Yomego today welcomes its first ever guest post!. It's from Jasmine Jaume, community manager at Brandwatch, and is all about finding the best time to run campaigns in social media.Take it away, Jasmine...
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As brands increasingly explore ways of using social media for marketing purposes, they may find it difficult to answer all the traditional marketing questions: what content works? How much content is the optimum? When is the best time to publish?
Where traditional forms of promotion have clear ‘prime’ times for content – think of advertising slots within evening shows compared to those in daytime TV – social media is less clear cut.
A study by Bitly attempted to understand behaviour patterns on social networks, which found that the best time to post on Facebook was at 3pm (EST) on Wednesdays, and the best time for tweets was between 1 and 3pm Monday to Thursday
The problem is that every industry is different, and these timings may not work for every brand and sector. Automotive fans, for example, might be online and interacting at a different time to gamers or mums. There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to social media.
Using our social media monitoring tool Brandwatch, we took a look at the days and times that some industries might be best suited to tweeting.
Let’s imagine we are a pizza company. We want to offer a promotion or run a competition via Twitter to help the brand gain visibility and – potentially – new customers and more orders.
Common sense would suggest that mealtimes would be perfect for promotion, as it’s when people might be thinking about pizza.
Using Brandwatch, we can track all the tweets mentioning ‘pizza’ for the past couple of months. Analysing the timestamps on those tweets reveals to us that the majority were posted – perhaps unsurprisingly - over the weekend.
We can see that Wednesday is the least likely day for people to be talking about pizza. This could be approached in two ways. Either we, as a pizza company, could consider that we should run our promotion when people are already discussing pizza, as they may be more influenced towards choosing us for their pizza needs.
Alternatively, we could want to be putting the idea of pizza in the minds of those not already thinking about pizza, and therefore give them a craving to place an order.
The strategy will be more sophisticated than we've suggested, but it's this kind of data that makes the decisions informed ones.
Let’s take a look at what times of day pizza is discussed on Twitter. Again using Brandwatch, we can see that most people discuss pizza in the evening, predominantly from between 6 to 9pm. There’s also a bit of a peak a bit later in the evening and a smaller increase at lunchtime.
These findings are perhaps unsurprising, as when it comes to food, the patterns are pretty predictable. However, it’s definitely worth considering whether it remains valid if the subject were to be switched to something a little less mealtime-specific.
Well, we kept the example simple to portray how easy it can be to investigate something that could dramatically enhance the quality of your marketing strategy, but it’s indicative of the type of insight you can glean from social data.
Obviously this is not an exact science. It may be that tweeting when everyone else is tweeting about your subject might be a bad idea – your tweet might get lost in your followers timelines. You might want to tweet at a quieter time, though then you risk less people seeing your posts.
This kind of analysis can be performed at a much deeper level, and can be applied to other ideas, such as content type, where you publish and even look at why different marketing and content is succeeding or falling flat on its face.
It's just one of the many ways that preliminary research can be used to gain insight about your market, and the possibilities for such research are endless.
Whatever your digital strategy may be, one that is researched properly and backed by data is always far more informed than firing in the dark, and therefore more likely to succeed.
By Jasmine Jaume, community manager, Brandwatch