How to Time Your Social Media Updates by lisafugere

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How to Time Your Social Media Updates
by lisafugere

shutterstock_69713374If you have something important to say on social media, make sure it gets heard! Different networks prefer different time windows, and different audiences operate on different time frames. Before you start scheduling out social updates, make sure you have a clear understanding of the audience you want to reach. Determine their age, geography, and reason for reading your social updates. We've tailored our findings to B2B organizations.

When determining a time frame that resonates with your audience, first look at when they're online. Are they a New York financial firm? An L.A. film studio? A Dublin-based sales team?  Set the windows of your posts within the frame of your audience's online time. Posts outside those windows are not as likely to be discovered as posts you send while they're at work.

Within those parameters, follow these guidelines for best practice:

     Make posts and tweets at daytime, especially between 1 p.m. to 3 p.m (EST) on week days. These are the hours when your tweets receive maximum impressions.

     Make posts over the lunch hour when many social network users have time to look at their social network platforms.

     Before school (4 a.m to 7 a.m EST).

     Time of arrival at work.

     At the end of business days

The wisdom behind this is that it is during these times that most of people find some time to check their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest among other social networks. Accordingly, messages posted at these strategic times are likely to reach a greater number of target consumers, resulting in lead generation and possibly more sales.

When it comes to social media, timing helps you get noticed, but timing certainly isn't everything. If none of your target customers even know how to use Pinterest, don't invest a lot of time building a Pinterest campaign. You have to figure out which social networks are right for you. How?

     Run tests to determine the best time on each network according to your industry and target audience. Try sending out posts on all your networks at a certain time of day. See which posts engage your audience. Make sure you test all types of content as well. You never know if an audience that ignores your thought leadership is hungry for your customer case studies.

     Post the same message multiple times. Learn to retweet/re-post a particular message several times in a day. This boosts chances of the content going viral and reaching a potentially larger audience. If you're worried that sending too many messages may overwhelm your audience, create different channels. For example, if your Twitter feed gets too crowded with job postings about events that only a small portion of your following will attend, create a separate Twitter profile just for events. The people that find the event Twitter handle helpful will not be as bothered by too many event posts. Targeted Tweets work wonders in audience engagement.

As it is, timing is an integral aspect in successful social medial marketing. Whether you rely on social media management tools, agencies, approved experts and analysts, or do it yourself, do not just post your content. Doing so may flop a potentially viral post. Know when to post. And remember that the recommendations in this post are just that: recommendations. If you want to understand how your audience responds to social media, start collecting analysis on the times and subjects of the posts that inspire the most engagement.