…for just a moment, please. For libraries that post to social media, the lesson for today is: Keep your posts interesting and new, keep them short, and post often.
- Facebook and internet ‘can re-wire your brain and shorten attention span’ (Daily Mail/Fiona Macrae) “Some British children spend seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen. And Baroness Greenfield wants the Government and private sector to research the effects of technology on the brain. At the British Science Festival, in Birmingham, she said: ‘We should acknowledge that this is bringing an unprecedented change in our lives and we have to work out whether it is for good or bad.’”
- Social media is not lessening attention-spans! (Social Media Philosophy Project/thePuck) “Studies, articles, and tweets pop up all over, every day it seems, about how people of my generation, spoiled on TV, computers, and video games, have no attention-span, can’t focus, and have fragmented work ethics. This is not the case. We spend hours focused on the minutiae of our Twitter accounts, the apps on our phones, our contact lists. We spend months and years playing the same online video game, engaged in long-term goals that often take months to accomplish. We’re focused, we get the information, we know what we want to know…we just aren’t doing it like they want us to.”
- Beating back the boredom: How your social media marketing campaign can outlast your fans’ short attention spans (Gremln/Clayton Smith) “In the traditional advertising world, a single ad campaign can carry your company for years, sometimes decades. […] That type of thing wouldn’t fly as a social media strategy. Mostly because it’s not exactly a ‘social’ strategy, but more to the point of this blog, it doesn’t change. It doesn’t evolve. If I see the same, stagnant strategy on Facebook three days in a row, I’ve lost complete interest in the product, not to mention some faith in the creativity of the company.”
- You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention? (bitly blog) “In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention. Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers. This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!”
Detail facts:
From the same bitly blog post cited above: “So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours.”
