The real strategy behind social media marketing

Social media can be an extremely powerful way to connect to your publics. You can both solicit action from your active publics and peak the interest of any latent publics through effective social media.

There are countless platforms and strategies to choose from, so how do you decide when and where to post? Here are two suggestions to help guide your marketing strategy:

Analyze the activity of your publics.

The most important step before planning a social media marketing strategy is research. You must determine the platforms and times that will be most effective for targeting an organization’s publics. Do they primarily use a smartphone? Do they typically use Facebook in the afternoon? Answers to questions like these will guide how and when you post.

Likewise, it is important to consider time zones. Your publics may not necessarily live in the same area or even the same country. Setting up scheduled posts is an effective way to make sure that all members of your target audience are receiving your message at the optimal time.

Determine the level of frequency.

You definitely want to expose your publics to your brand and information often, but not so often that they become annoyed. If your content is informative and works to grasp and maintain attention, members of your target audiences will share your information for you. On the other hand, if you are constantly reposting and sharing your content on social media platforms, your publics will see that as spam and likely ignore you in the future.

Communications professionals should ensure that people interact with and comprehend an organization’s information with ease, which is the goal of social media in the first place. With that being said, there is no “correct” strategy for timing your social media posts. Researching your target audiences is the most effective way to determine both frequency and platform preferences.