You may not know this but I started my marketing career as a radio DJ. To be honest, I didn’t know it was the start of my marketing career either. I was a DJ for five years before I figured it out. I wouldn’t trade the lessons I learned for the world though, and heres why.
I didn’t know it then, but many of the things I was learning as DJ would go on to help me in every area of marketing from improving conversion rates to writing subject lines. One lesson that was especially tough to master but has helped me out greatly was learning to talk under pressure and do it well. When that “On Air” sign flipped on, it meant I had to perform and one second of dead air meant lost listeners. We didn’t have computers that ran everything like most radio stations do now. Every part of the show was live and run by me so I didn’t have time to over-think what I was going to say. I learned to think of my feet and deal with machine malfunctions on the air and laugh at myself when I was the one who blew it.
But I want to share the biggest lesson I learned in radio that has especially helped in marketing. The value of Timing. In radio I measured every song, commercial and story in milliseconds. There was nothing better than a perfectly timed transition. My obsession with timing carried over to marketing where it matters just as much. We may not be measuring in milliseconds but when you have an average of three seconds to convert your audience through a landing page – every second counts.
I broke down some of the biggest lessons I learned on each major content channel to help you with your timing. Here’s my guide on how to time each piece of content perfectly across all channels
Because each tweet is seen by your audience in chronological order, the key to perfect timing is sending your tweets when the majority of your followers on Twitter. Fortunately we don’t have to guess what those times are. There are a few apps that actually analyze your followers activity to find when they’re most likely to see your tweets.They then schedule your tweets at those times. Timely is my favorite Twitter app to schedule tweets. You can schedule up to 9 tweets a day at optimal times and it integrates with the Bit.ly URL shortener.
I was hesitant at first to use it so I tested Timely to see if it really made an impact on my tweet exposure. I found that I was geting more conversation and retweets with it than without it. If you do choose to go this route, you need to make sure your present on Twitter when your tweets are sent. Timely will tell you what times your tweets are scheduled so always check or you’ll have people trying to engage with you and you’ll look like a jerk because you aren’t responding back.
Facebook doesn’t have a third party app to schedule your status updates at optimal times and if they did, you probably wouldn’t want to use it because they penalize most third party posting apps in their algorithm. Here’s what I’ve found to be the most successful:
- Check your fan page insights and study the posts with the highest impressions. The life of each impression depends on how engaged your fans are with your updates. The more engaged your fans are with your updates, the longer your updates will stay in their newsfeed. When looking at your most popular posts, pay attention to what days and times they were posted at and look for trends in timing.
- Check the feedback per post. What times are the posts with the most comments and likes being posted? If your just starting your page, try intentionally spacing out your posts to determine whether morning, noon or evening is best.
- Don’t forget about the weekends! The highest amount of sharing on Facebook happens on Saturday.
Blog posts
There is no industry standard best time to publish blog posts. Again, it varies for each audience. For example, if your audience is corporate clients, the best time will probably be before or after work. I’ve also found for corporate audience, the lunch hour is a popular time to catch up on reading. If your audience is home-based businesses who are much more flexible, during the day is usually optimal. If you have Google Analytics, check out which days of the week your blog traffic is the highest. That’s a good starting point.
To find the optimal time to send emails to your list, you need to test. There’s no way around it. Here’s two great ways to start from my free Email Marketing Guide.
- Analyze your email reports for clicks opened over time. Check which days and times are performing the best and stick with them. If your using email marketing software like Mailchimp or AWeber, the analytics are provided.
- A/B test your emails. Create two segments in your email list to send the same email to at different times. Compare open rates to find which group performs the best.
We covered a lot of ground so here are a few quick action steps you can do to implement these marketing tweaks RIGHT NOW:
- Go through the suggested steps above for each content platform you have. Check the timing in your analytics and try to spot trends in the timing of your content.
- Make it a priority in the next week to test your content at different times to see what works best for you.
- Leave a comment below if you have any insights to add that you’ve learned.
