Although in the beginning social networks were used for staying in touch with important people in your life and for stalking your ex partners, entrepreneurs and marketing managers quickly realized their promotional value. Social networks also adapted big time to the new use and offered many marketing packages for companies and entrepreneurs.
With a good social media strategy companies are able to increase their exposure to the public, develop a loyal customer base, highly reduce marketing expenses and receive fast feedback from their customers. Since these networks became so important for business, people started investigating the best social media tactics and strategies. Also the new profession was born, called community manager, which is basically the person who is in charge of one company’s social media campaign.
Mark Zuckerberg’s little project went a long way from the Harvard and Ivy League’s version of Hot or Not to being the most popular social network and the fifth biggest internet based company by revenue (after Amazon, Google, eBay and Tencent). In 2007 this social network already had more than 100,000 pages.
With all this business being marketed on Facebook, it became little bit hard to attract people to see your page, so each Facebook community manager needs to provide top-notch content, that includes interesting links, videos , photos, graphics, etc. Another important thing is to have the right timing and post material when people are next to their computers and can see the posts before they go down their timeline.
The best time to post something on Facebook is usually from 1 to 4 pm. During this time Facebook posts have the best click-through rate, which proves that people often check their profile even when they are at work. The worst possible time to post something, is during the weekend before 8 am, when most of the people are still sleeping and after 8 pm, when people usually go out. In addition to all of this each entrepreneur or social media agency needs to know how to read his page’s metrics, while determining what kind of content and what timing are the best for his/her audience.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that is based on 140 digit messages that can be posted by members who create their own follower bases. This social network is widely used for journalism and reporting, but it can also be useful for business and company promotion. Most companies that use Twitter to stay in contact with their customers, post info about sales, events and new trends in their industry.
On this network companies use much more casual approach to the customer base, than on Facebook or any other social network for that matter. Comparing to Facebook post, one Tweet needs much less time to go down the follower’s timeline and became completely useless. That’s why timing is even more important when it comes to Twitter, and managing a company’s Twitter account is a 24/7 work.
Still, the best time to post a tweet is from 1 to 3 pm during a working day, as well as in the morning around the time when th workday starts in North America. The worst time is during the weekend after 8 pm and on Friday after 5 pm.
Other Social Networks
There are hundreds of other social networks, and each one of these is used for business purposes. LinkedIn is the most widely used business-only network that connects companies and individuals and has options for posting and applying to job ads.
In addition to this LinkedIn is very useful for promoting your business and the best time to post on LinkedIn is during working days from 5 to 6 pm and around noon. Pinterest is a social network that is very useful for designers and retailers. When it comes to business engagement, it has the best score out of all social media with more than 55% of its users who engaged with retailers and brands throughout this network.
Normal United States working hours are the best time to pin something on your wall. Google+ is another social network that levitates between the friendliness of Facebook and pure professionalism of LinkedIn. It is one of the favourite social networks for entrepreneurs and its popularity is constantly growing.
No matter which social network you choose for promoting your products or services, you need to be very agile and dedicated to building up big and loyal audience. At this moment when newspapers and TV almost extinct from our homes, social networks offer some of the best ways to promote your business.
