Social Media can be confusing, especially when picking the right times to post to social media. Let’s think about this logically. You are a business owner yourself trying to attract the right customer, client, and audience to your website yet THEY have their own lives they are running and so do you.
Yet, you want to connect with them but never feel like you get the timing right. So when can you connect the right information at the right time without spending all your precious time posting and engaging customers on social media? Better yet, how much time should you spend devoted to online social media management, or posting, or responding, or creating content!
Confusing, huh! This is one of the things that usually takes the fun out of running a business, but can be so effective if done properly.
Social Media posting may not be the most exciting thing to do for most businesses owners, but with a few simple strategies, it can prove to be incredibly effective for your business. (If implemented strategically with your overall plan!)
Over the past several years studies on social media posting and activity trends performed by Huffington Post, Quick sprout, Followerwonk, Fanpage Karma, Moz, Perfect Audience, and Mashable (to name a few) have all concluded one definitive thing…
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE… because they all vary. B2B vs B2C have different trends. Just as Pinterest trends vary significantly from LinkedIn.
Although there are peak times and some optimal posting times for each social media platform. Each audience varies in their behavior. The only sound advice anyone can give you is to test, test, and then test again!
Not really the advice you wanted, I get it, it’s time-consuming. But testing your audience is the only way for you to know what works best for your business. What do I mean by testing? Keep track of your post types, responses, times of posting and times of most engagement. This will get you going.
Below, I have highlighted the summary of the general population and social media optimal times for posting.
Keep in mind that there are many factors that can alter peak posting times. But the diagram below will give a great overview of suggestions.
Another suggestion is to automate. Ahhhh, doesn’t that feel good to put something on autopilot and have it run for you?!
Automating or scheduling your posts will allow you to organize a certain amount of posts ahead of time, set it, and forget it. This will save you time so you can run your business rather than get sucked into the vortex of social media management. You can check out my free social media scheduling tool here. Or try any number of other scheduling resources available such as Hootsuite, and CoSchedule!
Set a schedule. Decide at the beginning of the month or week what platforms you want to primarily target and set a posting calendar. Create the posts ahead of time and automate the posting.
When you are posting try to include as many images and videos as possible. Images will grab the attention of your audience on most social media platforms. Videos (if kept short) are more engaging than most text posts and will usually catch the eye of your audience.
Think about it when you are scrolling through any of your social media accounts….what catches your eye, or better yet, what catches your attention?
TIME and attention are your main competitors on social media. Your post MUST capture and engage your audience quickly.
Why automate? If the reasons above are not convincing enough to automate your social media then what about your mental block time? Mental, what time?
Think about blocking your time. You know, when you get in a certain mind frame and flow. When maybe it takes a bit to come up with certain ideas, but then once they start flowing, they just keep flowing.
A lot of times when we spend time just preparing our minds to be in a certain mindset, it takes longer to get there than to get the tasks done. (ever happen when doing the laundry…or working out….how long does it take to just get yourself going but once you’re in the zone you could stay there all day? No? Just me?!)
Anyhoo…..BLOCK TIME. Schedule ONE whole day to prepare your social media posts for the month. I do this with my clients. We usually set a whole day towards the end of the month looking week by week. We have a checklist of each social media platform and review what worked well the prior month, and what didn’t work out so well.
Then we will take each social platform we want to post on the following month. Look at each week and create content themes. These themes are created in another phase of the overall digital marketing plan (you have one of those too, right?! It’s okay, it took me a LONG time to master my digital marketing plan). Each theme then we start creating posts. As I mentioned earlier, this is a combination of video, text and image posts. We then, enter the posts into the
Look at each week and create content themes. These themes are created in another phase of the overall digital marketing plan (you have one of those too, right?! It’s okay, it took me a LONG time to master my digital marketing plan). Each theme then we start creating posts.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a combination of video, text and image posts. We then enter the posts into the scheduler and poooof, like magic they will post at the time we schedule each day. We have a whole process throughout the week to monitor and engage, but the automated scheduler makes our time SO much more efficient.
The scheduler along with just blocking or chunking our time really maximizes time and puts some automation into your business so you can do the other things you really love to do. There are guides and suggestions on outsourcing some of your social media management as well. I do suggest this once you get to a certain advanced stage in your business. For now, let’s keep the conversation about when to post! If you need more ideas on automation or even outsourcing, feel free to drop me a line. I’d love to chat about what options are out there!!
Happy Posting!
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