7 Secrets of Timing a Social Media Campaign

7 Secrets of Timing a Social Media Campaign

1. Consider Your Audience

Every service or product has a certain target audience that it is most likely to resonate with. Taking some time to understand what your target audience is will help you tailor your social media advertising accordingly. Thinking about whether your product is intended for men or women, for older or younger users, for people of a certain economic profile, and a number of other factors are all good starts. Customer surveys can also provide you with valuable insight.

Once you’ve figured out who your target audience is, consider what the social media habits of the person you’re trying to reach might be. Senior citizens and other older age demographics tend to be active earlier in the day, so could respond to posts made early in the morning. On the other hand, if you’re trying to reach a younger audience, posting during school hours on a weekday may minimize your impact.

2. Know the Platform You’re Using

There are numerous different platforms that you may try to reach your audience on, and each platform has its own unique user base. For example, Facebook tends toward an older crowd while platforms such as Instagram generally cater to a younger audience. Maintaining an effective presence on every platform available isn’t a feasible option, so deciding where your social media efforts will be most effective is crucial to the success of your campaign.

Sometimes, the active times on different social media platforms run counterintuitive to what you may expect. For instance, although you might expect social media to be active on Saturdays and Sundays when everyone has a lot of free time on the weekend, Saturdays and Sundays actually tend to be less active than other days of the week on all platforms. That makes backing up your intuition with hard data essential to the success of your social media campaign.

3. Keep the Conversation Going

Building your social media presence isn’t as simple as just posting effective content. Modern customers don’t want to be marketed to; they want their favorite brands to engage with them in an ongoing conversation that feels personalized instead of just feeling like a sales pitch. That’s why it’s essential to time your social media posts so that you’ll be able to respond to comments on your content and interact through other means of communication.

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t limit yourself to only engaging with positive feedback that you receive. A bit of personalized interaction can turn things around for a customer who has had a negative experience with your brand. Learn how to engage in a constructive way with criticism to show the professionalism your brand is characterized by both the person with the negative experience and anyone else seeing the interaction.

4. Study the Times That Your Competition Is Active

As with so many aspects of running your business, getting some insight into how the competition is operating can be a useful resource for figuring out your own brand’s strategy. Look at other businesses that operate in your field and see what strategies they employ to maximize their social media reach However, this part of developing your strategy isn’t as simple as copying existing strategies.

Following exactly what a competitor is doing with their social media presence will create too much competition, splitting the audience that you hoped to reach. Instead, develop a unique strategy that shows how your brand is set apart from the rest. Using lulls in activity from your competitors to post your own content can help you reach your audience without any distractions getting in the way.

5. Automate the Process as Needed

Once you’ve developed a strategy for when to post your content, you’ll need to consistently stick to that strategy to get the results you desire. However, with all of the other demands and concerns you need to attend to in order to operate your business, manually posting at a specific time may not be possible. That’s where automated tools come in to assist you.

You can set posts to go up at a specific time so that you can post at the most effective time without having to do so manually. That frees you up to devote your attention to other aspects of your business. You may also be able to automate your social media interactions with customers to an extent but use this tool cautiously. Overly-automated social media presences read as robotic and forced, turning off potential customers.

6. Use Data to Measure Your Success

The foundation of any successful business strategy is having the right data on your side to be able to plan intelligently. This holds true in the world of social media marketing, where actionable data is much easier to collect than it is through older forms of advertising like TV spots or billboards. Data in a digital format is much simpler to gather, letting you take an intelligent approach to the way you market your content.

Raw information such as the number of views and likes a post receives are useful, but these are only the beginning of the data you can use. For example, you might want to track the amount of time that a user spends engaged with your content as they’re scrolling through their feed. Tracking the number of users who click links included in your post can also show you how well your social media engagement is converting to sales and traffic.

7. Refine Your Approach

Gathering data on your social media campaign is only the first step to improving your results; you’ll also need to figure out what action to take on the basis of that data. Being able to recognize patterns and trends in the analytics that you gather will be valuable in finding an approach that works for your unique brand. Trying different strategies and seeing how the data changes in response will help you figure out what changes need to be made.

If you want to maximize the return on time and investment that you put into your social media marketing, getting the right expert help on your side is essential. Our team of social media pros has the skills and experience needed to reinvigorate your brand’s online presence so that your brand’s best face is shown to potential customers. Contact GooRooz today to start making the most of your online marketing!