- Use Facebook Insights to determine when your best audience is spending time online.
- Don't believe there are universal times to post that apply to all businesses.
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There are as many advice articles about the best times of day to share social media content as there are homebuyers who say they’re qualified.
Experienced agents will take the time to determine if a buyer is ready — so why not do the same with your marketing decisions?
What we’re up against
In a post from almost three years ago, Facebook’s former VP of Advertising Technology (now VP of Publisher Solutions) Brian Boland lamented the decline in reach of organic content.
His first reason for the shortage is easy to understand: “More and more content is being created and shared every day.”
I use that dated article to demonstrate how even more relevant it is today.
The volume of content streaming down our news feeds has jumped an unimaginable amount since Boland penned that blog.
Plus, thanks to Facebook‘s echo chamber of algorithms, we’re only seeing a small percentage of the information our news feeds attract.
The competition for our customers’ brainwaves is reaching almost hostile levels, with agents the nation over trying to outspend one another for a mere shred of market awareness.
This only adds to the synapse-killing din of thinly reasoned detritus that, truthfully, defines the majority of what we digest when online.
Loud vs. targeted
I wonder: Why are so many businesses continuing to pump the content machine full of more low-grade fuel when it’s already cranking well past their readers’ attention span red lines?
This may sound like a rather harsh take on the value of Facebook to our marketing budgets, but hear me out.
Social media remains important to many of your prospective and previous buyers and sellers. Subsequently, it’s critical that you do all you can to make what they read important, too.
Don’t look at it as a challenge to cut through the noise; you merely need to get the right people to hear you.
This is why Facebook introduced its Insights tool. You can drill down into the metrics of every post to determine what worked with who, when.
Businesses on Facebook can use this data to determine when their friends and faceless “Likes” are most active on the platform.
Why do we believe that there are a only a few windows of time when our content matters?
Do you know your sprawled audience?
Still, many agents don’t work with only one specific demographic.
The majority of agents are assisting customers that socially and economically range from single, 25-year-old Latino women to married, middle-aged African-American males.
Each group will be online at different times and engaging with different forms of content.
Then how can we believe that there are a only a few windows of time during the day when our content matters? One post does not fit all.
The best option might be to focus on only one of your demographics, centering all of your Facebook activity around their metrics for a given amount of time to measure results.
After three months, have clicks increased to your listing pages? Do you have more newsletter subscribers?
Trying to provide engaging, relevant news and insight to all customers all the time is nothing short of Sisyphean.
Like all marketing endeavors, efforts on Facebook need to be targeted, succinct and based on numbers.
There is no right time to post content … only the right customers to post for.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
