Timing’s

Impact on
Social Success
Getting reach in the age of declining reach

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM | SOCIALFLOW.COM 1

 Introduction
There are two equally important aspects to social media success:
Creating great content and reaching your audience so they can
consume it. As Marketers and Publishers we are only able to truly control
one of these items: content. The other, reaching your audience, is more
difficult because of all of the possible variables that impact when your
audience is active and online.

Unlike other more traditional channels, such as email, social messages

do not sit in an inbox waiting to be seen and acted upon. If social
messages are not seen in nearly real-time they are most likely not going
to be seen. The constant flow of content in and out of people’s feeds
is both the challenge and the opportunity. As more marketers take to
social as a primary channel to connect with prospects and consumers,
a new approach to publishing and distribution needs to be embraced in
order to effectively compete.

Many organizations are still relying on first generation social management

5 6 1 2 13 24 platforms that utilize traditional methods, like scheduling, that simply do
5 61 7 8 7 9 81 3 4 not provide an impactful ROI. An agile distribution process that relies on
2 13 0911
12 113 14 11541165 10 1 real-time information is the only way to be able to react, in real-time, in
9 20 117618 1 order to reach people at the right time with the right content.
19 260 21 2221 2232 1 7 18
27 2 2
243 2
2 5
8
26 27 28 29 2390 4 25
30 To fully understand the value of this new approach, first take a look at why
the traditional method of publishing, scheduling, is now ineffective.

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The Peaks & Valleys
of Not only are audience levels
shifting constantly, but

YOUR AUDIENCE
what they are talking about
changes just as quickly.

What if you had to predict

what people would be
talking about one week
from today at 2pm. Do you
AUDIENCE

think you could get it right?

POST 3
POST 1 Or what if a breaking
news story hit at the exact
POST 4 time your scheduled post
was published. While
POST 2
your audience may be
POST 5 active and engaging with
social media channels the
topic may not resonate,
TIME OF DAY ultimately resulting in low
engagement levels.

Imagine you have scheduled five posts throughout the day. Without You need to take both
knowing when your audience will be active and engaged you are simply audience levels and trending
hoping for the best. Post 1 and Post 3 would have good reach and might drive topics (or keywords) into
decent engagement but Posts 2, 4 and especially 5 would miss the mark. account when determining
the best time to publish
The end result would be you and your peers discussing why the content did your content.
not perform well. You might question the topic, call to action, headline, and
relevance all while completely missing the true culprit…bad timing.

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 Not All Peaks Are Equal
Content Marketing continues
to be a focus for brands and
AUDIENCE

marketers alike. The issue

POST 3 that many organizations have
run into is creating a scalable
strategy that generates both
POST 1 great content and great results.

Smart companies have

POST 2 POST 4 begun hiring journalists who
have the ability to effectively
POST 5 transform marketing
TIME OF DAY messages into compelling
stories. Too often marketers
get caught up in their own
agendas while writers are
more in tune with their
If we look at the same graph but also take into account that not all of the audience, therefore creating
peaks and valleys in audience engagement are the same you will begin to see thoughtful pieces that they
how differently these posts would perform. Dramatic shifts in activity are connect with.
caused by outside factors that publishers and marketers have very minimal
control over. A data-driven approach
to publishing allows you
to focus on creating great
You need a way to monitor real-time changes in audiences and use that content rather than wasting
information to automatically publish when the time is right. Without a data- time trying to figure out when
driven approach opportunities to engage your audience are being missed. to distribute it.

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THINGS Are Facebook continues to
make updates to their
EdgeRank algorithm that are

CHANGING Every Day.

seemingly meant to target
and penalize marketers.

These changes seem to

validate what many in the
marketing world had already
Active Engagement been thinking and saying:
organic reach is essentially
Today Yesterday dead, and Facebook will
ultimately kill it altogether.

But of course this latest

change must be put into
the context of a decline in
organic reach that marketers
have been seeing for a year
or more. The reality is that
these changes are not being
made to penalize marketers
but to support the creation of
Historical data, while important, cannot accurately predict the best time to quality content.
publish content in the future. This graph, from the SocialFlow UI, demonstrates
how audience levels fluctuate from day to day. While the landscape has
changed the way companies
are managing their social
This additional layer of complexity supports the rational to move towards a
media publishing has not…
technology driven approach that relies on algorithms and keyword analysis to Why?
find those peaks in audience engagement that drive reach and engagement.

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Finding the Right Time
and the Right Content
So how exactly does
this new approach to Step You create
multiple pieces of
Step You feed that
content into your
publishing work? Well it’s ONE social content TWO SocialFlow queue
actually quite simple:

The rest is up to our data-driven platform which will:

Sort through posts in real-time to evaluate
business rules, audience availability and
keyword and trending topic data.

Utilize this information to predictively rank

3
1
2 and score social content to determine both
the best message and time to publish.

Automate the posting of optimized content to your social media channels.

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Conclusion
Just as important as what to publish is when to
publish. With tons of content, and the amount of
time in the day to digest it remaining relatively e ed

Quantity
constant, a change in how social is distributed is MyF
required to succeed. n t in
te
Con
Without question, the key to increased
engagement is increased reach, so hitting your
audience when they are active is critical. A data-
driven approach is an effective way to combat Hours in My Day
the decline in organic reach in social media and
achieve your business objectives. Without real-

Time
time data to inform your publishing strategy you
are merely guessing.

ABOUT
SocialFlow is the next-generation enterprise social
platform, built around the objective of gaining
audience attention on social networks. As increasing
quantities of content compete for consumer
attention, publishers and their advertisers need more
effective, data-driven approaches to their social
publishing.  SocialFlow dramatically improves the
delivery of content to consumers’ feeds across multiple
social networks, delivering significant increases in
audience attention.

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