A LinkedIn research states that 81% of small business on social media and the 94% of them using social platform to promote their products and their services. This trend will undoubtedly continue to grow, with social media taking the place of companies’ websites.
In addition, data from SumAll highlights how social media usage is pivotal to “hyper growth” companies, because a savvy online presence grows awareness, and nearly three quarters of them had bigger social media budgets. Evidently, they’re doing something right.
But being on social media is not enough: you need how to leverage each platform to meet your goals: you want to make sure that your content is impactful, without spending too much time on it.
What many companies miss is not what, or how, or why publish, but it’s when. You can have the best content ever, but if you choose the wrong time to publish it nobody will see it.
SumAll.com is a startup that provides data analytics for every kind of business. The company analyzed large amounts of customer data to determine the most opportune times to send out posts to various platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and Google. The “best time” metric was calculated for each social media platform by measuring the responses on hundreds of millions of different posts, representing companies in various industry verticals. The measured “responses” were likes, comments, reposts and other similar activities that represent a specific action taken by the recipient.
You can find the specific times when it’s more likely your post will be viewed and appreciated.
Twitter: People have a chance to share their own thoughts or retweet in the afternoon.
Facebook: The work day is slowing down and people have more time to do a Facebook check.
Tumblr: Reading micro-blogs on Tumblr takes more time and thought than other platforms, so non-work hours are often ideal.
Pinterest: Weekends are best, as the craft and collection emphasis of Pinterest lends itself to weekend projects.
A common trend with the optimal times is you want to catch people during their downtime. You might need to get them early in the morning during their commute or “settling in” time at work, during lunch or in the evenings.
Small businesses should try to follow these times but also need to understand the timing may be different for their specific customer base or industry. If they are trying to reach college students, the normal 9 to 5 workday doesn’t apply. Experimentation is still recommended, and small businesses can use various tools to automate the sending of posts and tweets at various times throughout the day and over the weekend.
Source article on Entrepreneur.