Here’s how Yala determines when to publish your posts
Imagine you’re a standup comedian. Your neighborhood pub is hosting a standup night with a three local performers. They offer three time slots, say 8, 9 or 10 pm, and you get first dibs.
Luckily, you have a pretty clever manager. Being a rationally-minded person, she decides to take the methodical approach to picking a good time slot.
First, she goes to the pub every day for a week in advance, and takes note of how many people are in the pub at 8, how many are there at 9 and how many survive till 10.
Then, she decides to be really clever, and tries to determine how enthusiastic the crowd is at any given time. She dutifully notes customer’s tips and applause, and concludes that 10pm is a particularly cheerful time slot.
Finally, just to be extra careful, she asks the barman: what do you think is the best time to perform?
Taking all these factors into account, she can now confidently pick your time slot so you’d enjoy a large, enthusiastic audience for your routine.
Social media is like a pub, and small businesses are the performers. Yala can help them determine the best time to publish their posts using the same approach described above.
First, it checks when their posts received interactions.
Then, it determines when these interactions tend to be enthusiastic — for example, a share would receive higher priority than a like.
Finally, she uses Facebook’s and Twitter’s own analytics to see what they have to say about the times with the highest engagement.
After taking all these factors into account, Yala can determine a good time to publish a post.
Of course, timing isn’t the only factor that influences social media engagement. Content, post type and previous engagement also play a large role.
Similarly, the success of your routine depends on more than performing at the right time — it also has to be funny!
Unfortunately, bots can’t help with that (yet).
We built Yala initially for ourselves.
We wanted to make better timing decisions, post from right inside our primary communication channel and most of all, make social media about the conversation, as opposed than a stream of boring marketing messages. And so Yala was born: a chatbot that augments your Slack and Messenger conversations and makes Facebook and Twitter a part of it.
The decision to make it a chatbot came because social media is, at its core, a messaging media. A conversation.
Yala was so successful in our own small business, that we decided to make it public.
The result we’ve experienced is a more enjoyable and effective social media presence. I think you’ll like it, too.
