Tag Archives: social media posting

Advanced Account Management – Optimizing Posting Times

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How can a business optimize its posting timing?

Test test test.  That is the answer.  At the end of the day (proverbially speaking) there is no magic formula for determining the best time to capture your audience’s attention without some trial and error testing. 

Nonetheless, there are some notable patterns. Determining the best time of day to post on social media leverages a combination of understanding your target audience’s behavior and taking advantage of platform-specific insights.

This article provides a starting point for this analysis, and highlights key tactics to optimize your posting times. 

Optimizing posting time for audience engagement

Know Your Audience – Start with demographics, habits, and time zones. Who is your customer and what is their profile?  Other factors include age, profession, and typical lifestyle to estimate when they’re most likely to be active on social media.

Analyze Audience Insights – Leverage your data from past postings.  Keeping a close track of platform analytics will help to gather data on when your audience is most active. Most social media platforms provide insights into your followers’ online behavior.

Experiment and Track – Begin by posting at different times of the day and track the engagement metrics for each post. Over time, patterns will emerge, and you’ll be able to identify the times that consistently yield the best results.  This analysis, in particular, will help you find peak hours.  Generally, posting during peak hours (when users are most active) can maximize visibility. These hours can vary depending on the platform and your audience’s location.

Third-Party Tools – As always, there are several applications that can support this process, but which will take some time to learn.  While the best foundational knowledge is gained through sifting through the user data (did we mention above, know your customer?), there are various tools and services that can analyze your audience’s behavior and suggest optimal posting times based on the data you input into the application. 

Understand the Platform – A growing body of research in recent years has shown patterns of engagement in common social media platform.  Some platforms will prioritize content when it’s initially posted, while others might distribute it over a longer period, to enable a pattern of likes and shares to develop.

Key variables in optimizing posting time

For many social media marketers, there are some specific variables to assess in determining most favorable posting times:  

  • Commute Schedule:  When there’s nothing else to do on the morning public transport commute, many users engage with social media.
  • Competitor Behavior:  Observe when your competitors post and when they seem to receive the most engagement.
  • Audience Profile: Younger audiences are more likely to turn to social media after dinner, versus older audiences who are still attached to network broadcasting for entertainment.
  • Platform Usage Patterns: Different platforms have different peak usage times. For example, LinkedIn daytime is relatively busier than evening Instagram.

A more sophisticated analysis will track engagement statistics not just for volume, but also for quality.  Analyze when your posts receive the highest engagement (likes, comments, shares), which can indicate when your audience is most active and most open to new offers. 

As always, continuously analyze your data and adjust your posting schedule based on what works best for your specific audience and goals.  The best posting times can evolve over time as your audience changes and social media trends shift.  Regularly review your analytics and be willing to adjust your strategy to maximize engagement and reach.

Five content tricks to boost social media performance

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Content Savants aims to continually enhance and improve upon social media content, and as such, we are ever in search of tips, tricks and hacks that help to boost performance of social media postings.  By “boost performance”, we mean increase social engagement, likes, comments, and… most importantly, grow sales for you and your business.

Use Video Content

Research on social media marketing says again and again, videos perform better than stills.  According to research by online content consultant BuzzSumo, Facebook video posts enable over 70% more engagement than posted photos.  For the same set of clicks it takes to post a meme, the video content will outweigh the benefit by far, according to this and many other research reports. 

The challenge with video content isn’t imagining why or how it draws better engagement, nor is it in the effort of posting.  The challenge is in the development, requiring much more time and complexity.  The good news is that still, video content represents a minority of postings (~10% on Facebook and Instagram).  Your business can stand out better, enabling much greater value for the work you put into video content. 

Use the right language

While it remains true that nearly any content posted on a regular basis can have a positive result for engagement with potential customers, what makes content development a professional art is the fact that there are some patterns which can distinguish a “good” post from an “average” post.  We’re not even talking about a “bad” post – in this context, meaning one that works against your business interests.  Offensive material would, for most industries, count as a bad post.  What we’re looking at here is the opportunity to optimize postings from simply “Product x available” to “Shop now for your new Product x”.  The former is a rather bland statement that merely announces availability, compared to the latter which touches on enthusiasm and personality.  Here are some other examples:

“OK”“Great!”
See our new Product XCheck out Product X
Top 10 new productsThe most sought-after products
of the year
You’ll love…You’ll be amazed… or You’ll be inspired…
Let us show youCome and explore
Be sure to check out our latest productsDon’t miss out on limited-time offers

Leverage built-in features

Instagram has a great sticker as part of Instagram Story called the countdown, making it possible for individuals and businesses to set a countdown clock for publishing new content.  This feature is brilliant for generating curiosity and interest, particularly for product launches, business openings, special events and live streamed content. 

Use quizzes

Through a Facebook lead gen campaign, you can also set up quizzes by using the lead form.  Typically this feature is used to interact with the audience after they have clicked on your Facebook ad, and is meant to help categorize customers by obtaining their initial feedback on an offer or opportunity.  Giving customers a quiz enables more active engagement and begins the customer on a journey.  Questions that are on-topic (relevant to your products or services) while invoking common knowledge can give the prospective customer a good feeling for being smart and knowledgeable, effectively creating a positive association with their first experience. 

Avoid the mistakes

As mentioned earlier, there is a way to place “bad” content online, and defeat the purpose of your own efforts.  That’s why we recommend playing it safe from the start, avoiding political, religious or other potentially contentious issues.  A quick search on Google will reveal gargantuan mistakes made in the past by well-known global brands.  While they can buy their way out of a PR disaster, small and medium-sized businesses wouldn’t have the resources. 

More subtle mistakes that many marketing teams make is to focus on branding.  Brand and image are important, but the leveraging of good branding at the early stages of a marketing campaign is far outweighed by the need to educate your customers and raise awareness of the business.  That’s why content rules the day for fast-growing businesses, enabling posted messages to reach more effectively into the customer’s needs and motivations for seeking out your products and services. 

Closely related to an excessive focus on branding is a more practical mistake that is all-too-common, not giving customers a way to respond.  Clever memes and stories are great to entertain your audience (and that has value), however give your customers a link, a phone number, a web address… anything that allows them to initiate a connection and reach out directly. 

And finally, the most impactful mistake that companies make is to start a social media campaign and quit too early.  Real results take time.  At the heart of social media marketing is an effort to connect with customers, and to make your business a part of their thinking.  Specifically, the aim of a social media campaign is to trigger action, preferably immediate action, but if the customer is not ready to respond, the posting must set a trigger which reminds them of your business at a later time.  In this way, consistency and perseverance are everything when it comes to sustainable success.

Inspiring Word of Mouth through Social Media Posting

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In academic marketing jargon, social media is often considered to be a variation on word of mouth marketing.  This view is a flattering portrayal of social media platforms in all their variations, and conforms to the standard approach to what these platforms would have its users believe, that social media posting is like a person-to-person conversation, but done through a digital platform.

While we know social media networks and the postings that are shared have a sort of conversational look and feel, particularly where comments and chat sessions are involved, the sort of mindset that is required of making an effective social media posting is entirely different from that of a personal conversation. 

Consider the following:

Conversation Social Media
Look them in the eyes and make yourself immediately vulnerable to their opinions (expressed verbally or expressed through gestures) While the social vulnerability remains, the sense of your listeners’ opinions are delayed, there is no split-second feedback that you get from a conversation
Often spontaneous, with thoughts transferred to communication near instantly While many social media postings are indeed an instant reaction to a thought (and then regretted later) social media by nature allows people to think about what they write or public in advance, and gives people time to cultivate a well-thought message (not that many people use that opportunity)
Generally unrecorded – the memory of the conversation is reliant on the other person’s ability to internalize messages, which in turn often depends on their emotional reaction to not only the words, but also the tone used to express Recorded, for all posterity to see – therefore the memory of the message is also influenced by ways external factors can influence and change the meaning through a different context than the one originally intended.
In your face – it is nearly impossible to ignore someone who is speaking directly to you, the listener therefore has nowhere to hide The audience may or may not regard anything you say

So conversation and social media are totally different.  What of it?

We know the value of word of mouth marketing, or referral-based marketing.  Social media’s greatest strength is in enabling a mass marketing message to be communicated at little cost to those who have spent time (and money) in developing and cultivating their online social networks.  Prioritizing this type of network has brought amazing success to many businesses.

Focusing only on this aspect of social media may doom the businesses which fail to obtain maximum leverage from their social media investment.

How to maximize the investment?

The key here is to remember that everyone who sees your post not only has their own followers, but also has individuals in their network with whom they have actual – real, live – conversations on a daily basis.  Breaking through the digital realm into the organic, analog world is an amazing feat in terms of the value-for-money impact it can have on your marketing campaign.

How can that be done?

There’s no magic to making it happen.  We’re talking about hard-core messaging that is designed to elicit a human reaction that is so strong, that the reader or the viewer wants to walk away from their desktops or smartphones to tell someone else about what they just read.

While that precise scene rarely happens – ie., someone jumping from their desk and talking about what they just read – we know that people like to talk.  What they talk about is highly influenced by what catches their attention and gives them a way to garner attention from others. 

What kind of attention do people seek?

Tools of leadership (otherwise known as manipulation) are a key driver in relaying messaging.  Therefore, social media content which conveys authority and knowledge are those which are most useful to the type of people who influence others. 

Few companies have a plan to develop word of mouth marketing.  Part of the reason for that reticence is that there is no budget for word of mouth marketing.  As said by Jonah Berger in his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, speaks about difficulty of developing a plan of action.  As he has said, “You can shape it, you can encourage it, you can drive it, but you can’t buy it.” 

That’s why Content Savants is pleased to present what may be your company’s first word of mouth advertising campaign strategy, in these succinct steps:

Step 1 – Shape it:  More than what you want someone to talk about, decide how you want someone to feel when mention of your company, or your product, or service comes up in conversation.  What feelings do you want to associate with your business?

Step 2 – Encourage it:  The key here is to ensure that the messaging is relevant to the viewership.  Implementing this strategy often means that social media campaigns must be more finely targeted.  Rather than mass distributions to a large list of followers, narrowly-defined lists to followers with similar characteristics are often critical to the success of a message or posting.  In this step, relevance is everything.

Step 3 – Drive it:  Make people want to recount the message.  Driving references, or more specifically referrals, requires that the content give the referring person a way to enhance their standing or stature vis-à-vis the ones they are conversing about.  In the world of social media, memes which sound smart are top priority.  Here are general content themes for driving word of mouth discussion:

  • Data which offers explanatory insights about which products/services work well and which ones do not
  • Information which succinctly explains why designs or works of art are better than others, with a bonus for characterizing admirers of competing works of art (thinking of fashion designs) as being inferior in terms of class and taste
  • Anecdotes which explain how things work, in a social or political context especially – and these tend to work better if they are cynical in nature
  • Funny messages which have a dual use in explaining human behavior
  • Comments which explain the universe and human nature in a way that someone who got in trouble should have known better.

Great ideas, now what?

Remember that investment into social media is not just about frequency, timing and the audience.  It is also about content, and ensuring that the messaging has the intended outcomes. 

This article is about driving word of mouth marketing into your social media marketing strategies.  Will it have the intended outcome?