When you’re running multiple social media accounts on multiple websites, you need to put more science behind your posts. No, we’re not talking about making the actual content a math equation. We’re talking about when you post. The most important aspect of social media behind what you post is the time you choose to do it!
Identify Peak Hours
A social media manager should always have the most recent statistics of social media peak hours memorized. More importantly, that employee should eventually know when their most successful posts are typically sent out for their particular business or industry.
With help from handy statistics found on socialcaffeine.com, we are able to show you peak times on the largest networks.
Facebook – Wednesday at 3pm
Twitter – 1 to 3pm, Monday through Thursday
Pinterest – Saturday morning
Schedule Posting
With peak posting information publicly available, you may notice that there is lots of noise coming at your target audience during these times. This is why you need to start running tests of your own to find out your business’ best time for posting. As social media becomes more and more ingrained into a business’ strategy, it’s easier to see that the generic social media post times above are simply helpful guidelines for you to base your posting on when you start to test successful posting on your own.
Marketing resources such as Monday.com and Socialpilot could help with this; they allow you to manage social media accounts by scheduling posts and organizing content. Additionally, their affiliate programs are both free to sign up for and give you a portion of the profits they make when you bring customers to them.
Segmenting the Audience
In most cases, coming up with your own formula is helpful only to the point when you hit a roadblock. Be a creative thinker – how are you going to overcome this obstacle? Is the issue that you’re running into that you have a split audience? Start basing your output on mixing the two audiences but leaning towards the audience that has the greater percentage of sales, interaction, etc. Work outward from there.
Other issues may be a sporadic audience. Be patient. Stats may not come into any sort of semi-constant form until months of recording results. Luckily for you, free and powerful software online will help you achieve recording your results in a meaningful manner. Applications such as Asana can help businesses plan and organize their work. Sites such as bit.ly will even tell you how many hits a link received!
Do A/B Testing
When a solid application such as Hootsuite offers a “Peak times” posting option, should you use it? Yes, trying it out cannot hurt. But blindly using it might not be the best option. Create some algorithms yourself! Time your post success rate with using the peak statistics compared to the automatic scheduling. Divide two weeks’ worth of posting and then do A/B testing. What was successful? Did you notice a drastic amount of engagement change from using the 2013 peak times compared to using the auto-scheduler? Remember, many auto-schedule posting programs such as the Hootsuite Auto Scheduler do not make their algorithm available for the public. Because of this, you can never be positive it will achieve the best results for your given industry.
We’re seeing less and less posts about “what is the best time to post on Facebook” and more and more writing about “learn your industry’s best post times.”
One of the trickiest parts about social media is the audience factor. The simple reason there isn’t an end-all-be-all solution to what and when to post is because you’re creating content for humans with a specific interest, not numbers. Because of this, some things may not take off. It can be a gamble to post something, but it also can be a great learning experience. As long as you aren’t spamming your audience or posting offensive material, you are in the clear to experiment with different approaches.
Rely on your own testing with your own audience. Document it, learn from it, modify it, and show it off to your coworkers!
Idea Labs Consulting is an Austin-based team of coaches and consultants helping small businesses solve a wide range of business problems since 2011. Our team is composed of experienced entrepreneurs and technical experts.
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