In this age of real-time social and customer engagement I wanted to share two charts that dramatically demonstrate how important timing is to the success of your brand from both a macro and micro perspective.

The first is a chart for Linked In Analytics that breaks out the growing and shrinking industries as defined by the volume of jobs added or lost. Of particular interest is the relative position of each industry. I would encourage you to examine the list and consider what place your brand occupies as defined by the specific mix of skills, services and technologies you offer.

Clearly it’s far better to find yourself in the upper right hand corner with a sizable circle indicating growth industries. If you find yourself in the lower right, it is worthwhile considering the prospects on your company in terms of larger macro-economic forces at work and the way technology is changing business. As any entrepreneur (billionaire or otherwise) will tell you, timing is everything in terms of what companies and industries explode and charts such as these give us a window into shifts that shape our success and futures.

The second chart from U.S. Net habits data illustrates in simple terms how the seconds that a web page takes to load impacts customer abandonment. A few facts jump out:

– 1 in 4 Americans abandon a page takes longer than 4 seconds to load.

– 4 in 10 Americans abandon a mobile shopping site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

– 5 in 10 mobile users abandon a web page if it doesn’t load in under 10 seconds.

As Fast Company notes, this means just one extra second in page load time could cost Amazon $1.6 billion in sales a year. Or for Google, by slowing search results by just 1/4 of a second they could lose the ad revenue on 8 million searches a day.

So no matter what your industry is, what your brand stands for, or how smart your marketing is, never lose site of the fact that capturing your customer’s attention is hard, but losing it can be even more costly.