Social media has touched almost every aspect of our daily lives. It’s changed the ways we socialize, seek our entertainment, and get our news.
But it hasn’t just changed the daily routines of ordinary folks. It’s also changed the working lives of business professionals. And its influence has been particularly profound in the field of marketing.
Social media marketing has dramatically expanded the market reach of even the smallest mom-and-pop shops. It’s helped businesses build long and lucrative relationships with customers in every corner of the globe. And it has transformed the ways that companies find, engage, and communicate with clients and prospects.
However, not all social media marketing campaigns are created equal. In fact, when it comes to using social media for your marketing purposes, it doesn’t only matter what you post and where. It also matters when you post.
After all, given the enormous volumes of content posted on social media each day, if you’re not timing your content effectively, there’s a good chance your target audience will miss it. So let’s take a look at the importance of timing in social media marketing and provides strategies you can use to time your campaigns effectively.
Know Your Audience
When it comes to executing a successful social media marketing campaign, one of the first and most important things you can do is identify your audience. Understanding who your target demographic is, after all, is critical to defining what their social media habits are.
For instance, teens and tweens use social media very differently than older audiences. This includes not only deploying their own unique social media and texting lingo, but also engaging with particular platforms and specific times of the day and night. This means that if you wanted to reach this specific market, you would need to both understand and use the right lingo at the times that this audience is most likely to see it.
In addition, younger audiences may be more attuned to current trends that may be cycling through. Since social media content revolves quickly, it’s important to involve yourself in these trends as soon as possible, instead of waiting until it’s too late. Participating in trends your audience is involved in will let them know that you’re engaged and willing to adapt quickly.
Tune the Time to the Message
As described above, timing your social media marketing content effectively means understanding who your audience is, what they do on social media, and when they do it. But that’s not all you need to know when you’re defining your marketing schedule. You also need to have a plan to align your timing and your message.
For example, you may have created the most meticulously crafted, thoughtful, and compelling post imaginable, but if you’re not delivering it when audiences are ready for it, it just won’t land. Thus, content created for adult professionals is likely to gain more traction, and generate more clicks, if it’s posted on a weekday during normal business hours.
If you want to catch the attention of audiences on LinkedIn, post during early mornings, at the lunch hour, and near the close of business on Tuesdays through Fridays. On the other hand, if you have some fairly dense professional content to share in your marketing materials, late nights and weekends should generally be avoided.
Professional audiences are not likely to be very interested in the latest payroll management solutions when they’re trying to enjoy a leisurely weekend with friends and family.
Frequency and Timeliness Matter
Timing your social media marketing campaign isn’t just about posting when your audiences are most likely to see and be interested in your content. It’s also about using your scheduling strategy to cultivate your brand.
More specifically, if you want to build a brand identity centered on engagement, responsiveness, and vitality, then it’s critical that your posts be frequent and timely. If you’re only posting a few times a month, for example, then your content is going to be stale. Even worse, you’re going to telegraph to your audiences that you don’t care much about engaging with them.
However, when you are actively engaged with your social media accounts, posting frequently across all platforms, you’ll be communicating your passion for your work and your customers. By doing so, you’ll also be more adept at receiving and catching any feedback directed at your brand. After all, no one likes a brand that ignores feedback.
If anything, resentment will build. On the other hand, if users see you actively addressing any complaints or feedback, they’ll be more receptive to your work.
Planning Your Social Media Marketing Schedule
To be sure, continuously producing fresh and topical content on your social media platforms is critical to engaging your audience. That doesn’t mean, however, that everything about your social media marketing needs to be so off the cuff.
In fact, if you try to be wholly extemporaneous in your social media strategy, you are either going to become overwhelmed or you are going to fall behind. The best approach for your social media marketing schedule is to combine the spontaneous with the pre-planned.
For example, you might create and schedule a specified number of posts a week, two weeks, or even a month or more in advance. These can be aligned with scheduled blog posts, planned press releases, or other scheduled events. This will ensure that your social media schedule echoes, coordinates with, and supports your business operations.
Creating this schedule in advance frees you to create more impromptu content in response to external developments in the market, industry, your company, or among your customers. This, again, is a great way to solidify your reputation as an organization that is alert, vibrant, responsive, and interactive.
The Takeaway
Social media promises to revolutionize the field of marketing. However, conducting an effective social media marketing campaign isn’t just about creating great content. An effective social media strategy also depends upon the timing of the campaign.
Scheduling your social media marketing campaign effectively requires you to understand who your audience is and how they behave online. It also means determining when your target audience is most likely to see, and be interested in, the content you have to share.
Above all, effective timing of social media marketing campaigns means combining the spontaneous with the pre-planned to advance your marketing objectives and build a brand renowned for its engagement and timeliness.
