The Half-life of a Post on Twitter
Do you know the half-life of your post on Twitter? Twitter moves the fastest of all the social networks. The half-life of a post on Twitter is a great example of determining your own social half-life.
The social platform is indispensable for many experts, thought leaders, trendsetters, and influencers.
Twitter is one of the most competitive (if not the most) and probably the most cutthroat platform where your posts disappear the fastest.
What is Half-life?
According to Wikipedia,
Half-life (t1⁄2) is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value. The term is very commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay, but it is also used more generally for discussing any type of exponential decay.
The Life of a Twitter Post (Tweet)
It is a high-volume low-value traffic source because the largest number of impressions and interactions your tweet will get will be in the first half-hour or so. Wiselytics studied a million tweets (that had at least 10 retweets each) to find how engagement declines over time. They found that the average half-life of a tweet (its median lifespan) is 24 minutes.
The SEO consulting company Moz found in its research that the number is around 18 minutes.
In other words, a tweet gets half its interactions in the first half-hour and then starts a long, slow decline into the fog of time. This is why some guides don’t have upward limits on the number of times a brand ought to tweet in a day.
You will see some Twitter profiles posting a lot on twitter every day because of this short lifespan of a tweet. You really can get away with it there! You may also see people posting the same tweet to their Twitter feed at different times of the day.
A tweet’s life span is tightly correlated to the size of an account’s following. See the data metrics when this profile on Twitter had less than 3000 followers.
However, the longer you leave a tweet up on the top of your page, the longer your followers will have an opportunity to engage with it. Give your followers some time to check it out and react to your tweet before piling on another one on top of it.
Comparison of a Tweet, Instagram Post, Facebook Post, and Pinterest Pin
Instagram Post
The half-life of an Instagram post is about 19 hours. It takes 72 minutes for an Instagram post to gather half of its total engagement. But that doesn’t mean a post is useless after 19 hours.
Posts continue to get engagement for days afterward, just at a slower clip. A post by a top brand receives 50% of comments within the first six hours and 75% within 48 hours.
High-performing posts on Instagram – those that have double the average engagement – see this peak later, taking more than 13 hours to reach 50% of comments. High-quality content has a longer lifespan on Instagram.
Facebook Post
The half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes. The half-life of a tweet is 4 times shorter than a Facebook post.
A Facebook post reaches 75% of its potential engagement in 5 hours. A median Tweet reaches this 75% mark in less than 3hrs. a typical tweet will reach half the value of its total engagement within the first 16 minutes after it was posted.
The takeaway here is to remember that after about 2 hours, your Facebook posts disappear from the News Feed — never to be seen by fans again. So make sure those 2 hours happen at the right time!
Pinterest Pin
Pinterest’s average life of a Pinterest post is 4 months. The half-life of a Pinterest pin is 1,680 times longer than a Facebook post. When people visit Pinterest, they browse, they search, they surf, and they uncover more pins.
Researching a bit further seemed to back up these numbers, with some debate on Pinterest. A year later, a pin is getting 1000s of repins.
Pinterest pins are accompanied by a lot of metadata. Make the most of this long life by creating evergreen pins with beautiful images and well-written descriptions. Share your content with your audience and find quality content that you can pop in and schedule instantly for an entire week or month. If you spend time picking out the perfectly shareable pin, that effort won’t disappear within minutes.
Extend the Half-life of a Post on Twitter
The equation for Twitter success is simple: More tweets = higher engagement.
Tweets can have an extended old age due to retweets and a couple of people continually zapping the tweet back to life through comments, reposting, and resharing the post. When you tweet (the time you actually push the tweet button on Twitter) or ide your scheduling too, therefore, is critically important.
Join the Monday and Thursday blog share team on Twitter.
Instructions of blog sharing
Retweet yourself like no one’s watching. In our case, Monday and Thursday Blog Share is a day to share content to a relevant audience. The pioneer team is cut accross diverse fields though interrelated. The uniting factor simple: Every business, person, startup, mom working from home, stay at home dad, or employee wants to make more money today, than they made yesterday. If non-profits want to be self sufficient.
Tweet frequently and include relevant hashtags to increase retweets from other parties. Currently, we use two generic hashtags #mondayblogshare #thursdayblogshare plus one hashtag that identifies the blogger, writer or content creator like #thextraordinarionly. A universal hashtag will be shared shortly.
Tweets with links are 86% more likely to be retweeted. Like photos, links appeal to Twitter users. Links, however, are more likely to increase your number of retweets than engagement rates. Give people something valuable to pass on to their followers beyond your commentary on the link.
Retweet your followers and other people’s content too. At the monday and thursday blog share, the instructions are to reply to a tweet with a blog post link (NOT link to a prodcut, service or program).
Post at the optimal time
The best time to tweet is when your audience is online. On any given day, the best time to tweet is about 5 pm, when about 6% of all re-tweets are made, but on mid-week or on weekends, post or schedule your tweets to post at noon or 5-6 pm.
For Business to Business (B2B) marketing, weekdays (Monday to Friday) are 15-20% better for meaningful engagement. Most retweets take place at 5 pm and the best click-through rate is seen at 6 pm (best CTR) tweets. This is the time the ‘5 to 7’ crowd includes the majority of motivated entrepreneurs looking to catch up on trending topics and the latest news.
Post multiple times
If less than 10% of your fans see any given post, the odds of them seeing it more than once are very unlikely.
So how often should you post on Twitter?
Your chance of getting more unique views and backlinks increases as you increase the frequency that you share content. Content updates are vital when trying to drive traffic to your site. A study done last summer by Kissmetrics indicates that the best tweeting frequency optimal for click-through is one to four tweets per hour.
By their own admission, Buffer tweets 14 times per day but never more than once per hour. They suggest that you can tweet as many as 30 times per day.
Post repurposed content
The most difficult type of engagement to earn is a share. With a share, a Twitter user indicates that they enjoy the post, and they are willing to be associated with it. They’re okay with their friends on Twitter seeing that they’ve shared the piece. Hence, you can present your content, blog post, or video to your audience with different titles, questions, images, quotes or other messages. The same blog post has several different ways of presenting it.
Engage
If you never respond to comments or likes left on your posts, why should people continue to leave comments or like your posts? It sounds simple. To help extend the lifespan of your posts, do not thank your fans and followers only. Keep conversations going, pose more questions, and seek alternative opinions.
When mixing up blog posts and other pieces of content, we would tweet 15-20 times (even more) on Twitter especially on weekends. The resultant effect was the engagement and reach as shown below with over 8000 followers.
Schedule your content
When ghostwriting, the buck of scheduling content stops with the owner of an article or blog. Our content scheduling strategy comprises of the virgin, evergreen or repurposed content. TweetDeck’s host of advanced features helps us to test other content scheduling apps and get the most of Twitter when managing multiple Twitter accounts, scheduling Tweets for posting in the future, and building Tweet collections.
Conclusion
Twitter algorithm-based timeline ranks popular tweets higher than recent tweets. Competing brands including Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp use a similar approach. Instead of a typical link on Twitter seeing half of its total engagement in less than three hours, the half-life of a popular post that generates engagement is extended. t now ranks higher in timelines.
Be creative and devise posts around trending topics that are relevant to your brand so as to get the content bumped to the top of timelines. Trending topics generate more exposure on the Twitter platform.
Previously, tweets were ranked in chronological order; now, tweets are being ranked based on engagement. You would rather spend more time developing a quality post that interests and benefits your followers and target audience. The more your post is favorited and clicked on, the longer it will stay in plain view in user timelines everywhere on Twitter.
To maximize your social media marketing for extreme engagement, exposure, and sales extend your content sharing strategy to include Pinterest. Make sure that in addition to optimizing content for site performance and SEO, you invest time to include beautiful shareable images for Pinterest.
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Retweet yourself like no one's watching #thextraordinarionly Click To Tweet Tweet frequently and include relevant hashtags to increase retweets from other parties. #thextraordinarionly Click To Tweet Tweets with links are 86% more likely to be retweeted, Ensure its something valuable that your fans can share with their followers. #thextraordinarionly Click To Tweet Boost your followers and retweet their tweets. Win more followers by engagement, replies, comments, retweets, and sharing other people's content too #thextraordinarionly Click To Tweet
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Hi Emma,
Great post. Informative and insightful. I have just had an education from your post. I can only say the magic to success in life generally is to add value in all that you do and people will beat a path to your door. Thanks for the post. Keep up the good work.
Hey Charles,
Yay! So glad that you found this post helpful. As I interact with social media users on different platforms, their questions motivate my quest to learn more because social media is very dynamic. You may also want to check out this blog where I helped a client mitigate Facebook changes.
https://thextraordinarionly.com/facebook-changes/. I think you will find some gems there.
Thank you so much for taking the time to contribute.
– H Emma
Amazing piece of information. New point of view for me, I learned a lot from it, and for sure I will put these points in account while dealing with my social media hereafter. It was good to understand the life-cycle of the tweets reaction in twitter, moreover in different social media platform too. I think the impact of this article will go far to the people who wants to build a real social media enthusiasm, effectiveness and efficiency to achieve their goals, also to spread tolerance, love, respect and accepting others. Many thanks Hazlo Emma for the effort done.
I knew that the half-life of a tweet was short – I thought it was around 15 minutes.
I had buffer scheduled once per hour but at random minutes past the hour to try and hit differently, on the days I remember to schedule my tweets that is!
I find the timing on social media so difficult because I have a mixed UK/US audience and with differing timezones it’s sometimes hard figuring out if I should tweet 5pm UK time or US time…so I tend to try and cover my bases.
Hey Emma,
What a rich insightful perspective, it bleeds pages of turns, it can only assimilate social media dashboard, it effectively gives massive exposure to posts, traffic and timelines. Thank you for the extraordinary sharing.
This is a rich insightful perspective, I can only equate it to a social media dashboard, its a step up to digital presence and exposure, thank you for your remarkable share.
This is a great read. I find a lot of value in utilizing Twitter to build my brand, but the challenge is posting at the right frequency and at the right times to compensate for the short half-life of a Tweet.