When we’ve sent out proposals for inbound marketing and social media presence development for B2B companies, we make it point to suggest posting and publishing either 3 or 5 days a week based on our structured solutions. The reason being, experience has made it clear if you’re spending hours developing a great blog post or content piece to publish and share on a Saturday or a Sunday, chances are it’s falling to deaf ears since activity is significantly lower on the weekends when people are not at work.

For a B2C shopping site however, it could be quite the opposite since people are more likely to be online relaxed and considering some online shopping over the weekend if the’re not out. It’s a good time to get some messages out to them and could trigger buying. Similarly, a business located in South Korea with it’s key consumers in North America are likely to be ineffective posting updates to their Facebook page during the day when their customers are fast asleep. By the time they wake up, those updates will be so far down their news updates feed, it’s like they weren’t even there.

Timing is a determining factor when it comes to how effective an inbound marketing or social media engagement is. Getting content out at the right time, sparking conversations when there is an audience to participate and not getting lost in a flood of information from others all play their parts in the effectiveness.

What we’re consistently aware off simply from experience, trial and error has now been brilliantly put into perspective in the form of an infographic by Argyle Social which plain and simply explains timing your social media marketing right! -

 Click On The Infographic Below To View Full Size

Prior to launching BuzzFactory in my previous work experiences I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of content sites which were designed to draw inbound search traffic around a specific B2B (in most cases) or B2C (in a few cases) industry vertical. The objective was to develop each of these sites into a valuable resource for each industry that had fresh content updates such as news, articles, blog posts and more in a single location and professionals would have a something akin to an industry publication they could quickly open and read through for good content in their space.

One set of these sites were driven by syndicated content which came through RSS feeds from various other related publications and an other set employed a very small team of writers who would contribute to the content daily in the form of one or two articles and blog posts a day. The general idea behind the site which displayed content from other publications was to have more updates and a lot more content in an automated and cost effective way. Since it was simply aggregating content from other sites, it didn’t need much time or money and would update it self several times a day building a large index of links on the site. On the other set of sites progress was much slower. Limited resources mean’t the site could only be updated when there was bandwidth for someone to spend time writing a post or a detailed article, using the right keywords, linking, publishing and finally promoting it personally through social networking and bookmarking sites. While the first set of sites had hundreds of new article links each week (though duplicated (syndicated through RSS) the second slowly and steadily grew at around one new original post or article each day.

Now as logical guessing would have it, the first set of sites should have done very well but failed quite miserably at search results in every single case. The second set of sites which depended on original content though slow to develop grew in terms of both referral traffic and gradually drew a rising percentage of search engine traffic through some very relevant keywords and phrases.

Lessons Learned

• Syndicated content on your business website is a good resource. It’s useful for those who come to your website. It’s not as effective in bringing them to your website from search engines.

• Syndicated duplicate content doesn’t do much for gaining more links in search results as that benefit really goes to the site that originally posted the content you are just re-distributing.

• Duplicate content which is not syndicated and posted directly on your site is a big no no. It’s not just damaging to your page rank and site reputation, it’s plagarism.

• Keep it original even if it means it can cost more in terms of time or money. It will pay back in the long run and give you long term returns in terms of bringing the right people to your site.

• Slow and steady wins the race. Even if you can’t update your site with new content everyday, do as much as you can and make sure it’s fresh, useful, relevant to your business or website and build your own content one step at a time. Even if you don’t see magical spikes in traffic, each original post will bring in a trickle of search traffic and you can build that trickle into a stream of search traffic gradually.