Time can be broken down into a few elements: time spent responding to commenters, therefore engaging your social media audience; time spent connecting with with other businesses and organizations in your industry or area; and time spent posting original content.
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| Showing personality and engaging your social media users means your on track to implementing a successful strategy. |
The importance of engaging with your audience cannot be stressed enough, however it's hard to measure exactly how much time will be spent on this task. A simple suggestion would be to start with a simple 20 minutes a day, checking your page at two, 10-minute intervals to see whether there were comments, and draft an appropriate response. As you get to know your audience, you'll see whether you might need more time to respond — but as a start a morning and afternoon check will be sufficient, and appear responsive in your users' eyes. (Read more about the two-way street on social media.)
Time spent engaging other businesses and organizations in your industry or area is a great way to increase your reach on Facebook. If you "like" or "share" something from another business, they are more likely to "like" or "share" something of yours. What this means is that all the fans of that business page now see the content on your page, and perhaps they will decide to like your page, too. This could almost be considered a back-alley, two-way street, if you will.
Time spent posting original content — this one can be tricky depending on the industry your in. A survey on Socialbakers.com found that brands such as iTunes, Skittles, Disney and Starbucks were averaging just one post a day on their Facebook pages; posting less than two times per week is very ineffective for any brand according to the survey. Put two-and-two together, the moral of the story is to post at least every other day in an attempt to be effective.
But then you have to consider that different people are logging onto their social media accounts at different times of the day. If you can easily figure out when your target market might be using social media, you can then determine what times of the day to post. For example (warning, this is a hypothetical example and not researched): Perhaps mom's of small children log on shortly after 8 p.m. when their children are asleep — and you're trying to sell diapers, formula, etc. Then scheduling posts for after 8 p.m. on a regular basis is a good idea. However, if you can't determine that this is when moms are logging on, perhaps you also want to post during the lunch hour, and perhaps in the morning from time to time.
My best advice is to post morning, afternoon and evening — because you'll hit varying groups of people and increase your odds for a return on investment. If you really want to get nit-picky, here's a pretty cool sheet from Business Insider that shows the best and worst times to post on a variety of social media platforms.
Need more help with your business' social media accounts? Contact Clever Dog Media Relations & Business Marketing.
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