Remember Marketing 101 (or maybe, like me, it was in Journalism 101) where the professor stressed the 5W’s? (Who, What, Where, When, Why) I do, and after nearly 40 years in marketing and public relations, it remains the most important lesson I ever learned.
For most of us, figuring out four of the five is relatively simple — or it should be. I mean, if you don’t know who your audience is, what your message/product is, where you can reach the target audience, and why they should buy your product or pay attention to your message, then you’re probably not going to succeed at whatever you wanted to achieve.
The question of when, as in “when is my audience most likely to hear and respond favorably to my message“, has always been more elusive for me, however. That was especially true when I started using email marketing (about 25 years ago) and social media marketing (about four years ago).
It took a lot of trial and error — and a lot of reading analyst studies — before I figured out how to test the timing on my email marketing. I learned that for business to business clients, the best time for email marketing varied widely, depending on the industry in which my audience worked, and when marketing directly to consumers, the age and gender of the target matters most.
Finding My Social Media Timing
With social media, no amount of testing, and no amount of “best practices” actually got me any kind of consistent results.
That is, until I discovered the two best social media scheduling and reporting tools that were affordable for a small or mid-size business. I add that caveat not because I honestly think there are better tools out there, but simply because I haven’t tried some of the more expensive ones, and I’m willing to be persuaded that one of the enterprise-grade products might have better tools….although, given the results I’ve been getting, I honestly don’t think so.
The two best social media apps out there for my money are BufferApp and SocialyzerHQ. I started using Buffer in 2010, and Socialyzer when it came out in beta earlier this year. I’ve tried some of the others (Timely, Social Flow, Tweriod and Crowd Booster), but have used Buffer and Socialyzer most successfully over the longest period of time.
Before I tried Buffer, and started pre-scheduling marketing messages for my social media campaigns against a schedule based on comparing the results of similar messages, I had been following some general “best practices” guidelines from a study conducted by HubSpot that told me that morning, noon, and the evening commute were likely to be good times for my social media postings, based on my target audience.
Buffer helped me improve those results substantially — over 75% more clicks — by letting me see a clear comparison of timing and results. And you won’t find nicer people than the Brits who founded Buffer. They answer support inquiries promptly, gladly stay after work for Skype calls with U.S. customers, and work hard to resolve problems.
Buffer partnered with Tweriod earlier this year, and began using Tweriod’s algorithms to analyze my social media audience and predict the best times to tweet. And that’s where they lost me. Although I have no idea how the math works, or what I should have expected, the truth is that the recommendations I got from the partnered apps just didn’t work for me.
My results remained unchanged — zero increase in the click-through rate compared to the what I was getting from Buffer before the alliance with Tweriod. (Remember, Buffer had already increased results 75% compared to what I was doing by following “best practices”.)
SocialyzerHQ, on the other hand, takes care to explain exactly how the math works. SocialyzerHQ analyzes your current audience before every posting, on each of your linked accounts, and then schedules the posting at the time when the algorithm predicts that the largest percentage of your audience will be on that social media site, and therefore most likely to see your post. The analysis happens in real time, every time you schedule a posting, so it’s always based on the most up to the minute information.
As for the people behind SocialyzerHQ, they’re super nice and friendly. They bend over backwards to help customers solve problems — and they’re real mathematics geniuses. I also like the fact that they’re local to my home base of Dallas, Texas, and I love the app’s user interface and design.
My favorite difference between the two products is that SocialyzerHQ makes it easy to customize messages for different audiences — so I can schedule the same message and link, but make minor changes for different social media sites.
I hate seeing Facebook posts that come complete with Twitter hashtags, or LinkedIn Group posts that don’t display properly, and Socialyzer makes it easy to customize the same message & link for different sites. (Buffer lets me edit content for different sites, but it requires more mouse clicks.)
But it’s the scheduling methodology that makes the difference in the results, and I wouldn’t have switched away from Buffer – a product I genuinely like, from people who have been more than kind to me — unless I saw a clear difference in the results.
Consider this tweet:
Check out my friend Dick Monday as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey – great new live theatre show http://bit.ly/Pd1EMk #Dallas #theatre
Buffer would automatically drop this Tweet into the next “open” time slot in a pre-set schedule, giving me the option of moving it within the schedule manually. It’s linear, and the order in which I enter the tweets determines the order in which they’re posted, unless I do something to change it.
SocialyzerHQ will run an analysis of my followers, and recommend a time for the tweet. It might be “next” in the schedule…or it might not, if the behavior of my audience has changed. SocialyzerHQ is nonlinear, and I don’t get to determine the order in which tweets are posted. It’s all up to the math geniuses behind the algorithm.
Head-to-Head Test Results
Being someone who thinks that I shouldn’t spend my client’s marketing dollars on something I haven’t thoroughly tested, I decided to run a head to head test of the two apps.
One of my clients has two Twitter accounts with approximately the same number of followers — 31,000 and 31,486. We use both for our content marketing campaigns.
A couple of weeks ago we released a new white paper, and I wrote a series of tweets promoting the download for the white paper. I used Buffer to schedule and report on tweets sent for one of the accounts, and used Socialyzer for the other.
Each link was tweeted the same number of times, and the content of each tweet was the same for each account. The only variable was the timing recommended by each application.
Here are the results :
SocialyzerHQ Clicks
Buffer Clicks
Link #1
54
1
Link #2
42
26
Link #4
86
60
Link #5
47
69
Link #6
21
17
In 5 of the 6 head-to-head comparisons, SocialyzerHQ’s algorithm resulted in more clicks. Does this mean that I’m switching all my clients away from Buffer? Nope. Some of them are very happy with Buffer, and plan to continue using it.
As for me, I was so impressed with SocialyzerHQ during its public beta that my husband and I became small seed round investors. After their most recent release of new features and an upgraded algorithm, I’ve seen a definitive upturn in my results, and I’ll keep using SocialyzerHQ for my own accounts.
What should you do? Exactly what I did: Test different scheduling products, and use the one that works best for you. Delivering your message at the right time makes a big difference in click-through rates and overall reach.
Graphics credit: Artist Shawn Campbell offered his Twitter logo sketch on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
