"That's the press baby, the press."
Once it was the press and the noise of the rotary printing press. Now it is social media strategy and the sound of tweets.

In the struggle to find a suitable social media strategy to follow, many researches provide data, analysis and advice on how to surf the social media world and try to find out how Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks really count in driving attention to news organizations websites.

"Tweet more and embrace the weekends" is the message coming out of research by Dan Zarrella , a social media scientist from HubSpot, a marketing software platform, reported by Nieman Lab. Zarrella has 33,000 Twitter followers himself.

Of course it depends on what the goals are. To accumulate followers it is best to tweet a lot, while to drive more traffic to a website the best method is to tweet with some moderation.
It's not an exact science, Nieman noted, but it's surely better than the intuition that usually drives media strategies ("Love your customers, hug your followers and engage in the conversations" sounds a little bit vague, Zarrella argued).

What emerged from two years of data, collected in the webinar "The Science of Timing", is that the trick is to reach people when the noise has died down. "It turns out that time is often the afternoons, when blogs and news sites are slower, and the weekend, when they're all but asleep", the article reported.

Retweet activity is highest late in the work day and late in the week - the article reported - as well as during weekend mornings.

The best days and times to get the most retweets per tweets are shown here.

Weekends are a suitable moment also to share on Facebook, as Facebook is not allowed in many work places.

Moreover, while reposting the same content on Facebook sounds annoying, retweeting the same links more than once a day (changing words maybe) could be profitable as the audience is not always reachable most of the time.

Considerable amounts of data showing referral traffic to news sites (meaning how many people arrive on a website through side doors like Facebook and Twitter links, or search engines and other websites - compared to the ones who directly go on the website) have emerged.

Andy Carvin, senior strategist of NPR's Social Media Desk, said last year that there were about 2.5 million views on NPR.org that were referred from Facebook, which comprises of 7% of the total traffic. Facebook is the second largest source of referral traffic, with Google being the first.

Data regarding just the New York Times are not always consistent. As MediaShift has recently reported, the Times, which has the highest Facebook fans number of any newspaper in the US - 1 million - as well as more than 3 million of followers on Twitter, still gets the majority of its traffic direct from its own homepage. (We'll see what would happen with the introduction of the paywall anyway).

On the contrary, AdWeek has recently reported that according to Compete.com, only 17 percent of visits to NYTimes.com in February came from readers who went directly to the site, meaning 83 percent was referral traffic. The top referrer was Google, which accounted for 15 percent of visits, followed by Facebook at 4 percent.

About social media engagement and what online media outlets can learn from Facebook reactions YahooLabs has recently published a study, "The Like Log Study".

As Peter Kafka highlighted, Facebook and Google are competing on who has more influence on other websites. "The reason that Web sites that write stories about other Web sites are writing about Google's influence shrinking while Facebook's rise is because it seems to be true - for some media sites. But not for most of the Web", he wrote.

He cited Citigroup's Mark Mahaney, whose newest report, based on comScore's data, revealed that Google ranks as the top traffic source for 74 percent of the top properties he surveyed and between January 2010 and January 2011, Google's referral share increased for 69 percent of the sites.

But for media sites, this is not true. Note the summary chart below, reported by Kafka, which shows that for 80 percent of the top media sites, Google's influence has diminished in the last year.

Social media is far from an exact science, but various experiments are deepening our understanding of it.

Sources: Nieman Lab, MediaShift, AdWeek, YahooLabs, Media Memo
Images source: 1. From the movie "Deadline", USA, 1952
2 and 3 Zarrella's webinar slides
4. comScore via MediaMemo