What is the best time to post your content on social media?

There is a lot of discussion ongoing how often should we publish a content on social media. But the answer on the best timing of your posts is not clear either. Of course, it depends on your audience, their everyday life habits, when they are online, but there is a proven standard of best and worst timing to publish your content on social media. This was researched by Social Caffeine. Here are the main facts:

Facebook: On Facebook, traffic starts building after 9am but posting should work the best between 1pm to 4pm. Peak time is on Wednesday at 3pm. Traffic should be worst after 4pm and you should avoid posting anything on weekends.

Twitter: Engagement should be best between 1pm and 3pm from Mondays to Thursdays on Twitter. Traffic gets higher from 11am on and vanishes at 3pm. You should forget tweeting on Fridays afternoon.

LinkedIn: On the other hand, LinkedIn has its peak time before and after business hours. Not many people pay attention to LinkedIn during middays. Peak days are Tuesdays to Thursdays. Try to avoid posting on Mondays and Fridays.

Google+: The best timing should be during working hours, best between 9am – 11am. Traffic fades in late afternoon and on weekends.

Pinterest: This is a bit different type of social media, therefore, peak time is on Saturday mornings. During working days, traffic increases after 12pm and best posting time is between 2pm and 4pm. Avoid sharing your content after 5pm.

 

 

 

Tips on social media strategy

In one of my previous posts about Age of self-educating buyer, I mentioned that buyers no longer have to rely on salespeople to tell them what and why to buy a certain thing. There is a lot of information available online, companies produce more content that enables these potential buyers to decide about the purchase. To have a good content is as important as knowing how to spread this content further. That is why companies should also have very good social media base. Why and what is important about social media, read next tips & info about social media aspects for your business.

According to a study Social Media Examiner by Michael A. Stelzner from year 2013 reveals that 86 % of marketers say that social media is important for their business. And here are the biggest advantages of social media marketing, starting from the most important one:

• Increased exposure
• Increased traffic
• Provided marketplace Insight
• Developed loyal fans
• Generated leads
• Improved search ranking
• Grown business partnerships
• Reduced marketing expenses
• Improved sales

The more competitive you want to be with a help of your social media, more planned and strategic approach you must have. Thus, companies are able to generate more revenue or exposure if they include social media as a part of a corporate plan. Here are some tips how to take advantage of a social media power:

1. Clarify your social media goals

It is important to know what you want to achieve for your business when having a social media presence. You should be able to answer few questions, like: What do you want to accomplish? Why do you care? What do you want to track? Those goals should be explicit so that you know what to focus on. E.g.: I want to share valuable content. I want to see what´s going on in my industry and among my competitors. I want to integrate with my fans. I want to generate revenue. I want to create a traffic…and so on..

2. Keep a track on your goals

Once you set your goals, you should be able to track and measure them to see what you´re doing right and what wrong. Google Analytics will certainly help you with that. E.g. Data Hub Activity report demonstrates where and how people are talking about you on social networks. The Trackbacks report shows you the sites where others share your content. The reports will provide you such detailed information, the all you need is time and patience to be able to learn how to use 🙂

3. Choose the right social network channel

Depending on your nature of the business, you should choose the right social network. Do not try to use all possible social platforms, it´s too complex for you and you won´t have time to focus on all of them. Instead, choose the right ones where the major of your audience is.

4.  Produce valuable content regularly

Do you want to annoy your audience by pushed sales? I guess not. How do you then attract your audience? You have to keep one thing in your mind. You have to be helpful. You should create your content, which must be of a help. The best way is to publish valuable tips, something that will help them to solve their problem. This will not only want these people to come back to your site but also want them to spread and share your content.

5. Listen to customers & engage with your social media fans

First observe and listen to your fans, see what they complain about and what they love about you. I would say you should pay attention to complaints and react to them ASAP. With that, they will see you´re not another bad business which does not care about customers. Also, ensure that you comment on any customers´comments or requests on social media. Even if they do not ask anything ,engage by posting super interactive questions by drawing their attention.

6. Post frequently

Many people recommend publishing short posts  5 to 7 times daily and long posts/content 1 to 4 times daily. It depends on your goals or which stage of business you are. I think if you just stick to publishing at least twice a day, it´s a good start! After you publish something, make sure you share it on all of your social channels. I recommend avoiding useless, irrelevant posts too often. Timing of your publishing is also important. More about it here.

7. Utilize Klout Score

Klout is website that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the Klout Score. Klout Score is a numerical value between 1 and 100. It measures the size of user´s social media network and interaction with the content. It helps business business to learn about their online audiences.

8. Use hashtags

Using # hashtags help users to find your content. In which way can you use hashtags? It is easy to track any of your activity across many social networks. Hashtags can build your reputation online. If you create a trendy hashtag you can gain hundreds of followers daily. # helps you to engage in conversations. Instead of randomly trying to talk to users online, hashtags will help you to lead to relevant people.

9. Apply In-Person Events with your Social Media 

You can use your personal events to interact with users on social media. It definitely provides great opportunities for businesses to bring in the benefits of both aspects.  Several ways how to promote in-person events on social media:

• Engage – If you´re arranging any event, encourage potential attendees to interact with you early on by giving suggestions
• Design – create an event page on Facebook or any other event platform
• Reinforce potential attendees with videos, blog posts, press releases, etc.
• Expand – spread the conference presentations
• Use email links on your website and publish on SlideShare.

I´m sure there are plenty other things you should consider, however, I find these as something essential. What do you think?

 

 

 

 

Sales funnel? Forget this traditional way!

This post is inspired by an amazing book ‘ Invisible sale ‘ written by Tom Martin. I need to share with you a great idea he wrote in this book.

Most of you who works in sales know pretty much what sales funnel is about. Most companies have pre-defined sales process (see the figure 1) , which they follow every single sales stage.  This looks as following: Your first stage is prospecting, where you allocate your potential clients, then you contact them. Third, you qualify if the potential lead is your prospect. Fourth, proposal stage is where you present what you have to sale and luckily at the end you have negotiations and contracting. People, this is already outdated!

Figure 1: Traditional Sales Funnel (Taken from the book Invisible Sale by Tom Martin)

The sales funnel defines you that you’re going to start big amount of people but those are unqualified prospects. It takes a while until you get smaller qualified group of people on your list and yet you do not have a guarantee you will close the lead.

Instead of sales funnel, let’s focus on something you can call a sales radar (see the figure 2). It is a new type of sales funnel but without a visible database,however, you can see it using digital technology. This sales radar helps you to sell because of today’s self-educating buyers. The knowledge and the content that is available online gives so many options to self-educate the potential buyers. Buyers no longer have to rely on sales people.

Figure 2: Sales Radar (Taken from the book Invisible Sale by Tom Martin)

So imagine you have lots of content available on your website or social media that helps your potential lead to get access to. Even better, a valuable content for free that helps this prospect  with something he is looking for. When this person clicks on your content, it could be already displayed on your sales radar. It doesn’t necessarily need to mean this guy will purchase your service/product but can consume much more of your content you provide in the future allowing him to move to another circle in your radar.

That’s why today is super important to have valuable content shareable with your prospects. Because this prospect may become your customer in any time, you do not have to chase people,most of them they don’t like it! Instead, create  your online presence!

Age of self-educating buyer

“Today we live in the age of self-educating buyer who is using digital channels to develop a short list of solutions to pain point”, the author of ‘The Invisible Sale’, Tom Martin, said. Nowadays people are way busier than before, they don’t have time to spend 20-30 minutes on the phone qualifying the leads. It’s important to understand that companies should let the prospects (potential leads) to self-qualify by simply monitoring what those prospects are reading,downloading and viewing online. This way you might be able to discover new invisible buyer leads.

The days when buyers of products or services were forced to rely on information provided from sales team,are gone. Technology,especially internet has shifted the power from seller to buyer. Those have lots of online tools and information available. Thus, it makes them less dependent on sellers or vendors.

With this, you should make sure you create social media and marketing strategy. There are some basic points you could touch to define it. For example, defining your social media audience, choosing the right social media platform for your company, how are you going to see the success of it,etc. More of it coming in my next posts..

Additionally to the content, it’s crucial to realize that in today’s internet-based world, the competition is much higher than ever before. You cannot make a mistake of creating the content that isn’t any helpful to your potential client. Any companies can provide white papers, blogs or any information that can be downloaded. The information you want to provide your qualified buyers must be very helpful. The content you put online must be appealing and must give a great impression to convince a potential buyer to make a purchasing decision.

It’s important to know that sales are becoming more invisible every day. Buyers are 57% of the way through the buying decision before they are even talking to a sales people. That’ s why your online content is your online salesperson. So make it the best you can to get some leads done the fastest way possible.

Is selling based on cold calls still effective?

Lots of companies still have their selling strategy based on cold calling. It still works but in a long term. But the overall process of identifying potential leads, qualifying and closing the deals is very lengthy. Why? The biggest weakness of the traditional selling process is inefficiency. Well,let me explain one annoying thing about cold calling. You call one hundreds of contacts that are part of your database and could be that 60% of them respond to your calls with statements of being too busy or entering the meetings or just not interested. You can try to call ten times more but these guys will have always the same answer for you. In my opinion,this is a huge waste of time for companies. Companies more and more dislike pushy cold calls.

Instead,companies should take a look into a new concept of selling, so called invisible sale, in which qualified leads find companies instead of them spending lots of time finding those leads. This is called The Propinquity Effect – this is created by 2 main trends: self-educating buyers and the proliferation of internet service.

But how do you achieve that? By building a rich and valuable digital content and information that you can share with others. This information helps to find the way to self-educate the buyers. With this, you can build your reputation online with the potential of getting many clients.

Giving out some piece of information for free to your audience is so much more valuable than wasting 30 minutes with traditional cold calls with unqualified leads. Creating content takes definitely longer than that but this enables to sell to hundreds of people not only today but also in the future.

So now knowing that you can engage with qualified leads much sooner than with traditional cold calling, are you ready to acquire a totally new marketing & sales process that would deliver you awesome sales in much quicker way? If yes, stay tuned with my next blog posts.