BTL 8: Getting the timing right

Timing matters. A joke told at the wrong time will always fall flat. Similarly, a piece of excellent content posted at the wrong time may disappear without trace. If you look at the Twitter accounts of news organisations, you will see that they often post the same stories several times in a day—and that’s not because they have nothing new to say. It’s because they know that their audience is looking for new content, not information from three hours ago.

To maximise your effectiveness on social media, you need to get the timing right. There are a number of aspects to this:

• What time of day does your audience engage? You need to think about the time of day—for example, if most of your audience is in the US, and you are in Europe, they will be engaging at the end of your working day, or even when you are asleep. How are you going to ensure that they see your content ‘fresh’?
• Are there differences in how your audience engages with different types of content? Will this affect what you post and when?
• How does your thought leadership fit with your organisation’s wider campaigns? It is useful to know about particular sales campaigns or what other thought leaders are doing. Coordination would be good—but you need to be sure that at least you are not doing anything that actively cuts across someone else’s work.

There is more about some of the issues concerned here. You will also need to think about how you measure the impact of your work, and this will be covered in our next email.