A Guide You Will Need On Social Media Posting Schedule For Your Business Growth
So, you have come up with a stunning piece of content for your business page. You’ve done your research, created an infographic that you feel will be resourceful to your target audiences, and finally posted it. A few hours pass (or even a day) but that magic doesn’t seem to happen. There are hardly any interactions on your posts and it is just sitting right there idle, inactive, and devoid of its purpose.
You are on the verge of giving up on your social media business page.
Wait!
The problem is not with your posts or your followers but the timing you choose to post it online. There is a myriad of social platforms today and over 50% of the world’s population is on social media (close to 3.76bn). Also, an individual has close to 8 social media accounts that they surf through during the entirety of the day.
With each social media platform solving a unique purpose, it becomes vital for marketers to identify their online goals, relevant channels for them and figure out the right time to promote and post their pieces of content.
So, for those of you struggling with low social media visibility and engagement, here is a super-extensive post on planning your social media calendar for your business page.
Let’s get started.
How Businesses Can Leverage Social Media For Their Growth
Social media is a once-in-a-generation tool that allows businesses to connect directly with their target audiences and potential customers. With the right techniques, companies can increase the number of leads they generate, make way for a more qualified funnel of leads, convert them, engage with them, upsell their products and services, manage their reputation and do more.
The biggest advantage social media offers over conventional marketing techniques is the power to track the performance of every campaign with specific metrics. Unlike television commercials, where, Instead of assuming a post would have garnered so many eyeballs, marketers now have the power of visualized charts to show statistics on impressions, engagements and reach. If your business has an app, then it is essential to have effective app marketing strategies for more install rates. You need to focus more on social media for reaching a wider audience.
However, social media is only as powerful as how much you make out of it. Not all social media platforms are the same in terms of their user base, activities, login times and more. That’s why one of the first things to do is to identify the top social media platforms and understand their purposes in detail.
To help you get started, here’s a quick table.
How To Choose An Ideal Social Media Platform For Your Business
Like you can see, every social media platform we have listed has a unique purpose and a target audience. For instance, you cannot expect to build authority around your business on a platform like Instagram or Snapchat. People access these platforms to unwind from their professional lives and access content that is fun, entertaining, and does not require too much thinking or attention. Similarly, you cannot post something light and casual on a platform like LinkedIn, where anything remotely close to being fun will be immediately frowned upon.
So, consider the table like a roadmap to tailor your content based on the platform you intend to post on and polish the tone, approach, language and quirkiness accordingly. To accomplish this, you should have an agile marketing plan. Once you’ve done that, you have already tackled 50% of the challenges associated with social media marketing.
Next is coming up with a social media plan.
Having a social media plan is paving the way for clarity on what you are going to post, on what platform and at what date and time. Like we mentioned, not all personas access social media platforms at the same time. There are different timings and days of the week you need to target for specific audience groups and this is exactly what we are going to explore in our next section.
How To Create A Social Media Plan?
Plan A Time-Contained Post
Relevancy is key in acing the social media game. Your posts need to be relevant to the time and day you post on your social media page. For instance, time-specific posts are the ones around deals, discounts or giveaways that you intend to offer on your website or page. If a deal ends at midnight, your posts should lead up to the deadline through relevant posts at different times of the day.
As far as posts on occasions are concerned, keep an eye out for specific days that could mean something to your business. If you have an online gifting store, occasions like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving and more could be good times to capitalize on. When you are planning your content calendar for the month, ensure you include relevant occasions beforehand and have posted on them ready for promotions.
Leverage The Potential Of Moment Marketing
Once every month (or sometimes twice), there comes a sudden trend that goes viral across the globe. The trend could have stemmed from a viral meme, pop culture occurrences, global events or anything that is remotely entertaining. In such instances, brands and businesses join the bandwagon and capitalize on the attention people give to the specific event.
This is done by tapping into relevant hashtags, tagging social media handles, resharing celebrity tweets or posts, taking part in challenges or giving a unique twist to an already prevailing trend based on their business or domain expertise. This moment marketing technique allows businesses to reach new audiences that they couldn’t have accessed otherwise. Moment marketing is also a good opportunity to make businesses more accessible and authentic in the eyes of consumers.
Bring Consistency
Several businesses start out great with their social media promotion strategies. They come up with useful content, spend time meticulously on refining and making it perfect and going the extra mile in giving their followers something valuable. However, the biggest mistake they make is not being consistent with their posts.
If, for instance, a brand posts a piece of content at the beginning of the month, you wouldn’t find another post from them until the third or last week of the month. They remain inactive through the month, projecting an impression among their followers of becoming obsolete or shut down.
From a technical perspective, being consistent is the only way you could come under the good books of algorithms. The more frequently you post, the more the algorithms will love it and the more it will show your posts to your intended audiences. So, if you want to bring in engagements and impressions for your posts, come up with frequent content.
Engage With People And Their Posts
Users love brands that reciprocate their love, admiration, questions or any form of engagement with them. When users realize they are not valued when they engage, they will stop associating with your posts. With algorithms laying heavy emphasis on engagement metrics, your posts will go invisible from your users’ feeds, ultimately making you non-existent.
So, when you are still new to the social media landscape, ensure you respond to user comments, direct messages, tags and more. Acknowledge the efforts your followers put in to reach out to you and reciprocate some love back. If there are too many responses on a particular post, run a separate post on the overwhelming love received. Gratitude goes a long way in social media.
Keep An Ideal Frequency Of Posts
Now that you understand the value of being consistent, next is deciding how much. There have been instances where companies have lost followers because they posted way more frequently than they were supposed to.
Also, when you are coming up with a content calendar, the percentage of posts comes into the picture as well. As a business, we are sure you would have posts such as blog articles you want to promote, specific campaigns or adverts you want to run, podcast episodes that you want to highlight, stories on diverse platforms, pulse articles, user-generated content in the form of photos, reviews and more.
So, what should you post in a month, and how much of it?
Well, to get started, you could follow the Golden Rule of social media posting. This is
30–60–100. Let’s break it down further.
● 30% of the content you post in a month should be original.
● 60% of the posts should be curated (either from users, influencers, other brands, trends and more)
● 10% of promotional posts (advertisements, sponsored posts, highlights and more)
With this rule of thumb, scatter your posts for the months through the days and experiment for engagement.
Posting Schedule In Social Media: Decoding The When And Where Of Social Media Posting
Over the years, gurus and expert marketers have experimented with different times, days and occasions for their posts and gathered enough data to confirm engagement statistics as well. Based on diverse research and statistics, here are some tried and tested post scheduling times for different social media platforms.
Ideal days — Tuesdays and Thursdays through Sundays
Ideal time — between 1 PM and 4 PM and 6 PM and 10 PM
Frequency — two posts a day
Ideal days — Monday through Friday
Ideal time — between 8 AM and 10 AM, 11 AM and 1 PM and 5 PM and 6 PM
Frequency — two tweets a day
Ideal days — Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays
Ideal time — between 11 AM and 1 PM and 7 PM and 9 PM
Frequency — one or two posts a day
Ideal days — Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays
Ideal time — between 8 AM and 10 AM and 5 PM and 6 PM
Frequency — one post a day
Ideal days — Saturdays and Sundays
Ideal time — between 12 PM and 2 PM and 7 PM and 10 PM
Frequency — five posts a day
Ideal days — Saturdays through Mondays
Ideal time — between 6 AM and 9 AM
Frequency — up to two posts a day
Wrapping Up
So, we believe you now have a better idea of social media posting strategies for your business. This comes from years of experience, experiments and interactions with other leaders and social media pioneers. We are sure these content promotion tips will help your business gain new followers, increase engagement with your followers and increase brand visibility and credibility online.
Implement these tips, follow the timings and do better.
Good luck!
