When is the best time to post on social media?

Erik Qualman at the Socialnomics blog has posted this video from @equalman about the best times to post content on social media and the graveyard slots to avoid.

General guidelines:

• Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are your best days
• Saturday is the worst day
• Holidays are slow traffic days (except commerce sites)
• 10 am – 11:30 am and 1 – 3:30 pm are great times to post
• Stagger posts based on time zones

A recent study by Virtue specific to Facebook also shows that Social Media may follow similar patterns to the rest of the traditional Web.

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.

Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week; most sites slowest traffic day is Saturday, followed by Sunday. This is interesting since so many schools and companies block Facebook from 9 – 5 pm.  Tough to block mobile devices though.

There are exceptions to the above rules, depending on what you are posting, but these are good general guides for most sites, social media activity and blogs. Erik has been fortunate to have access to statistics to hundreds of different sites/blogs during my sixteen year career and roughly 90% of the time the above holds true.
When he was the Head of Marketing at Travelzoo his production team always sent out the Top 20 e-mail list to the 21 million subscribers on Wednesday at roughly 11 am.  Why?  This gave it the best chance to be read.  If you have an incredible Tweet you need to get out, but it’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday, use a tool like hootsuite to schedule for the tweet to go out when more potential readers might read it.
Ironically, this post may not be picked up as much as it could since I’m posting it in the afternoon on a Monday following a holiday.
Ric suggests these as other good posts on this topic: YouTube Traffic Patters, Best Time to Send E-Mail, When are Facebook Users Most Active?, Conversion Volume by Day

BBC enlists commercial sector help to shake up radio

Amanda Andrews has written a piece in The Telegraph and also reported by Radio Today that former GMG Radio boss, John Myers, has been asked to carry out a wide-ranging efficiency review.

Mr Myers has been tasked with reviewing the operations at core BBC stations including Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1Xtra. The review could lead to a major shake-up of the way BBC Radio operates and is one attempt at ending constant accusations of a "bloated" BBC. In recent years, the commercial sector has heavily criticised the BBC for spending more than is necessary to operate a radio business.

The BBC Trust wants the core radio stations to deliver value for money to the licence fee payer, while operating as efficiently as possible. Mr Myers will spend the first three months of 2011 undertaking the review. As a result of his commitments at the BBC, he will not begin his new role as chief executive of the Radio Academy until April. "I can confirm that as part of our ongoing drive to ensure value for money we have asked independent consultant John Myers to help us in reviewing the efficiency of our radio operations. He will be working with us between January and March 2011," said a BBC spokeswoman A source familiar with the situation said that the BBC wanted to hire someone primarily with commercial sector expertise, but needed to ensure that person was not a "BBC hater". 

It is an interesting development am I not sure what I make of it. He is only reviewing the stations that compete with the commercial sector  but arguably that is all he is qualified to advise on. But when you look at the budgets will it make any real difference.

Radio 1
10.8 million weekly listeners, budget £43m, cost per user per hour 0.6p

Radio 2
13.3 million weekly listeners, budget £50.7m, cost per user per hour 0.5p

Radio 3
2 million weekly listeners, budget £51.1m, cost per user per hour 6.3p

Radio 4
9.7 million weekly listeners, budget £108.6m, cost per user per hour 1.3p

Radio 5 Live
6 million weekly listeners, budget £72.2million, cost per user per hour 2.3p

6 Music
0.7 million weekly listeners, budget £9m, cost per user per hour 3.4p

Radio 5 Live Sports Extra
0.7 million weekly listeners, budget £3.7m, cost per user per hour 2.6p

Radio 7
0.9 million weekly listeners, budget £6.9m, cost per user per hour 2p

Asian Network
0.4 million weekly listeners, budget £12.1m, cost per user per hour 6.9p

Radio 1Xtra
0.6 million weekly listeners, budget £9.6m, cost per user per hour 4.5p

The channels he is going to look at total £12.3m which is only just above the Radio 4 budget and the cost per listener for Radios 1 & 2 is already small so it makes me think this process is just to pacify the commercial sector.

More examples of my work

I have been busy on a number of dramas and documentaries most of which I cannot talk about yet but will be on air around and just after Christmas so will share more when they go public. However one that I am just finishing is a 2 part documentary on Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino boxer, and now politician. An exclusive interview produced by Lyndon Saunders at All Out Productions which I have been involved in editing and mixing will be going out on the World Service on Nov 26th and Dec 3rd as the Friday Documentary.

Fighting for the people

Making the leap from top level sport to politics is not unique: Pakistan’s Imran Kahn did it; Britain’s Sebastian Coe’s done it… but Filipino, Manny Pacquiao, takes things to a new level. As an active boxer – and the world’s first fighter to win eight world titles in no less than eight different weight divisions – earlier this year he was also elected to Congress in the Philippines earlier this year.
Now, Mike Costello, the BBC’s Boxing Correspondent travels to the Philippines to spend time with this sporting legend as he trains for his forthcoming fight with Antonio Margarito. Mike discovers who Pacquiao is as the boxer, the newly appointed politician and man of the Filipino people.
Speaking with people that know, love and work with Pacquiao, his story of poverty to one of the world’s most high earning sportsmen is compelling. Mike Costello will visit the streets in General Santos where Pacquiao grew up to see for himself where he came from.

TX times...

East Africa
Friday 07:00, 14:00, 21:00
West Africa
Friday 09:00. 14:00, 21:00
America
Friday 14:00, 19:00
East Asia
Friday 03:00, 08:00, 13:00
South Asia
Friday 04:00, 09:00, 15:00
Europe & Middle East
Friday 10:00, 15:00, 20:00
Australia
Thursday 23:00, Friday 04:00, 11:00, 16:00
UK
Friday 09:00, 12:00, 15:00

C4 unveils £5m gaming push aimed at 10 to 19 year olds

Channel 4 is to plough around £5m into a raft of games and apps that will encourage youngsters to consider finance, ethics, attraction and death. The 10 multiplatform projects have been commissioned by Channel 4 Education.
The services span a range of platforms, including console gaming, online games and mobile apps as C4 Education bids to reach youngsters in all digital places they consume content. 

As part of the range of commissions, C4 has earmarked three specifically for 10-to 14-year-olds following its extended remit to cater for this target demographic.   The orders follow C4’s decision to ring-fence its 2010 investment in education of £4m, along with an additional £1m injection specifically for 10-14s for 2011.
Alice Taylor, C4 commissioning editor for education, said the aim was to provide engaging content for the target demographic of 10-19s. “Covering a fantastic range of formats and platforms, the projects are varied and fun whilst still tackling useful and important subject matters,” said Taylor. “As usual we aim to represent teens – and now tweens – in their best light, and to continue to find new talent and recruit UK independents in the drive to provide public service content of the very highest quality.”
Speaking about Channel 4 Education's general remit, Taylor said it is "committed to the public service remit of reaching teenagers and young people with content relevant to their tastes and as such the budget is ring fenced". Taylor defended the public service remit of her department and its shift away from traditional term-time morning slots, which reached 70,000-80,000 viewers, to more experimental games and projects on the web and on mobile. The annual education budget of £4m for 14- to 19-year-olds is to be supplemented with £1m for 10- to 14-year-olds as a result of the government's Digital Economy Act earlier this year.
She said the department was "not only allowed to but expected to fail in some areas". "That's the merit, the point of public service to try something not that's not commercially proven or that doesn't exist yet," added Taylor.
"Luckily we're having a lot of success with our stuff but without public service you would only do what is commercially viable. We want experimentation, diversity innovation and something for the public benefit, to make products that are about helping somebody or making them feel better."
Taylor said that in the two years since Channel 4 changed its education strategy there is "no doubt" that it reaches a more suitable audience, but added that reaching that audience online presents different problems. "It's a challenge to get things noticed – publishing things on the internet is like chucking them into the sea, rather than a river."

Is Cameron showing his true colours about the BBC?

In an editorial in today's Observer they say....

David Cameron enjoys joshing with journalists. He also, in a previous, non-political life, worked as a media public relations expert, lobbying against, among others, the BBC. So when he tells a Brussels press conference that we're all in the cuts and freeze business together, "including – deliciously – the BBC", it's probably best to leave high horses in the stable. You can make too much of a deliciously duff joke. But you also see why our prime minister needs to be very, very careful. Is he in hock to Rupert Murdoch? Labour MPs, anxious to see more of his Number 10 visiting book, want fuller disclosure here. The two main Murdochs, father and son, have been heavy-footed and loose-tongued in their lobbying against the corporation...... more

The cuts rushed through in 48 hours are not inconsequential and will have an impact on what the BBC can do. However the integration of the newsroom in 2012 will make the world wide new gathering much more effective and will certainly help the 'One BBC' including the World Service but in this digital age where less and less people will consume public service broadcasting using a TV receiver in the corner of the front room, we really do need to find a new funding model to guarantee a viable public service broadcaster for the long time. Please do not let folk chip and slice away at the BBC so that all we are left with is the Murdoch empire.

Who is going beyond the Murdoch paywall 3 months in

I posted about this at the start back in July here and here. Now Peter Preston has written in today's Observer an article about numbers and types of people venturing behind The Times paywall in the first 3 months.

Fleet Street is gagging to discover whether Mr M has shot himself in the foot. Interim answer, from the heavyweight Nielsen company: foot still attached to leg. They reckon that total unique monthly UK visitors to the Times site went down from 3,096,000 to 1,782,000 when the wall went up, and that only 362,000 – about 20% – ventured on to pages beyond the wall. You can weave webs of relative triumph or disaster from all this. The good news for News International is that those who vaulted the wall were a bit older, richer and more dedicated to scanning the site carefully. They are the "engaged readers" advertisers admire – as opposed to the click-by-night trade who never stop to buy anything. The bad news is that a few hundred thousand unique visitors sounds pretty puny compared with the 20 million or so the Times was claiming before the wall went up. If you want a guess in the fog, 362,000 "engaged" UK readers was broadly what the Mail (a believer in a web without walls) found a year or so ago when it took a 30m unique visitor monthly total and whittled away overseas callers and click-by-nighters. By those lights, the Times's great wall isn't a flop, nor yet a necessarily a glowing path to future riches. But there's something worthwhile left to work with, so start counting the ads.

Back in July I compared the two models, the paywall from The Times and the traffic driven site from The Mail. Well 3 months on into the Murdoch paywall and it seems that both models are producing about the same number of engaged users.

Labour calls for inquiry into BBC licence fee deal

James Robinson writes in The Guardian...

The shadow culture secretary, Ivan Lewis, has demanded an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the BBC licence fee settlement following the hastily negotiated deal agreed with the government last week. Lewis has written to John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, asking him to hold an investigation into the six-year deal.

Lewis said the agreement "rode roughshod over the independence of the BBC, crushed any serious prospect of reform and involved no consultation with licence fee payers or parliamentarians". "The BBC is one of this country's great institutions and its future a matter of public interest," Lewis added.

Although Ivan Lewis is my own MP and a good local MP I have to say I am not confident he will get very far.