Black Friday is gone and Cyber Monday is over; now it's time to tune your online abilities to less automated methods. You might have used automated email sending and automatic website content changing over the last few days, but for the next month you will need to put a little TLC spin on attracting new customers.
Radio, TV, direct mail, and newspapers are all traditional methods to attract customers; you either love or hate these methods. Social networking is time consuming and seems to have a hit or miss success rate.
So what's the suggested strategy? Actually it's one that should work throughout the year...
Back in June 2011, KISSmetrics (www.kissmetrics.com) published an interesting infographic called "The Science of Social Timing." Actually we can't give KISSmetrics all the credit because they got their data from Dan Zarrella, HubSpot's Social Media Scientist (www.hubspot.com and @danzarrella).
We're going to review the important points, but here's the source material if you want to check it out yourself:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/science-of-social-timing-1/
http://www.hubspot.com/the-science-of-timing/
First, let's ask a silly question... Where do you live?
The data presented at those sources showed that 48% of the US population lives in the Eastern time zone. 33% of the US population lives in the Central time zone, 4% in the Mountain time zone and 14% in the Pacific time zone.
Naturally, as a jewelry store, you are really only worried about the people in your own time zone, or perhaps within driving distance of your store; unless of course you have an e-commerce website and sell nationally.
According to the research data, the most status updates posted to Facebook happens at 12 Noon, which correlates to the typical lunch time. The number of posts on Facebook dips dramatically in the afternoon and slowly builds activity again until the 7pm evening high point.
Whether or not this Noon time spike is natural (i.e. manual) or automated is a different question, and it's probably a combination of both.
Here are the 4 top approximate times that most people share on Facebook:
11:30am - 12 Noon
7:00pm - 7:15pm
1:00am - 2:00am
4:30am
The data suggests that you have the greatest chance to get noticed if you also share to Facebook during these local times. On the other hand, if you have an e-commerce site that serves all of the USA then you should target the Eastern Time zone since that's the majority of the population.
Another interesting Facebook fact presented by @danzarrella is that the most popular day for Facebook sharing is Saturday. This was a surprise to us when we read the report. We know that most businesses are closed over the weekend and many of the Facebook accounts we monitor are typically dormant. Our only conclusion is that it's the general population (i.e. your potential consumers) that are sharing en-mass via their smartphones all day on Saturday.
With this knowledge in hand we suggest you write on your calendar that every Saturday, about Noon, you should share a status update to your Facebook Wall. Tell customers what's happening, about new items, post photos, and anything fun and interesting. Remember, it's their day off from work and you need to be a fun distraction from their mundane weekday job.
Lastly @danzarrella presented that you can achieve the best customer engagement (i.e. the most number of Likes) if you only post to Facebook every 2 days, or every other day. This number seems small to us, especially when you are just building your new Facebook Business Page. Once you've built up your audience you need to balance between getting new Likes vs. annoying people who see your posts too much.
There's a lot more data from Dan Zarrella which we will work through over the next day or so.
