How many posts a day does it take to maintain interest?

Research from bit.ly shows that a link shared through social media stays of interest just a few hours:

The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter.
The surprise in the graph above is links that originate from youtube: these links have a half life of 7.4 hours! As clickers, we remain interested in links on youtube for a much longer period of time.

A simple calculation shows that to keep people consistently interested in a feed, you have to generate interesting posts at least 5 times a day.

But for a news site, the magic number is 24*60/5 = 288. That is, news links become not that interesting only just 5 minutes of sharing.

In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. To keep people interested you have to produce a lot of new content, but as you do so the older content disappears below the horizon of attention.

tags: information, attention, 10X, payload, social, network