“That blog you wrote, yeah, I saw it. It was good. But it was yesterday.”
Andy Warhol said “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Your flash-in-the-pan opportunity to be seen, taken notice of and talked about has now been considerably increased but the time-frame has been downsized when it comes to online content.
Consider your latest blog post. You have crafted a message that puts across your point of view, is informed of your experience in a niche and ready to be shared with an external audience. You have peppered it with keywords, linked to relevant sources of clarification or counter-argument and invited comment.
You hit ‘Publish’.
You blog post is out there. No going back.
You may have hooked up your publishing platform of choice to automatically tweet the title of your prized piece of content, you may prefer to pull out a champion quote and draw the reader in with a tweet that promises more, teases out the context or simply summarises what lies behind the link.
The promotion of the content enters the Twitter stream and in that snapshot of time – whoever is online with eyes pointing Twitterwards – will see it and have the opportunity to click-through, that is, until it falls off the stream. (Naturally, this depends on the number of people you follow amongst other factors)
All that work for a stab-in-the-dark, hope for the best moment of someone, everyone or just the influential one taking notice and sharing it further. Has content delivery become about timing the publishing, does the content itself matter or is it about setting it free downstream when there is a critical mass of users?
There are various conflicting pieces of research that suggest numerous optimum tweeting times. There is a line of thinking that the sweet spot is during the lunch break when internet access for ‘non-work activities’ is relaxed, but then people leave their desks for lunch too. Around 3pm – 4pm is also considered ripe for publication as daily tasks begin to wind down and clock-watching for 5pm sets in.
Of course, the long-tail of your content can be propped up with your SEO efforts, taking the content elsewhere and linking back to it as part of comments on the blog posts of others and elsewhere. Every blog has that one post that just keeps performing, nestled in a ridge of constant visibility, the traffic just keeps on coming to “Why social media is like a ripe Tomato” or other.
A poorly performing blog post may not be due to the content itself being a bit duff, it could just as easily be a timing issue but it is certain that for a good blog post to be noticed it needs a lot of nurturing external to its creation and a bit of luck too thanks to the fragmented attention mind-set of social media.
Good SEO is the saving grace of online when it comes to writing for the web. It brings longevity to the content that you wish to be seen, cherished and shared. If every blog post was only visible in that snapshot of when it enters the Twitter stream, the dynamics would be very different.
Are we now conditioned to view the ever increasing bulk of online content in the moment? Is it acceptable to retweet the same ‘new’ piece of content more than two or three times over a day, week or month without the fatigue of repeated links and the delivery of stale content? It is all a perception thing but what do you feel is acceptable?
