Social media has more than 4 billion active users. To capitalize on its engagement and growth potential, most marketers focus on creating content regularly. However, what they fail to acknowledge is that regularity is just one of the preconditions for success on social media.
Monitoring your brand’s reputation and creating content that resonates with the audience are all equally important. But that’s not all. Time plays a critical role as well.
In this article, we will look into how social media monitoring and social timing influence the success of a social media marketing campaign.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is listening to what the internet is saying about you. It also involves keeping an ear out for all the information out there in the internet world which can potentially influence your business.
Tracking your business mentions and relevant discussions on social media help you stay current with the latest industry trends. They enable you to understand your audience’s behavior and find out what they want from you.
The Importance of Social Media Monitoring
Unlike in life, you can not turn the other cheek on what people say. In the digital world, words matter. They can develop or demolish your online presence.
This is probably why a recent report found that more than 50% of brands were deploying social media monitoring in some capacity. They want to know what is being said about them or concerning them.
When you closely follow your brand mentions, you get closer to what your customers think about you. This helps generate real feedback in real-time.
Since 96% of unsatisfied customers won’t tell you about their dissatisfaction but will share the negative feedback with 15 friends. Therefore, it is important to be where your customers are talking about you to know what they won’t tell you directly and adapt accordingly.
Most people now turn to social media whenever they have a complaint about a brand. Knowing where your brand has been mentioned and what has been said enables you to ramp up your customer support game. You can reach out to a customer as soon as they post a negative review or a complaint, assist them appropriately, and salvage your reputation.
To top it all off, social media monitoring helps you generate content that your audience wants to see. By offering insights into the customers’ thinking, behavior and attitude, you can tailor your content to their preferences and requirements and experience increased engagement and conversions.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
Yes, there are tools for social media monitoring. You don’t have to sit wide-eyed in front of your computer, scanning media pages looking for your brand mention or relevant information.
In fact, social media monitoring (SMM) tools are so important that in a survey by Oneforty, approximately 43% of social media marketers claimed to have bought SMM tools.
The same survey asked these marketing professionals to list their favorite social media monitoring tools. And some of the free tools that secured a place in the coveted list that resulted from the survey were:
- Hootsuite as a tool for monitoring Twitter and Facebook.
- SocialMentions for monitoring brand mentions.
- Buzzfeed for monitoring social search
While the paid tools that secured a place in the list were:
- Hootsuite pro
- Sprout Social
- Cision etc.
To expand your options, we have done a bit of research ourselves and have created our own list of the best SMM tools that you can use in 2021. Our top picks include:
Google Alerts
Is there anything that Google doesn’t do?
Google Alerts help you track your brand mentions across the web. All you have to do is enter the keyword you want to follow, and Google will generate all the results it finds relevant. Not only that, but it also allows you to set up alerts and sends you an email whenever there is a relevant brand mention.
Mentionlytics
This SMM tool found its place in our list because of its intelligent social media monitoring. Mentionlytics scans a page and presents relevant information even if your brand or the keyword is not present within the content. It scours the entire internet for mentions and helps you track discussions related to your brand, industry, product, or competitors.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker enables you to monitor content across various platforms in 187 different languages. Additionally, if you upgrade to its enterprise package, you can track images and logos too. So, it does not let you miss any brand mention, helps with reputation management, offers customer intelligence, and enables you to manage the business impact and perform competitor analysis.
All these tools work fervently in yielding the insights you need to create content that your customers want to see.
You can check out our more detailed list of best social media tools here.
Now that you know everything about creating quality content, are you ready to launch your success on social media? Not so fast. There is one critical piece of information that’s still missing. Social timing.
The Relation Between Social Timing and Success on Social Media
Do you think successful marketers just publish content on social media whenever their heart desires? No.
The success of a social media campaign stands on a meticulously crafted foundation of right social timing.
What is Social Timing?
Social timing is the time when you publish a post on social media. And though seemingly irrelevant, social timing can make or break your social media campaign.
The right social timing is when your post has the maximum exposure to your target audience and is likely to receive massive engagement.
However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to determining the right social time. Many variables influence this parameter like time zone, customer behavior, brand type, the platform of communication, etc.
The Importance of Social Timing
If you think social timing is a vanity parameter, and you are better off ignoring it, here are a few reasons why you might want to avoid doing that and start paying more attention to when you publish your content masterpiece.
Social Timing Influences User Engagement
There is a time frame when your target audience is the most active. Identifying this time frame and optimizing your social timing to post content in this time frame makes the most sense because that’s when it will get the most engagement.
Let’s explain this with an example. Say you have a brand targeting Gen Z, which is mostly active during the night. But you post content on your social handles on a Sunday morning when your target audience is fast asleep. Do you think you will get the engagement you want? Not likely.
Therefore, it is critical to consider the time factor and schedule your content when it is most likely to be received well by your target audience.
Apart from the time your target audience is active, it is also important to understand variations in time across various time zones. Say you are running a business from the US with your target market in India. Being intuitive, you post content in the morning for your early rising audience. But what’s morning in the US would be evening in India, where your audience is. Your audience may not be as active. And your content might fail to engage them.
Therefore, understanding the correlation between social timing and engagement is important, and it cannot be emphasized enough.
To drive our point home, a study by the American Marketing Association studied the time and engagement correlation for multiple content-based agencies. They found that content posted in the morning saw an 8.8% increase in clicks than that published in the afternoon.
Social Timing Influences Revenue
Money is on the table. Quite literally.
When you post content at an inappropriate time regarding your audience behavior, you experience a drop in engagement. Which ultimately results in low revenue.
A study found that certain content-based organizations increased their profit by 8% simply by optimizing their social timing and posting content when their audience is most likely to see it, consume it and engage with it. That’s the influence of social timing!
Social Timing Helps You Reach the Right Audience
You don’t just want visibility on social media. You want valuable interactions and high-quality engagements, right? For that, your content must go out when it not only gets exposure to the most eyeballs but to the right eyeballs.
So, you must find out when your target audience is most active on a particular platform and post your content accordingly.
The Right Time for Your Social Posts
As we mentioned briefly above, there is no singular “right social time.” However, some studies note close approximations. We will talk about one such study by Social Sprouts in which they analyzed the engagements for posts across various platforms. They have listed the most suitable posting time and days based on how well social posts fared on four major platforms.
Facebook
Facebook has more than 2.7 billion users and is classified as the most used social media platform. Therefore, it is brimming with active users and bursts with engagement opportunities. But for your success, timings still matter.
According to the most recent case study, the best time to post on Facebook is from 9 am to 1 pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Instagram is gradually coming up at the level of its parent company Facebook. With its many new features, it offers unique opportunities for businesses to grow online.
Latest studies hint at late morning and midday during weekdays to be the most opportune time for posting on Instagram and engaging your community on that platform. This means, for maximum engagement, you can try publishing your posts between 11 am to 2 pm on Tuesday, and 11 am from Monday through Friday.
Twitter continues to be the go-to platform for people to gain authentic information right from the source. It also connects businesses with their customers directly.
Studies show that you can capitalize on Twitter’s rapid and easy method of communication and engage your target customers by tweeting between 9 am to 3 pm on Wednesday and from 9 to 11 am on Tuesday and Thursday.
The platform for professionals – LinkedIn is where you can effectively build your personal brand if your target audience is a cohort of professionals. Being a platform for career-related activities, LinkedIn is seen to have the most engagement during the weekdays, and the interactions dip on the weekend.
Social Sprouts found out that the best time to post on LinkedIn and stir your audience to engage with you is between 9 am to 12 noon from Tuesday to Thursday.
Before you start scheduling your social media posts according to the findings of this case study, you must tap into your own social media analytics and see when your users are most active. Your target audience could be active in one of the low-engagement hours.
For example, if you know your target customer is a night owl and you want to engage them on Instagram, publishing new posts in the 11 am to 2 pm window might not yield profitable results, despite what the studies show.
Therefore, use an appropriate social media analytics tool to see when your target audience will most likely engage with your posts. Then develop a content schedule around that time window. Continue to experiment with your posts and optimize your content schedule according to the metrics for promising social media campaign results.
Conclusion
Social media may seem like a goldmine for online prosperity. However, there are many prerequisites before you can unlock such success, like diligent social media monitoring and intuitive social timing.
Knowledge of customer sentiment and industry trends empowers you to create better content. But, regardless of the quality of content, if your social timing isn’t adequate, the post may fail to perform well.
Social media monitoring tools help you track the conversations surrounding your business. In comparison, analytics tools enable you to optimize your social timing and publish when the post is expected to receive maximum engagement. You can use these tools to develop and schedule your social media strategy and shape your online success.
