One of the most popular webinars I’ve ever worked on, The Science of Timing was also one of my favorite. If you haven’t seen it, go check out the on-demand recording now.

In it, I present data I’ve collected over three years about the effect timing has on a variety of online marketing activities, including blogging. Below is an infographic that represents a collection of the three most important stats I have about when to publish blog posts.

In the webinar, I also make the point that my results are based on huge aggregates of thousands, millions, or even in some cases, billions of lines of data. They might not represent the exact best times for your industry. What…

I’ve studied the relationship between Twitter success and politics before, and since this year is a big year in elections, I figured I’d do it again.

This time I looked at how the 4 front-running republican presidential candidates are doing on Twitter. I analyzed the obvious numbers, followers, retweets and mentions, but I also looked at a few of my favorite, deeper metrics: retweets-per-follower, link-percentage and reply-percentage. I also looked at Twitter “penetration” in two upcoming primary states: South Carolina and Florida. Notice anything that surprises you in this data?

One of the most interesting patterns I’ve found while studying social media and marketing data is what I call in my book “contra-competitive timing.” I’ve found in numerous cases that the most successful times and days to publish new content are off-peak times.

It’s like when you’re at a noisy party and it’s hard to hear the person talking to you 2 feet away, but suddenly you say something awkward and the room quiets down. Now everyone can hear you. The same is true with the internet. When there is less other noise to compete with (ie fewer Tweets, emails, blog posts, etc) your content can gain attention more easily.

The infographic below showcases some of the best…

If you like myth busting social media data like this, be sure to buy my newest book, Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness.

One of the social media questions I’m most interested in is about whether Twitter is best suited for conversation or broadcasting. To many people’s surprise, I generally find myself on the broadcast side, and most of the data I’ve analyzed seems to back me up.

Just yesterday, I started a little informal Twitter poll and found that respondents were pretty evenly split between broadcasting and conversation.

This time, I looked at more than 100k randomly chosen active Twitter accounts and their Tweets. I analyzed the percentage of their Tweets than contain a link…