As social media marketers, we’re always educating ourselves. In certification classes and seminars and articles, we learn when the best time is to post to our client’s accounts. What we find a little comical is that with each new class or publication, there’s always some new bit of information (that is really just the same information reworded to sound new), a tidbit, or something telling you in the right time is to post content for some weird crazy reason like LA traffic (yes, that has been a reason in past articles– don’t post when readers may be stuck in traffic).
Your biggest and best tool for social media optimization?
There’s no trial for it.
Its PC/Mac Friendly
Your license for it will never expire.
And regardless of what new study is released, this will hold true.
Common sense.
Throughout the last five years, our social media marketing specialist noticed that the general idea is to table all this social media information published by major newspapers and media outlets with reworded information jumbled with random bits of knowledge to make it sound like some science to gain momentum on social media networks. Here’s what we recommend: table all of that and just use these valuable social media tips, all utilizing the fabulous power of common sense:
Put yourself in their shoes: Marketing is all about target demographics, right? So if our target market is, say, stay at home moms– we would put ourselves in a typical day in the life of a mom. We would look for breaks in her schedule with her kids, figure out when she has time to check her social media networks, and when she’d be too busy making dinner to scroll through and like posts. We would take her mind, body, and heart into consideration. We would look for content that is relatable, usable, and sharable.
This “study” can be done for any demographic. These questions, this demographic “simulation” can be used anytime for any group of people.
Take Time Zones Into Consideration: Many social media newbies don’t take this into consideration, but keep in mind that if you post something on Twitter at 6 am EST for the morning audience, it’s only 3 am on the West Coast. By the time LA wakes up, there’s 341 tweets from your reader’s other followers, completely demolishing the chances of a potential customer ever seeing your tweet. This rule applies for any other social network as well, but especially Twitter. Compose and create social media posts for all your time zones to that your posts aren’t drowned out by the noise of other world clocks.
Be Dramatic:This sounds silly, but you have no idea how effective this is. Always create a title, or clip an excerpt from a story, link, page, etc that makes people reread it and want to click on it. If you have room on a campaign to be a little “edgy”, do it– it’ll get likes, it’ll get clicks, guaranteed. Cliffhanger teaser posts always take the reader by surprise and increase interaction. Yes, it may look “dramatic” but didn’t the squeaky wheel always get the grease anyway?