You Ask, I Answer: Best Time to Post for B2B Marketers?

Ashley asks, when's the best time to post on social media for B2B marketers? When your audience is listening. I was gonna end the video there. Um it's the same time as for any marketing thing. When is your audience paying attention to you?

Right? Just because in aggregate, you know, people behave uh in predictable patterns does not mean that is necessarily true of your audience without asking them. The easiest way to figure this out is to literally ask your audience, run a survey and say, hey, we're trying to figure out our our social media posting calendar. We think you like our content. A, what times a day do you want to hear from us on social media?

And B, what kinds of content do you want to hear from us? Right? Asking people those questions is the easiest, simplest, cheapest, uh, and most straightforward way to get an answer to this question and it will serve the needs of the audience that you have. One of the things that I thought was interesting, when I was looking at um the audiences for myself, my personal audience, you, uh um, and the trust insights audience, I thought there was gonna be like a 90% overlap, and it's not, it's like 40-ish percent. The my company's audience is different than mine, which means that just because I can do an analysis on my personal audience, you doesn't necessarily mean that analysis holds true for my company.

And if two things, two entities are s that are so closely related, have different audiences, that big of a difference in audience, then it stands to reason that what you read in some industry white paper or industry study may not hold true for you, right? It may be very, very different for you, even though on paper you may seem like you're you're have similar businesses, similar audiences, etc. The other thing to look at is unsurprisingly, look at your data, right? Um, whenever we run into this question, the stock answer I give is build a testing plan, right? If you want to know when the best time to post on social media is, build up a whole bunch of content, and then run a test and post every hour on the hour for 30 days straight.

Um, with clickable links, link tracking, stuff like that. Use a URL shortener that you can get data out of so you can see when people are clicking on links, whether or not they go to your website or not. Look at your your analytics on your the social media platform and say, okay, what times are people interacting with our stuff, clicking our stuff, viewing our stuff, etc. If you don't do that, if you just go with the data you already have, it's going to be biased, right? If you post on Mondays at 9 a.m., the best time is always going to be Mondays at 9 a.m., right?

You don't know that that's true until you've posted 9 a.m., at 10 a.m. at 11 a.m. and so on and so forth, uh, all around the clock. After you've done all around the clock, then it becomes a little bit easier to understand well, when is our audience actually interacting? And you want to do it over a 30-day time period so that you can see you know intra-week and interweek patterns uh in the data, especially if you are sharing about a pretty broad topic where one time slots topic may be uh of greater interest to the audience than others.

Uh, you can also uh reschedule and repost uh content that does well at different times to see if you have good performing content, uh if it matters what time you post it. So there's a bunch of different ways to set up a good testing plan for this. There is no pat answer, right? There is no answer that works for everybody or even works for everybody in your industry. You just can't know that because until you do the testing, because your audience might be different.

If especially if you are like a B2B company and you've got you know a CEO or a C-suite executive or somebody who has very much acts as the public face of the company. Um when you have a real person as the face of the company and as the voice of the company, then you're gonna attract a very specific audience around that person. And when you do that, then suddenly you're not marketing on the generics of you know, we make airplane parts or whatever. You're marketing on that person's ability to attract an audience, and who they attract is going to be very different from company to company. Um that's just the way people work.

So that's the best time to post on social media for B2B marketers. It's when your audience is listening, and you tell that by building and developing and rolling out a testing plan to see how your audience behaves. And by the way, that's something you're gonna have to retest probably quarterly, um, or at least once a year, at least once a year. Um, maybe you know, one week every quarter, and then a more intensive test because audiences change, people change. If you look at your email list, for example, how quickly does it churn?

What percentage of your email list has churned in the last year? Uh, with things like the great resignation stuff, your audience is changing really fast. Um, there are a lot of people changing jobs right now, and an audience that you thought you had two years ago may be very different than the audience you have now. So you've got to retest those assumptions too. So, really good question.