Last week, bit.ly released some really interesting data on the effectiveness of social media links. How long do they last before they don’t generate any clicks? They measure this in something called the half-life of a link. How many minutes does a link posted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube generate half the clicks during the time the link is on those networks? The data grunts at bit.ly looked at 1,000 popular bit.ly links and took the mean half-life of each across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube

The results are very interesting.

Facebook and Twitter have similar results where each link will generate half its clicks in 2.8 hours for Twitter and 3.2 hours for Facebook. The only outlier is YouTube which will generate half its clicks in 7.4 hours.

The learnings from this data can help guide how marketers should approach each social network.

• The general rule of thumb of posting no more than three times a day on Twitter and Facebook. Not only does this prevent users from being spammed by your brand, but it prevents cannibalization of other social media links
• Post at least once a day on any social network. Since the half-lives are so short you have to keep posting in order to keep traffic coming from these links.
• For people who use YouTube for social media marketing, no more than one video a day should be permitted. Again, this prevent cannibalization of other videos and maximizes the total amount of visits you can expect.