When To Post On Social Media For Gaining Traction?

There are two main requirements for social media marketing success:

Don’t waste people’s time with boring material; give them something worthwhile to read.
Make sure your audience is present when you deliver your message.

For many marketeers, coming up with engaging content is the easy part. Targeting the right audience and then identifying the communications channel that reaches them are the two most important steps in finding the right place to communicate your message. In this regard, one may resort to a wide variety of available resources and methods.

The mystery of timing, on the other hand, is not always apparent. It’s impossible to know when a specific person will be online and able to read your message. Of course, it’s impossible to know how any given person will act in the future; however, their online track record can provide some useful clues about what to expect from them in the future.

Tools for managing your social media accounts can analyse your audience’s past activity to determine when they are most likely to see your new content, allowing you to schedule posts at the optimal time. Whether or not you use a scheduling product, it’s still important to know when to post to social media for maximum engagement.

How Long Does It Take for a Tweet’s Shortened Link to Expire?

The term “tweet half-life” was first used by Bit.ly in a blog post from September 2011 explaining the company’s analysis of clicks on its short-links based on when they were first tweeted. In November of the same year, a Klout follower released an analysis of tweets demonstrating that users with a high Klout score (and thus a larger social network) enjoyed a longer “shelf life” for their messages.

According to Gartner, the half-life of a Facebook or Google+ post is about 6 hours, and the half-life of a LinkedIn status update on the homepage of someone with about 500 connections is less than 7 hours.

You can get more mileage out of your social media efforts in one of three ways.

Tweet the same link multiple times over the course of several days with varying messages.
Extend the life of your messages by using hashtags and sharing them in niche communities (like LinkedIn groups or forums) or social bookmarking sites (like Reddit and StumbleUpon).
Maximize your exposure by carefully planning when you’ll first publish your content (and when you’ll repeat it, if necessary).
More and more marketers are realising that a hybrid strategy that incorporates elements of all three—constantly testing and adjusting campaigns to maximise success—is the best way to go. You need not worry about tweeting too frequently or tweeting the same thing twice. Unless someone actively searches for them using a hashtag, they quickly become irrelevant.

Not everything that works today will continue to do so tomorrow

The social media landscape is dynamic, alive, and expanding. Humans, not marketing strategies, set the tone on social media, and daily human behaviour is unpredictable. Therefore, keep in mind that there are no absolute timetables to follow.

Every business or brand needs to experiment with different timings to see what works best for their target demographic and overall goals. A so-called “expert” who claims to have all the answers should be questioned further by asking how they would go about implementing their recommendations. In other words, if they don’t say something along the lines of “We’ve analysed your followers based on publicly available data and we think this is the optimum schedule to start – and we’ll be tracking and modifying the schedule based on actual results,” you should look elsewhere.

Time-shifting is a recent phenomenon that has been observed by many professionals and is expected to persist for the foreseeable future. “Adult homework” now includes responding to emails and posting on social media. We do it when we have time, which is why millions of us check our personal Facebook and LinkedIn pages in the wee hours of the morning, after work, during lunch at our desk, and on the weekend to catch up on everything that isn’t strictly work-related.

Generalized Schedules

If your social media marketing message is connected to an event or promotion, when you send it will depend largely on your location and the message you want to convey. If you’re a restaurant with a lunch special today, you should let people know about it right around the time they start to feel hungry, but before they get in the car to drive somewhere for lunch.

I mean, it makes sense, right? Then, think about this: in the United States, 33% of the population resides in the Central Time Zone and 48% of the population resides in the Eastern Time Zone. Just 2% of the population resides in Alaska and Hawaii, while 14% are in the Pacific Time Zone. To reach your target demographic, it’s important to post on social media at the right times.

If you can only send one social media message per day and your target audience consists of C-suite executives and other decision-makers, try sending it at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Good chances of snagging:

The West Coast of the United States and Canada is where you’ll find workers heading into the office.
The East Coast lunchtime is currently 12:00 pm.
The close of business in London, at 5 o’clock in the evening GMT (5:00 pm GMT)
Business social media posts in your “home time zone” could begin at the end of the business day, between 5 and 6:30 p.m. Start wherever works best for you, but make sure to test your timing and compare results before making a schedule.

It’s possible to get assistance with data analysis thanks to a variety of commercially available social media management tools, some of which are free.