READ TIME: 2 – 3 MIN
Creating brand awareness is one of the toughest parts of running a small business. It’s one thing to have a great product or service, it’s a whole other to present it to your new and growing audience. Social media is a valuable tool to help with this, but you need to be tactical with how you use it. Most small business owners don’t have the time to live on the internet, interacting with and growing their audience for hours on end. There are products to be sold, customers to see, and all the other work that must be finished daily.
This isn’t to take away from the importance of using social media for your business. It’s to emphasize the potential impact of using it more precisely and meaningfully, maximizing the visibility of your product or service while limiting the time spent on these apps.
The solution is to post during peak times when your target audience, current customers, and social followers are using the apps.
OPTIMISING ENGAGEMENT
Reaching your Target audience while they’re actually on social media gives you the highest amount of engagement with the same amount of effort. The way social algorithms are set up, the most recent posts rise to the top, giving you the potential to be one of the first posts your followers will see. It’s the most efficient way to communicate with your audience online. Saving you the hours spent lingering on the web, posting multiple times to improve your reach.
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
When you’re consistently posting at the time your target audience and followers are online, you show up more and more on their feeds. You get noticed and interacted with. It develops familiarity and a natural recognition, building a real relationship with your followers. It creates loyalty, placing you as the first business they think of when they’re in the market for your product or service. The repetition of being seen and engaging with your audience at all the right times, while consistently delivering great content can be game-changing for a small business.
So, the question is… how do you find the best times to post your content?
3 WAYS TO FIND PEAK TARGET AUDIENCE USAGE TIMES
The three best ways to find the optimal posting times are to experiment, monitor previous posts, and look at when your competitors are posting. Each comes with its challenges, but all three are effective. Here’s how they work:
Experimenting
Play around with the times you post. Do some in the morning, during lunch hour, evening posts, and even vary the days of the week you post. Keep track of which post times get the most engagement and observe if this happens consistently during the specific post times. It may take some time, but slowly it will reveal the optimal time to post to your specific audience.
Review Previous Posts
A quicker way to see when the best post times could be is to look back at your previous posts. If you have varied post times in the past, there could be some great information in the historical performance metrics. This method may not be feasible for new businesses or businesses new to social media.
See When Your Competitors Are Posting
Studying when your competitors or similar businesses post could be a very useful and efficient way to find the best times to post. Especially if they are already well established online, implying that they’ve got their content schedule down to an art. It can be very useful to mimic their posting schedule.
Whether you’re a new business trying to gain a following or a veteran business growing your online persona, maximize your social presence by posting at optimal times using these 3 tips! They will allow you to maximize your social media presence without having to waste hours of your time monitoring and actively posting.