Is Wrong Timing Hurting Your Social Media Campaigns?

We have become used to thinking that social media is the 365/24/7 always on, instant news and marketing service.

Engage it at any time of the day to inform your followers (customers) about a new product or service you are offering.

Whenever there is breaking news in the world or there is a major event, we hear about how hashtags are trending and how social media engagement is driving a story.

But what is good for the news business is not good for eSellers and their eCommerce business.

Of course most eSellers already assume that tweeting at 2am about a new product may not be very ideal, however did you ever consider it might make a difference to tweet or post on Facebook at 3pm vs 9am?

There is no shortage of social media analytics firms or tools, including ones offered by the social media companies themselves. But there is no better analytics data than sales and a little experimenting may find your sweet spot.

While there have been many studies on this subject by social media analytics firms, the fact is every customer base is a little different, so to find the best time that works for your business is going to take a little time and patience.

Social Media analytics firms cannot even agree on the useful life of a tweet or Facebook post and multiple published studies over the past few years claim anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours.

Hence the reason why collecting your own data is more important than some general audience research done by analytics firms marketing their services.

But there is one common threat among all studies and that is none of them suggest the best time to engage on social media is in the morning. The earliest suggestion is Noon with the latest being 6pm.

And with this nugget of information, you already narrowed down your starting point for gathering your own data.

Before you begin testing out different times of the day, do make sure you have signed on to collecting analytics data.

While ultimately sales is your most important data point, you still want to track social media engagement and visits to your store.

You never know, it could be that the new product you think should be hot, is actually a dud.

If your analytics shows a lot of activity, but not much in sales, well you may just learned that the product is not as popular as you thought or maybe the price point is wrong. And in this case the sales data doesn’t help you identify the best time to engage social media.

Most site analytics, such as Google Analytics, will show you social media referrals. You can enhance this information with analytics gathered by tools such as Hootsuite.

Obviously the more effort you put into tracking this data, the better your data will become on the best time to let the world know about your new products or services.

As an eSeller, did you ever consider social media timing could be this important?

Richard Meldner

Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.

To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.