In marketing, we have to be careful not to generalize from our own preferences, especially if we're trying to grow a small business. Our social marketing should be what our customers like, not what we like. 

The best way to improve our marketing is to keep an eye on leading companies and try to learn from their behavior. But it's also nice to see some statistics. Over the last few years, I have observed Hubspot become a thought leader in the industry by digging for truly original insight, then sharing it. Hubspot employs Zarrella, who shares some amazing insights into using social media. 

Nieman Journalism Lab: Tweet late, email early, and don’t forget about Saturday, 2011-Mar-29, by Andrew Phelps

Not only does Zarrella recommend tweeting more — he recommends tweeting the same links two or three times a day. Don’t bother calling it a “rerun” or apologizing to people who might have seen it before. Simply wait a few hours and change up the language. Only a fraction of your followers will see it the first time. Even an organization with thousands of followers won’t reach most of its audience most of the time. (As an experiment, social media star Guy Kawasaki once repeated the same tweet every day for nine days, and found the clickthrough rate remained high each time.)

Zarrella recently performed a similar deep dive into data for email newsletters, working with MailChimp to analyze 9.5 billion messages. A lot of the same lessons apply, he says: Email more, and embrace the weekends.