Timing of Social Media Content

What is it about?

Firms are increasingly investing their marketing dollars in social media — market research firms predict spending will reach $37 billion by 2020. It’s an impressive number given that the majority of social media professionals charged with getting customers to click on posts and through to their websites operate with little strategy. Strategic content scheduling is a formidable task. A social media manager charged with posting 10 stories in one day with a budget to promote four of them can position the posts in more than 7 trillion ways. In addition, while social media management software (e.g., Sprout Social) have gained practitioner acclaim for their logistical automation of content posting, they lack the prescriptive capability of suggesting profitable social media schedules. Thus, what is the answer for ad-supported content platforms that need a less expensive and time-consuming option but also rely on visitor engagement? By examining 5,706 posts on the Facebook page of a major U.S. newspaper, the study suggests that online ad-supported content platforms like CNN, ESPN and WSJ can significantly enhance their profits by posting content following the biological responses of their audience’s sleep-wake cycles and targeting content types to when the audience is most naturally receptive to it. The study calls for social media managers to make their social media content posting decisions based on the brain science driving consumer engagement as opposed to the “spray and pray” technique or arbitrary rules of thumb (e.g., post in the afternoon, boost in the evening etc.).

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Why is it important?

In 2017 alone, users worldwide consumed about 5.53 billion hours per day of social media content, up by 264% in the past five years. This pervasive trend has motivated online ad-supported content platforms to (1) maintain a significant presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (e.g., CNN posts around 47 tweets per day); and (2) invest more dollars on social media promotion to engage with the users (e.g., firms in U.S. are expected to invest more than $37 billion dollars on social media advertising by 2020). However, content platforms are struggling to develop profitable social media schedules to maximize website traffic originating from their social pages.