Three steps to leveraging social timing

Last week Jay Baer and Argyle Social teamed up to present a great webinar about the science of timing and its impact on social media marketing performance. The webinar explored post volume (content published to Twitter or Facebook), timing, and engagement (clicks per post per follower). Check out the slideshow above for insights and best practices on social timing for B2B and B2C brands. Then take it to the next level to make social timing work for you.

How can you leverage social timing for your organization?

1. Experiment and optimize. Use the scientific method to find the social timing that works best for your organization and your audience. Start with a hypothesis, design and execute an experiment and then analyze your results to develop a conclusion. In other words, create a hypothesis (or in plain English, make a guess). Do you suspect your audience might be more receptive to content on Sunday at 4pm? If so,that may be your hypothesis. Once you’re hypothesis is in place, create your experiment and do some A/B testing. They key here is only to change one variable at a time. So if you’re testing the 4pm time on the weekends, share content at the same time during the week (for at least 2 – 4 weeks) and gather enough data to prove (or disprove) your guess. Once you have your data, figure out what works best and use your new knowledge to optimize your timing.
2. Use a link tracker. Tracking is a key part of analyzing and optimizing. You’ll definitely want to track the number of clicks you receive and where those clicks come from. Ideally you also want to gain an understanding of the user behaviors after the click to find out how your audience is engaging with the content you share and to improve the conversion rates of your social media marketing initiatives. To do this, look into creating campaign tracking codes to use in conjunction with your web analytics tool(s) and/or look into other tracking options or tools like Argyle Social.
3. Leverage a third-party tool to schedule posts in advance. Scheduling (some of) your content to post in advance will save you time and energy. If you’re on a tight budget, you’ll want a basic scheduling tool and an Excel spreadsheet to help you plan updates and monitor results. If you have a larger budget, look into tools like Argyle Social, Buddy Media, emailvision or Shoutlet to help you with creating and managing  social marketing campaigns.