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How much of social media marketing is TIMING?
How important is timing in social media marketing strategy? For instance, should you publish your posts or updates with regards to the time of day? (i.e. Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon?) Should you time updates with market or media buzz (i.e. news or industry buzz)? What other variables play into how successful social media marketing can be in terms of timing?
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6 Answers
Leveraging current events or tapping into the collective unconscious, are great ways of capturing an audience. But no matter how you frame the concept of “timing” in social media marketing, I believe the power still lies in how well you're able to present your message. Here are some ideas to consider when crafting your communications:
• Keep it relevant – if it’s timely and relates to current events/trends, clearly leverage that aspect.
• Make it easy to digest – keep your message as simple as possible.
• Make it unique (dare I say “brand it”) - apply your “brand-filter” to your message.
• Be inventive! – push the visual/emotional aspect of your communications.
• Let it catch fire – help your audience promote you organically.
One thing that I would add to this that I believe can have an impact, is to focus on events (and the associated hashtags) that are important or relevant to your content. There are actually great opportunities out there to leverage events to distribute content to a broader and more focused audience.
Hope this helps!
Here’s the problem with all the answers above: they’re ALL RIGHT! Social Media is the most complex issue marketers have faced in the past 20 years. It’s not just about WHERE to publish content, or about what MESSAGE to send out; now, more than ever, TIMING is a key variable, as you stated in your question.
That being said, before you can put out messages in a timely manner, you need to understand what TYPE of message it is. Ask yourself:
- Is it an event announcement? Yes, these are timely, because they happen at a certain point in time, but can be seen from a long way off, so their relevance is low.
- Is it about a current project? In this case, it isn’t necessarily timely for the reader, but it could be relevant to current market trends.
- Is it about what you had for lunch? These types of status updates or tweets are neither relevant nor timely, but can provide a humorous look into your company. People still like them, as long as they’re not the only status updates you do.
So, the first key to timey social media messages is also about relevancy.
The second key has to do with which MEDIUM you send it through at a certain point in time. A tweet about a trade show you went to three months ago is worthless, but a blog post about what you learned and how it helped your business is perfectly effective three months after the event. It becomes important to LAYER your social media:
- Twitter and Facebook status updates are perfect “in the moment” media. They’re about what’s happening at the time.
- Facebook posts and short blog entries directly following an event can cover some more complex aspects after the fact.
- Long-term blog posts can give more in-depth analysis and deeper meaning.
Of course, these all apply to an event you might attend, like a trade show, but the concepts apply to more than just events. Think about how you layer your social media to get timely information out of a single event, or whatever.
The key takeaways are:
- Timeliness is also affected by relevancy.
- It’s important to layer for full, timely social media usage.
History says that day and time doesn't matter. What matters is quality and if folks are looking for it.
Over time there have been exhausted studies on when to send out an email or what day/time to do a teleseminar. The reality is when it's interesting they'll attend.
As far as Twitter is concerned there is a follow Friday trend that would indicate timing is good for marketing. If you want to collect followers on Twitter Mashable argues Friday is the best day to tweet. http://mashable.com/2009/03/06/twitter-followfriday/
Timing can be everything. Social media, especially Twitter, is a river of information. If you miss the mark, you're down stream and the information you put out there falls flat.
You can help divert that information flow with hashtags and other strategies. Timing isn't everything, but it sure is a big part of it.
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