There Is Such a Thing As An Opportune Moment
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One of the greatest questions that has come about as the use of social media and digital marketing has progressively grown…. “When should I be posting this?” You want to reach your target market and provide them with your content, but when are they online? Will they actually see my post, e-newsletter, or blog article if I post it now or should I wait until later? Is this another one of the posts that will get lost in the digital world? What is the opportune send time?
Fortunately for us, there are some great tools that various platforms have provided that can help us to better understand our target market. For example, Facebook Business Pages’ have a thing called “Insights” that provide us with information such as “likes, comments, and shares”, “hide, report as spam, and unlikes”, and “post reach.” When you dive in a little deeper, you will see that not only does it provide you with an overview, but it can break these categories down by day. By clicking on “Posts,” you can see the peak times of the day to post that your fans are online.
Your e-newsletter platforms will, also, have a similar analytic function that will help you to better understand the opportune moment to send out your e-newsletter. Let’s say for the first month of sending out your e-newsletter, you try Tuesday’s at 7pm. The analytics section of your e-newsletter platform will provide you with information such as “open rates,” “click through rates,” etc. If you take the time to look over the analytics and you see that your open rate is rather low in comparison to the number of e-newsletter subscribers your letter went out to, you may want to reconsider the time and day you are sending. Put yourself in the minds of your audience. If you are targeting stay at home moms, you aren’t going to send out your e-newsletter at 6pm during the week as they are taking care of kids. If you were in their shoes, when would you most likely see e-newsletter?
However, it is important to note that for every industry, there is a different standard! Not every industry should be posting at the same time. Audiences of each industry are online at different times. Not every industry will have the same open rate percentage.
Analytics tools can seem intimidating at first, but they can be extremely helpful to your business. Learn how to use them through tutorials online or through navigating through them yourself. Or… ask a friend! Understanding your audience and the best time of day to reach them is crucial to the effectiveness of your online communication efforts!
–Jamie
