Beat the Crowd on Social

When I introduce myself as someone who does social media for a living, I get asked often, "What is the best time to post on network xyz?"

Social content is only useful to organizations when it engages relevant publics (this is why it is called "social" media, after all). For this reason alone, there are many in my industry who believe that there is some sort of holy grail to posting exactly when people are most likely to become engaged. This is a foundational principle of marketing, whose validity has been proven over and over, not just by pure logic - "go where the people are." However, if you have ever been told that the best time to post on Facebook is between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on a Thursday or Friday (or one of the many similar, often contradictory, social potions), I advise you be cautious. There are three reasons why when you post almost never matters:

1) Crowded prime real estate is no longer prime real estate. Colloquially, us internet marketers call the space in your newsfeed "real estate." There is a limited amount of space to fill on the user interface and of course, a message not seen by the user is a sunk cost for you. Now, if there was a best practice to post on a certain channel at a certain time, this would yield optimal results if everyone abode by it. In other words, let's imagine everyone posted on Facebook only around the lunch hour on Thursdays and Fridays, with no posts at all made at any other time. The most likely result is that without paying a significant premium, nobody's content would even be visible. Also, Facebook would be extremely unattractive for most of the week, as it would be as empty as Utah's desert at all other times.

This works just like in the real world. Whenever I want to get away from my stressful life for a few days, I take a plane out to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then, I drive for another two hours to a resort town named Grove, located on the shore of Grand Lake near the meeting point of Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas. The lake features some of the best bass-fishing in the world, and the calm mixture of Midwestern lack of speed and Southern hospitality makes for an excellent recharging atmosphere. Yet, most people have never heard of Grove, and I would argue that everyone in the country moving there upon hearing of its beauty would utterly destroy the amazing intangibles of the place. I hope you get the idea - if everyone doing it ruins the whole purpose of a best practice, it never was a best practice to start with.

2) Distinguish impressions and engagements. Implicitly or explicitly, your content should always include a clear call to action. Conversion on this call to action, and not the fact that someone passively sees your content, should be your success measure. Let's once again think of the lunch hour Facebook example. If your goal is to gather quote requests for the insurance company you work for (some of my bread and butter), and this process takes some typing and about a minute from the user side, your likelihood of conversion is highest when people are receptive to input and have some time on their hands - real or perceived. Conversion rates from people who scroll through their newsfeed because they are just trying to catch up on the news or because they are bored at work are likely very low for that reason. People in a hurry have no time. Bored people are usually not very receptive for input. It's a very weak audience overall. You are probably better off posting in the evening - perhaps quite late - when people are home and relaxed enough to process information. Yes, you may get fewer eyeballs, but your conversion rate will likely make up for it.

3) Exposure length matters. Outside of Twitter and Snapchat (two anomalies in that way), social content actually survives for quite some time before becoming obsolete. If the content is of high quality, something posted in the morning will likely still show up in newsfeeds after dinner. My most successful LinkedIn post to this day from almost a month ago still gets likes and comments and shares, as it lives on throughout multiple distributors. Ironically, it was published late on a Sunday night - a big no-no for LinkedIn strategists. What I'm trying to say is this: If your content quality merits it, your posts will move through multiple high-impression and high-engagement cycles, picking up momentum each time they do so. It does not matter at what odd hour you hit "publish." As such, your content will stay alive for a long while. You just need to put the quality bar up high and then leap over it.

There is no ultimate secret weapon to leveraging social content. And, in everyone's best interest, I hope you won't listen to those who claim otherwise.