Almost all advice that you’ll find about social media marketing will be useless when it comes to the beginning stages of starting a brand. When your brand is nothing, has no following, and no one knows about it is when you need to be firing on all cylinders.
The first month of your brand being on social media is the time to explore, experiment, and learn. You probably won’t see much progress in the first month, but the data you’ll gather from it will increase the likelihood of your brand being a success.
Why you Should Post on Social Media 10 – 15 times a day When Starting Out
If you look online you’ll see the advice to post twice per day, 5-6 days a week, and to not deviate much from that formula. This works for already successful companies because they’ve already gathered the important information and are able to make effective posts because of it. You still need to do the research and data analysis which is why you should post 10-15 times per day for a month.
When you start posting 10 – 15 times per day on social media you’ll learn the following information:
- What content your customers engage with
- When your customers are online
- Who is online at different times of the day
The only way to discover this information is to post throughout the day for a month and then analyse the results. This does take a lot of time to set up and execute, but what you’ll learn will almost guarantee success the next month. You’ve just got to analyse the data every 3 days and keep track of patterns.
How to Discover your Customers Online Behaviours
Use Content Pillars to Create Hundreds of Social Media Posts
If you’re posting 15 times per day on social media then that’s 105 posts per week and 420 posts per month. That’s a lot of content to create and manage which is why you should use content pillars to guide you.
Content pillars are ways of focusing your social media content by having a theme that each post will fall under. For example, themes could be fun facts or behind the scenes or anything that relates to your brand. In social media marketing this is often used to plan out a week by having Monday be X and so forth but for us we’re using it to generate 1000s of ideas.
Start by writing down 3 themes that are suitable for your brand and then try to create as many post ideas as possible underneath them. For example, if you’re a car dealership then a theme could be facts about cars which you’ll then find and post every day. Another could be exciting developments for the future. The idea here is that by giving yourself a starting point, you’re then able to work much easier from there.
When Should you Post Throughout the Day?
Once you have 105 posts it’s time to schedule them throughout the week so you can discover your customers online behaviour.
The trick here is to have 2 posting schedules and alternate between them each day. For example, on Monday you’ll post every hour from 12 – 12 but on Tuesday you’ll post every hour from 6 – 6. This will allow you to analyse when your customers are online throughout the day and most likely to engage with your content. It also allows you to reach a worldwide audience as you’ll be posting in the peak times all over the world.
You should try to experiment with different posts at different or similar times to see what works best when. For example, try posting motivational content in the morning on one day and the evening the next. Experiment as much as you can with timings as this get you more data for the analysis.
How to Analyse the Data
You should aim to analyse the results every 3 days and make a note of what posts got the most engagement. Start by looking at what the post was, especially the theme and the way it was written. Then look at what time it was posted and, if possible, when people engaged with it. Follow that up by looking at who engaged with it and find out as much as you can about them.
All of this information will come together to create a picture of who’s engaging with your content and at what times of the day. Use this information to make a theory about what posts will get the most engagement over the next week and then see how correct you were. If you were mostly correct then you’ve got your customers behaviour down and can start making more effective content. If you were incorrect then repeat this process until you get it right.
Make a report of the data and your findings, especially what themes and timings got the most engagement. The best way to write this report is to write it as if you were giving it to someone who would then run the brands social medias. This means going into detail and making as many comments as possible to explain all of your findings/ theories.
How Often Should you Post After the First Month?
You should drop to a standard 2 -3 posts per day after the first month depending on when your audiences engage with your content. Obviously post whenever you’ll get engagement but try to limit it to 2 posts during your peak 4 hours. This way, you can still get the most engagement whilst not having to create hundreds of posts per week.
Overview:
- If you’re just starting a brand on social media, or starting on a new social media platform, then you need to be posting 10 – 15 times per day
- You’ll find out what type of content your audience engages with, what time they’re most active, and who is online when you post 10 – 15 times per day
- Creates schedules and alternate between them and then analyse the data every few days. Create theories and see how correct they are to know if you understand your customers
- After a month of 10 – 15 posts per day, you’ll know when your customers are most active and what they engage with. Aim to post 2-3 times per day in peak periods.
