On The Shelf

How effective is the links that you have shared? Looking for a longer 'shelf life' for your content?  It might pay to use video as it has been reinforced yet again, that the internet has a very short attention span.

YouTube has a half-life of around 7 hours as viewers need to concentrate more than reading simple text.

The news is worse, according to Bit.ly,  for links posted on  direct web pages and social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter . If you haven't captured their click-throughs when three hours have passed then your chances of doing so get a lot slimmer.  Click rates drop by half after this period of time

Breaking news that generates wide interest has an even steeper drop-off rate. The first five minutes of release results in half of the click-throughs these items will ever receive.

Distribution of half-lifes over four different referrer types. Facebook, twitter and direct link (links shared via email, instant messengers etc.) half lifes follow a strikingly similar distribution

Bity 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. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on Facebook than if you post on Twitter."

Their key finding is "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!"

Twitter would appear to be the better channel if you want people to view your content quickly.

Mixed Reviews For Facebook's "Non-Email"

In an earlier post we revealed that Facebook has plans to launch a competitive email platform.

There have been very mixed reviews of Facebook's new "email" system since its announcement by CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

"Emailing by Facebook? Good luck" says the Guardian who describe it as fiendishly tricky.

Forbes describes it as a "big deal for business" and  social media in general as "the next big thing to improve productivity".

Gizmodo has the most practical analysis detailed the system as having every email, text, and chat in one place.

Facebook's stated aim is to automatically deliver messages where it thinks a user is most likely to see them, create a unified history of the messages, and filter the threads by relationship with the sender to create a Social Inbox.

But if the complexity of Facebook's new non-email system floors you, why not do the next best thing and follow comedian Jimmy Kimmel's advice in the video below; celebrate  "National Unfriend Day".




Related articles

• Emailing by Facebook? Good luck (guardian.co.uk)
• "Facebook Messages" Is Cool But Email Isn't Going Anywhere ! (techpluto.com)
• Why Facebook Messages Will Not Be My Primary Email (ghacks.net)
• In-Depth Review: Facebook's New Message Inbox Product (insidefacebook.com)