How Long Social Links Are Effective?

Omri Shabath

When marketing on the different social networking sites, its a race against time to attract visitors. There is limited period of time where your posts will be at the top of the news feed/stream. The URL shortening service Bit.ly, conducted a study to examine how long will people pay attention to social posts…

The Study

Bit.ly examined 1000 social-links from 4 sources: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and direct (email, IM). The social-links was evaluated by what they called it “half life”. The “Half life” of a link is the period of time when people click on the link exactly half of the total number of clicks. Confused? So was i first… Maybe you would understand it better through an example:

Let’s say we posted a social-link on Facebook and we got 100 clicks on it. The “half life” of the social-link is when someone hit it for the 50th time. It is pretty safe to assume that the first 50 (half) clicks came much faster than the second half, therefore the study defines the first half of the clicks as “half life”. A little strange, but if you think about it, it is actually pretty smart.

The Results

The half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours, on Facebook is 3.2 hours, directly is 3.4 hours and on YouTube has the longest half life of links 7.4 hours.

Note: YouTube links are on comments and the description of videos.

Social Links Effective Time

Work From Home Conclusions and Tips

1.  On the major social networks the average time for link effectiveness is about 3 hours. I suggest you to read also my post When Is The Best Time To Market to maximize the potential of your social sharing.

2.  Although YouTube has much more effective time of the link than the others, remember that people tend to click on links from Facebook and Twitter much more.

3.  The study is discussing social-links in general, but it is more than possible that if you share something really interesting it would last for long period of time after more people will share it.

4.  If you have some hot news or something you need to publish immediately, but you know the hour/day isn’t effective enough, consider publishing the link twice: The first one immediately and the second one when you know more people are connected.