Customer Experience – Art or Science? The answer is YES

Crafting engaging customer experiences requires a blend of art and science.  The science often hinges on effective use of empirical data concerning consumer need states, use patterns, and changing trends. To that end, I offer some recent results from Bitly’s research’s on viral social media content.  As you probably know, Bitly is a service that helps you shorten, share, and track your otherwise long url links.

Researchers at Bitly offer some key insights on the science of when to present information on various social channels – so that you can maximize buzz, increase the potential your post will go viral, and lengthen the time that your posts get high traffic and reposting.  So lets get to the science:

According to Bitly:

“For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Posting on Twitter when there are many people clicking does help raise the average number of clicks, but it in no way guarantees an optimal amount of attention, since there is more competition for any individual’s attention.

For Facebook, links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm, and fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.

The Tumblr network shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.”

So now you know the science of message placement (at least as it stands today). Now on to the art of selecting messages that will connect and engage the consumers you most want to positively affect.  Fortunately, click through analytics allow us all to continue to refine those messages to determine what best resonates with our social media consumers.  This inferential, highly-nuanced, process affords exciting opportunities to constantly discover, refine, and emotionally connect with people in ways that make them want to post or retweet our content.

Here’s to the art and science of customer experience design.  Alas, but I am posting this on a Friday.  Will my message be lost?

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Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D. is a professional speaker and chief experience officer at The Michelli Experience. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, Dr. Michelli and his team consult with some of the world’s best customer experience companies.

Follow on Twitter: @josephmichelli

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