Timing Your Tweets

In marketing, timing is everything

Social media is a powerful tool to promote your brand and to promote your content.  You can’t just publish a blog post or put a special offer on your website and hope people see it.  When you are using social media to pull traffic to your blog or website, timing matters.

And with digital marketing, timing is very precise.  Once upon a time, companies pondered which day’s newspaper was optimum for their print advertisement.  But now, people are watching social media posts stream throughout the day.  The question of timing is more difficult.

Few points to keep in mind:

• Time Zones: Where is your audience? It’s simply if they are all in your time zone.  But if they aren’t, you need to consider what time it is for them when you post.  Maybe they are spread out over a few time zones.

• What Are They Doing: It is important to know your target audience well. How well? Well enough to have a good idea of what they are doing at various times of the day. When are they on social media?  At what times of day do they have a quick peek and when are they settling down to read in-depth?  When do they get online to search for information?

• Repetition Is Good: We don’t hesitate to repeat our brand’s message or slogan. Yet some of us worry about sending out a link to the same blog post more than once.  No, you do not want to flood your followers’ social media feed and annoy them.  But you do want to hit when they are reading – and they are not all reading at the same time.  It’s okay to promote the same blog post more than once on Facebook and Twitter, especially on Twitter.

When you are scheduling the timing of social media posts promoting your blog, think about the segments in your database.  Look at the time zones and what they are doing at various times of the day.  Consider when each segment is online.  What times can you post for the best exposure?

And remember, you can spread your posts over a few days.  For example, say you have two main audience segments reading at two different times a couple of hours apart.  You can post promoting a link to your blog at one time on the first day, and then do another post promoting the same blog post at a different time the next day.  That way, you are hitting both segments without flooding the news feed of anyone reading at both times.

Social Media Analysis