Dan Zarrella joined hosted a webinar on the best times to market your company using social media. The full transcript of the webinar is available online, but below is a summary of the topics Zarrella addressed and a few tips he offered.

For more than two years, Zarrella examined the business world’s timing of email, posts to Facebook, tweets, and new blog content. For this webinar, Zarrella took his research and put together an extensive sampling of data, showing his audience when is best to email, tweet and post their blogs.

Zarrella does provide one caveat; that marketing science is more like medicine than physics. You arm yourself with facts and important data and learn the best practices for success, but each case is different. Look for those methods that work for your specific case.

Social Media Marketing

Online marketers, in general, want more traffic and ultimately more sales from their company’s site, but these marketers also look for a different way to do it. Here are a few different methods Zarella touched on:

If your goal is to get more retweets, send out your tweets between 2 p.m. and five p.m., when retweet activity is the highest.
Weekends are good times to post to social media. Click through rates on Twitter links are among the highest on Saturdays and Sundays. 
Don’t be afraid to tweet too much. With people adding to their follow list every day, you need more content to break through.
The same is not true for Facebook, however. Zarrella’s research shows pages that post every other day tend to have the most likes.
Weekends are the best for sharing links on Facebook. As the publishing world slows down, the amount of attention Facebook users gives links increases. By posting a new link on your Facebook page on the weekend, it will get more attention.

Understanding Email Marketing

Zarrella is often asked when he finds people read emails. According to his research, the top times are on the weekdays, in the morning and afternoon. He pointed out there were still many people who were reading emails in the evenings and on the weekends, too. 

Zarrella urged his audience not to fear spam reports and people unsubscribing from email lists since those numbers tend to be very low after the first few emails sent. He instead asked the audience to send more emails and at unconventional times:

People tend to open more emails on the weekends and between 5-7 a.m.
Because people who usually unsubscribe  do so after the first few emails, sending emails twice a week, for instance, presents little risk of losing subscribers.
Make sure you are sending good content and offers. It will entice potential customers to stay on your list.

Improve Blogging Results

Zarella looked at when people read blogs, who is reading them and how different audiences may have different reading patterns. His study showed that men tend to read blogs in the evening, while women read early in the morning. Therefore, companies targeting products toward men might want to post more in the afternoon, he said.

More important, Zarrella said, is knowing your audience. Ask your customers when they read online and use that as a guide. Here are more helpful tips:

People read blogs more on Mondays.
Blog posts published around 10-11 a.m. tended to get the most views.
Blog posts published on the weekends get the most comments.
If you want people to link to your site, try posting on Mondays and Thursdays, and early in the morning.

Nurturing Your Leads 

Lead nurturing using Hatchbuck Automated Marketing or another system isn’t something to start thinking about after you get your leads. Having a good plan in place before people show interest in your company and products is important, too, said Zarella. Set up a lead nurturing campaign that sends quality emails in the first few days after a potential customer signs up. Here are some other tips Zarella gives:

Use an automated system to send emails, saving your staff time

Use that same system to measure email activities. Which emails got more sales? Who is buying and when do you see the most traffic? Experiment with different emails within the campaign. Zarella emphasizes that social media marketing is about using best practices, while constantly testing new methods to see which work best for your company. Whether blogging, using Facebook or Twitter, there are some small tricks companies can do to get more attention, just by adjusting their timing.

About Michael Conway

I'm the owner and strategist at Means-of-Production. My firm builds Squarespace websites, Houzz profiles, and content marketing and advertising solutions for architects, interior designers, design-build contractors and landscape design firms. Our all-in-one marketing tactics attract the right clients with exceptional architectural photography and brand messaging that sets you apart from the competition