Dan Zarrella, in his new book Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The science, design and engineering of contagious ideas offers answers to the questions that plague social media marketing practitioners:
• Is anyone paying attention to what I post?
• Does anyone see my updates on facebook?
• Are my tweets actually reaching anyone?
• Why aren't my tweets retweeted by others?
Of course, it doesn't help that there are bazillions of characters of information being posted by millions of other people (all with the same questions!) and your content is all but invisible in this sea of hyper-connectivity.
Zarrella provides a thorough study and careful analysis of hundreds of thousands of blog posts, tweets, status updates, and emails. A social media scientist and popular speaker on webinars and at conferences he has an easy-going, very readable style. The short book is a quick read and provides all the data you can sink your analytical teeth into! If you like data, you'll love Dan Zarrella.
In a surprising twist on the expected, Zarrella sets out to convince us we can get better, more meaningful, return on our social medeia effort if we go against the norm and employ contr-competitive timing for our posts, placing them in off-peak times. In these periods there is less noise, less distraction, less of a flood to keep you from reaching people with your content.
Zarrella suggests there are key times for each type of post and that by carefully reviewing your results you can find the best times for you and all but knock out the competition. For example, he suggests sending email on the weekends, which goes against more traditional marketing concepts but his reserch backs up his claim that you will get more clicks and convert to more subscriptions if you send your contact requests over the weekend.
For example, note his information about when to send email. Sending on weekends definitely goes against traditional marketing beliefs, but the science backs up the claim that you get more click-throughs and LESS unsubscribes when you send on the weekend.
If you are serious about your social marketing efforts then this is one book you really need to read. It may completely change your approach or, for some, augment your already successful campaigns allowing you to fine tune to even greater success. This one should be on your "I've Already Read It!" list.
[Rev. Stephen B. Henry, Phd., author, instructor, and mentor, is the current Executive Director of, and regular contributor to, the Online Sellers Associaion. His website, Wizard's Place is a membership help site for online practitioners.]
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