Thanks to guest blogger Robert Nissenbaum.
On December 18th, Robert was my featured guest on the Marketing Blab. Prior to the blab, he was kind enough to share this guest post on the subject of timing your posts on social media. Should you or shouldn’t you?
“When you post on social media doesn’t matter.” This is one of those statements that has most people thinking I’m a bit off my rocker – at least until you understand my thought process.
I get the concept of finding the right time to post. It makes sense. Determine when your audience is active, when they’ll likely engage with a particular type of content and post at those times. What doesn’t make sense is the willingness to tie the success of a piece of content to the time it’s posted.
That’s a broadcast mentality!
When it comes to radio or TV we need to time content to when our audience is actively listening or watching. When the spot is over, it’s gone. That’s not the case with social media.
If you don’t want your grandma to see it, don’t post it.
What we post online lives forever. While this normally is brought up with respect to reputation management, it applies nicely to your content. Since that content lives on, you don’t need it to necessarily be seen when it’s posted. You just need it seen.
Rather than being passive, focusing on trying to post at the ‘right or best’ time – and hoping it’s seen – consider these two options:
1. Craft your content and actively work to get it found.
• Use keywords and hashtags to get content found in searches.
• Use tagging to draw specific people to your content. Tagging someone in a comment even days later will drive additional views and traffic.
• Use sharing effectively.
2. Focus on getting profile or page views.
• Having specific posts seen in a feed, even if the content is relevant, visually appealing and perfectly timed, isn’t guaranteed. You’re still leaving it up to chance or the social site’s algorithm.
• When someone visits a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile or an Instagram account for the first time, they tend to read more than just the last post or piece of content. Even older content becomes visible again.
Optimizing content to show in a news feed takes more time and effort than driving traffic back to your profile with less of a guarantee your content will actually be seen.
Yes, finding the sweet spot when your audience is active and able to be engaged helps. It is, however, only one tool to get the visibility you need to drive conversions from and engagement and interaction on your content.
In my opinion, if you craft your content properly and do a good job at actively driving eyes to it, when you post doesn’t really matter.
What do you think? Do you pay a lot of attention to the times you post? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below because I’d love to hear from you. Thanks and here’s to your sweet success.
About guest blogger Robert Nissenbaum: Robert is a successful small business owner with more than 20 years of marketing and sales experience.He has utilized social media to increase branding, drive sales and create revenue for his own businesses since 2006 (before Facebook brand pages existed).
