or average would be the better metric to use for our insights. It turns out that so many tweets in the dataset receive minimal engagement that the median was often zero. For this reason, we chose to display the average.

Over to you: What are your takeaways?

We’re so grateful for the chance to dig into the stats from the many tweets that people choose to share with Buffer. The data is super insightful, both for sharing with others and for impacting our own social media marketing plans!

What did you notice from the stats here?

Did any of the results surprise you or get you thinking about your plans in a different way?

I’d love to hear your take on this! Feel free to share any thoughts at all in the comments!

Image sources: IconFinder, Blurgrounds, Death to the Stock Photo, UnSplash

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Why You Should Share to Social Media in the Afternoon + More of the Latest Social Media Research

I love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media.

If it’s research-backed or numbers-driven, sign me up. These actionable tips are what drive a lot of our experiments at Buffer as we’re keen to see if the best advice from these studies meshes with our experience, too.

And there’s a lot of new info to go off of.

I’ve collected 10 of the latest surprising, revealing studies on social media here in this post, with takeaways and insight into social media timing, Instagram sharing, Facebook users, and more. If you’ve seen a recent study worth mentioning, I’d love to hear from you!

1. The peak performance of social sharing

Late afternoon to nighttime is the best time to reach people on social

Social traffic substantially underperforms overall traffic from about 5 a.m. to noon, and social substantially overperforms overall traffic from about 3 p.m. until 1 a.m.

Chartbeat reported on the data of the sites it tracks, looking at how social media sharing corresponds to site traffic. The general trend seemed to follow: Traffic and social sharing both increase throughout the early morning, peak midday, then lessen into the evening.

The unique finding here was in the subtle difference in exactly where each metric peaks.

Social traffic outperforms website traffic from 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time to 1:00 a.m.

2. What the average Facebook user looks like

The very male, college-educated, heavily IT, somewhat liberal demographic

Only two publishers–BuzzFeed and Yahoo!–have more women than men in their audiences at 51% and 56% respectively.

Only two publishers–Forbes and Wired–exceed a 10% likelihood in their audiences working at management level.

Fractl and BuzzStream collaborated on a study of 20 publishers’s Facebook audiences, looking at the Audience Insights for publishers like The Guardian, Wired, BuzzFeed, Yahoo, Huffington Post, and more.

In the case of these audiences, the results skewed heavily in a few directions:

• 18 of the 20 publishers had an audience that was more male than female.
• The majority of active users on these pages has graduated from college.
• All but one publisher had an audience makeup of more IT workers than the U.S. Facebook average.

Comparisons might be a little tricky to draw between these pages and yours, though the research does point to the value of understanding your audience. My best guess at the demographics of some of these publishers would be that the audience was more female (I was wrong) and perhaps not as IT focused.

3. Instagram vs. Facebook

Instagram a more engaged platform than Facebook, Twitter

Instagram leads social platforms for engagement with 2.81% of audiences engaging with a post.

Locowise studied 2,500 Instagram profiles from April 2015 to measure a wide assortment of different engagement metrics and content strategies. One of the big takeaways was how engagement on Instagram far outperforms Facebook and Twitter.

Average engagement per post on Instagram was 2.81%.

On Facebook, engagement was 0.25%.

On Twitter, engagement was 0.21%.

(For Instagram engagement—as you can see from the graph above—the best results still come from photos versus video.)

Other interesting takeaways from the Locowise study include:

• Likes account for 96% of all engagements (comments account for the other 3%)
• Brands post 2.3 times per day to Instagram
• The largest profiles post 7.24 times per day, the smallest profiles post 1.68 times
• Average follower growth month-over-month is 1.95%, meaning that if you had 1,000 followers in March, you could expect to gain 19 new followers in April.

4. Interactions and Instagram

More interactions happen on Instagram—5 likes or comments for every 100 followers

The average interaction % on Instagram is up to 10 times higher than on Facebook.

Quintly analyzed over 5,000 Instagram accounts (and broke those accounts into buckets of followers, too) to see the current trends in engagement, content type, and strategy. One of the main takeaways from the study: Interactions are amazingly high on Instagram.

Quintly measured Interaction Rate, which is interactions per post divided by number of followers. They found that Instagram’s Interaction Rate was 4.80 interactions per 100 followers. Facebook’s rate is 0.72.

Further, Quintly also shared the average interactions per post for Instagram photos or videos, along with a breakdown of what you might expect at varying follower levels.

5. Where is social media marketing headed?

Survey says Twitter, YouTube, & LinkedIn

Social Media Examiner surveyed over 3,700 marketers on their social media strategies, goals, and plans, ending up with some truly fascinating results on where social media marketing may be headed.

A significant 66% of marketers plan on increasing their use of Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Additional cool findings from the Social Media Examiner survey include:

• Marketers are most keen to learn about Facebook
• Nearly 3 out of every 4 marketers plans to increase video usage
• Facebook and LinkedIn are the two most important networks for marketers
• Most marketers aren’t sure their Facebook marketing is effective

6. On reposting content

How to get more engagement with a second tweet

We’ve written much before about the case for reposing content, sharing an article more than once on social media. A research team from Cornellinvestigated this strategy, looking at the effect of wording on sending multiple messages through Twitter.

The researchers developed an algorithm that could successfully predict which variation of the same tweet would receive more retweets. (You can try out the free tool that is based on the algorithm.)

Here are the factors that researchers identified as being helpful for reposted content. (The most significant factors are highlighted in bold.)

• Ask people to share – Use words like “RT, Retweet, spread, please”
• Informativeness helps – Focus on length, nouns, and verbs (and not so much @-mentions or hashtags)
• Make your language align with both community norms and with your prior messages
• Mimic news headlines
• Use positive and/or negative words (both seemed to work equally well)
• Use third-person singular – He, she, it, and one
• Generality helps – Use indefinite articles like a, an

7. Twitter images for smaller accounts

The 9x increase in retweets just by adding an image

In a huge Twitter analysis by Stone Temple Consulting—over 2 million tweets analyzed for eight different factors, including unique things like domain authority and Followerwonk social authority—the authors discovered a few insightful trends, perhaps none more actionable than the power of tweets with images.

According to Stone Temple’s study, adding an image to your tweet doubles the likelihood that your tweet will receive a retweet or favorite.

And for those with low-level social authority—low follower counts, just getting started on Twitter, or otherwise—adding an image to your tweet generates 5 to 9 times as many retweets and 4 to 12 times as many favorites in total.

From Eric Enge of Stone Temple:

At lower authority levels including an image will get you 5 to 9 times as many Retweets and 4 to 12 times as many favorites than you will if your tweets don’t include an image. Hopefully, you were sitting down when you read that. Note that high authority levels also benefit as well, though for the 90-99 range the gain is relatively modest. For those high authority accounts, people are already hanging on their every word.

8. The top social networks

The surprising result at #1, plus the unique spot for Twitter

The Global Web Index’s most recent quarterly report (a survey of more than 40,000 Internet users) looked at social media usage and came out with a couple keen insights.

1. More Internet users visit YouTube than Facebook.
2. YouTube and Twitter have significantly more visitors than active users. 

So in case you had yet to consider YouTube as a possible channel to meet your audience, there seems to be solid evidence here that your audience is quite familiar and comfortable with hanging out at YouTube. (We’ve got some tips on how to make videos for your brand also, if that’d be interesting for you!)

And as for the drop in active users for YouTube and Twitter, I like to think of this in terms of consumption versus sharing. Someone may be on Twitter to hear the latest news, click some links, see what’s happening—they may still be engaged with your Twitter stream without contributing anything of their own to Twitter.

We covered a series of social media personality types awhile back, and these folks seem to fit well into the lurker category—still a valuable addition to your network, just with their own personal tastes when it comes to being involved.

9. How people spend their time on social

Twitter is for news, Facebook is for friends

Another interesting takeaway from the Global Web Index report is in the survey responses about how people spend their time on social media sites. For Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, the report found the following:

• The most popular activity on Twitter is reading a news story
• The most popular activity on Facebook is clicking the “Like” button

Here’s how the rest of the activity breaks down. Note how many of the top Twitter activities deal with reading the news or catching up on what’s been happening whereas many of Facebook’s top activities involve connecting with friends.

10. Make waves by responding quickly

5 in 6 messages that need responses are not answered by brands

Sprout Social regularly shares insights from its data, making particular note about the way that brands and businesses listen and respond on social media. Their 2013 benchmark study showed great room for brands to improve, andSprout’s followup study in 2014 had many of the same takeaways.

There is great opportunity for you to stand out on social media by simply replying to everyone. 

The data from Sprout Social showed that businesses are learning how to reply quicker to responses (we’ve mentioned before that response expectations on Twitter typically hover under 60 minutes). However, they’re replying to a smaller percentage of the volume of messages they receive.

• Response rate: 17% (was 21% one year ago)
• Response time: 5% improvement from previous year

Over to you

Which of these stats stand out to you? 

Is there anything here that seemed particularly surprising or true from your experience? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! Feel free to leave any input you might have, it’d be great to hear from you.

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, UnSplash

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