Transcript for How To Find The Best Times to Post on Social Media
To learn more about MeetEdgar’s webinar schedule and to catch us streaming live, visit MeetEdgar Live Webinars.
00:00 Hey there everybody, this is Amanda from team Edgar. Just want to say hello and thank you all so much for joining us this Thursday afternoon. [inaudible 00:00:16] here in just a minute. I see a lot of you are letting us know where you’re joining us from today. We have people from literally all over the world which is awesome. People from Colorado and Florida, and even Budapest, Hungary which I love Budapest, so very cool city there. The way that today’s Hangout is going to work. First of all, I’m going to go ahead and get my slides ready to go here. Like I said, my name is Amanda and I’m going to be presenting today’s webinar.
00:43 The way that it’s going to work. I will kind of go through things for about 30 to 35 minutes today. Tom and Stacey from team Edgar are going to be in the chatroom filling questions and just keeping an eye on discussion, so feel free to use that chat throughout the webinar. At the end we will have some time, probably at least 15 minutes or so for some questions and discussion, so if you do have questions along the way, you can pop them in the chat or you can hang onto them until the end, totally up to you.
01:15 Just to remind everyone, you will get a link to a replay of the webinar as well as all of these slides in a couple of hours after we’re done here today. You will get access to a replay and all that fun stuff. That’s kind of all the housekeeping. Before we get started, can you just pop into the chat and let me know that you can hear me and that you can see my screen right now, which is just the welcome or intro screen to the webinar. As long as you can hear and see me, that’s awesome.
01:44 If you’re having any problems with the audio or visuals or anything like that, you might try refreshing. Sometimes Google Hangouts are a little bit weird and it just depends on your internet connection, but hopefully we are all good to go. If we don’t have any issues, we’re just going to go ahead and dive right in so we can make the most of the time that we have. Again, thank you so much for joining us. This is how to find the best times to post on social media. Let’s go ahead and get started.
02:12 First of all, let me tell you a little bit about what we’re going to cover today so you have an idea of what to expect. First of all, we’re going to talk about why you don’t always want to rely on other tools to tell you your best posting times. Today’s webinar really is going to be all about how you can find the best time to post for your specific audience. It’s going to be lots of tips, lots of suggestions and examples of how to find some different data and some different insights and analytics and that sort of thing. This is all going to be about your specific audience and we’re going to tell you why that’s important to know.
02:50 We’re going to also tell you how you can find out info about your website’s audience, and again, why you would want to know this sort of information. Then we’re going to go over how to find the best times to post on both Facebook and Twitter. Again, this is going to be very specific to your audience, so there’s going to be lots of suggestions for what you’re going to need to go and find out on your own.
03:11 You might be tempted to kind of play along, so to speak, and maybe pop into your Facebook Insights, to your Twitter analytics as we go along. However, just remember you will get a replay and all of the slides from this presentation. If you want to like maybe wait until later and go through the slides again on your own, that is totally cool and you’ll have the opportunity to do that.
03:34 Let’s just dive right in. Let’s first talk about the big D word, data. Data doesn’t have to be scary. If you’re like me, I’m actually one of those people that kind of freak out when I see spreadsheets or lots and lots of numbers grouped together, and graphs, and charts, and all this stuff. Statistics, that’s another scary word for me. If you’re like me though, I am here to assure you that what we’re going to go over today, I’m going to show you that it doesn’t necessarily have to be scary. It’s not going to be too complicated.
04:09 I’m going to show you how you can look at your analytics, and your statistics, and your insights and all of those scary words and make sense of them. I know that some people are more data-minded than others, and I’m definitely one of those people who’s not super data-minded. Coming from me, this is a presentation that I hope you will also be able to understand and take something away from.
04:33 We are of course going to address this question, okay. We’re talking about how data is not scary, but why do you need to know this stuff? Why do you want to know information about your audience, and about best times to post, and why does it matter? Well, there are a couple of different reasons why this is really important.
04:52 First of all, we’re talking about consistency. Consistency on social media is so, so huge. You don’t want to go days or weeks without posting, and you also don’t want to be just posting randomly because when you’re just randomly sending out social updates, let’s be honest, sometimes you’re just wasting your time. Like let’s say you got all the way till 4 o’clock today and you’re like, “Oh crap, I haven’t posted anything on Facebook yet today”, and you run over there, and you write an update and, you send it out and then nobody responds to it. It’d be partly just because you’re not consistent with your social media posting. Knowing the best times to post obviously going to help you be a lot more consistent.
05:35 Another reason why this matters is so that you can optimize your posting on social media. This means you’re going to be posting when your followers actually might see what you’re sharing. We know that Facebook reach and the lifespan of a tweet, they’re not that great, and so you definitely want to optimize everything that you’re doing on social media and to get more out of your updates because again, a lot of your stuff just doesn’t get seen.
06:05 If you’re being consistent and optimizing when you’re posting things, you’re going to get more out of your updates, and this means perhaps more reach, more engagement and it’s going to save you time because you’re not going to have to be so stressed out about, just doesn’t get any response from your audience. All of these reasons are why it’s important to figure out this stuff on your own. I know you’re probably going to ask now, why do I have to do it all on my own? Can’t I just go out there and find a blog post that’s all about the best times to post on social media? The short answer is no, you can’t. That’s simply because everybody’s best times to post are going to be different.
06:51 Whether it’s your industry might be different than the person sitting next to you … Sitting, we’re using that term loosely here since we’re all on a virtual webinar. Every industry is different. You might be in a totally different time zone than somebody else. Your audience might be older or younger, and depending on age and gender and all these different factors, people tend to be online at different times of day. It is really important for you to find out the best times for your particular audience.
07:23 Yes, there are plenty of posts out there that will tell you based on all these studies that different social media, I don’t know, study people have done looking for the best times to post, and there are plenty of things out there that report on all of these different studies and all of this different research. Really, it might be a starting point but it’s not going to tell you anything about your specific audience.
07:48 That’s really what we’re talking about here today, and everything I show you today, you’re going to be able to replicate to find out the info about your audience. Everything we’re talking about, [inaudible 00:07:58] free tools that you can use to find these best times on social to post.
08:05 First of all, let’s talk about how to find out more about your audience. I mentioned this in the beginning when I was saying stuff we’re going to talk about, and this means learning more about the people who read your website, who buy your products, who sign up for your courses or your services, or whatever it is that you’re offering. This doesn’t directly tie in to the best times to post, but it’s still a really important thing to know.
08:30 Why would you want to know more about your audience? Well, I mean, it’s good to know your audience. You want to know the people who are actually responding to you that people who are spending money on your website or on your products or whatever it is that you’re selling or that you’re telling people that you want to know who’s responding. The best way to really find out more about your audience is to use Google Analytics. If you are not using Google Analytics to track your web traffic, you should start.
08:58 You can go to Google. com/analytics. It’s free to use, you just have to have a Google account and you can set your site up and all this fun stuff. You get tons, and tons, and tons of information about your traffic, and where it comes from, and where the people who are reading your site come from. It’s a good starting point to just kind of get to know your audience a little bit better. I’m going to show you a couple of places that you’ll want to look in your analytics.
09:25 First of all, you’re going to want to check out some demographic information and demographics, so things like age, and gender, sometimes occupation, that sort of thing that you can find out about your audience. The best place to go in your Google Analytics along the left hand side once you’re logged in there, you’ll see all these different links, and one of them says audience. If you click on that Audience tab and then scroll down a little bit, you’ll see demographics. If you click on that and you click on overview, you can get information about your audience’s age and their gender and all that fun stuff.
10:04 We can see here people that come to Edgar site tend to be within that 25 to 45 age range and skew slightly more towards female than male. Now, that’s our audience, yours might be completely different, but it’s interesting just to know. Also in that Audience tab, you can find out where your audience lives. This is something that we’re going to talk about on both social networks too, so on Facebook and Twitter. Knowing where your audience comes from is really, really important.
10:37 You can find that information in Google Analytics about your website by going to the geo link under that Audience tab, and then clicking on location. You can see here that most of our website visitors, almost 60%, are from the United States. That’s really good to know because of course that means we know what time zones that they’re in, a what times they might be more likely to be online or visiting our site and that sort of thing. Again, this is just our website.
11:09 This information is really good to keep in mind, so if you go and look at this sort of stuff first, you can compare it later to the info that we’re going to find out about our followers on each social network. Because a lot of times, obviously, the people who are visiting your website are going to be really similar to the people who follow you on social media. It is good to know everything that you can about your audience, so that’s something to keep in mind.
11:33 I know Google Analytics is not why you came here today, so we are going to go ahead and jump into how to find those best times to post on social. We’re going to start on Facebook because Facebook of course, is really, really great for promotion whether it’s a website, or a service, or whatever it is that you’re promoting. We definitely want to try and optimize it as best as we can. So finding out the best times to post is really one of the greatest and easiest ways to do this.
12:04 You’re going to start out first focusing on your Facebook Insights, and that’s simply because this is info about your audience, about your followers that comes directly from Facebook. This isn’t like a third party tool that’s telling you about your audience, this is directly from Facebook so it’s a good place to start. You can actually learn a lot from these insights.
12:25 Now, I’m not going to go over everything you can learn from your insights because not all of it is really relevant to finding out the best times to post, but you can find out all sorts of things like what types of posts do well on your Facebook page, and lots of stuff that relates more to the content that you’re posting. We’re going to focus right now on those followers and your audience.
12:48 Let’s go ahead and take a look. All of the screenshots you’re going to see are from our Facebook account for Edgar. First of all, let’s find out where your fans live. Just like I mentioned with Google Analytics, that knowing where people are from, knowing their location is really useful. You can use this by going to the People tab inside your analytics, and this is going to give you important information about time zones. Obviously, you’re going to be in one time zone, but your audience is not necessarily going to be in that same time zone, so knowing where they live helps you figure out the better times to post.
13:24 This is what it looks like. When you go into your Facebook Insights and you click on the People tab along the left here, along the top depending on which version of Facebook you have. Facebook is like always tweaking this sort of stuff. You click on the People tab and you click on your fans along the top, and you get all this information following your Facebook page.
13:48 You could see here, I mean we’ve got gender information, info about age and we also have info on the countries and the top cities where our fans are coming from. Again, this looks really similar to what we saw in Google Analytics, that United States is by far our top country for where our fans are coming from. The majority of people who like our page are US based, so that’s really useful to know. Now we’ve got the UK, Canada, and Australia underneath that. Those are our main audiences on Facebook with the US obviously being number one.
14:23 You can find even more info if you compare a few things on Facebook. For example, now let’s look at comparing the fans to the number of people reached or engaged because Facebook also gives you this info. This is interesting to look at because the results actually might be a little bit different in this case. Of course, you know, you generally want to be publishing and the best times for the fans who actually engage with your content, right?
14:50 I mean engagement and reach is the goal on Facebook, so if you can find out when and where people are engaging the most, you can be more … also click on people engaged. I like the people engaged tab better than the people reached simply because the people engaged obviously shows you the people who are actively interacting with your page. These are the people who are leaving comments, who are liking posts, who are sharing things with their friends. These really are like your best fans are the ones that are engaging.
15:23 We can see some interesting differences here. For example, the gender is still skewed way towards the female end as far as the people engaged, but it’s actually a lot more women that are engaging than men. Also, if we look at the ages, that’s a little bit different too. Our fans, there’s a slightly higher percentage in that 35 to 44 age range, but it’s actually the slightly younger fans who are going to be interacting more according to Facebook.
15:53 Now this info about your demographics doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on when you’re going to be posting. I mean unless the age ranges are hugely different, like if most of your fans are above 45 but you have the 18 to 24 year olds are engaging more, then that might actually make a difference in when you’re posting. In general, this is just interesting information and might influence the type of content that you publish more so than when you publish it. I mean if you have a ton more women engaging than men, then maybe you’re going to keep that in the back of your mind when you’re creating content on your page.
16:33 What’s really interesting here is, again, in that location box underneath. We can see here that, again, it’s still the US that is the top engagers, but the number two audience for our general overall fans is the UK. However, the number two country that people engaged from is actually Australia on our Facebook page. It’s interesting.
16:58 Of course, the numbers aren’t that much different, it’s not like a huge deal, but just knowing that some of our Aussie fans tend to engage more than some people from other countries might mean that when we go to start thinking about when we’re going to schedule our social media posts, we might keep that in mind that, “Oh, hey, we should maybe schedule some stuff for when Australians will actually be awake.” Because if you’re scheduling just for US or European audience, it doesn’t necessarily always overlap with Australia or that part of the world. Interesting to compare those two tabs in your Facebook Insights.
17:38 Another thing you can look at on Facebook, and this is actually a really important one and where you might want to start is to find out when your fans are online. You can use the Post tab in Facebook for this one, and you’re going to want to pay attention to both the day of the week and the time of the day. Let’s see what that looks like. Again, you can click on the Post tab and then when your fans are online, pretty easy to find.
18:00 On the post tab and then when your fans are online. Pretty easy to find. Very self explanatory.
18:06 So, across the top we have the days of the week. And you can actually see that it looks like Wednesday and Thursday are the days when more of our fans are online. And it’s not a huge difference in number. I mean it’s not thousands of people different. But it’s different enough that maybe we’re going to put more effort into what we’re posting on those days of the week than say the weekends or let’s see, it looks like Monday is our lowest fan day.
18:34 And similarly you can look under that and see the graph that shows the times when people are most likely online. This one’s really useful, because again it accounts for different time zones and people from different countries coming to your site. Ours makes sense, because we have mostly fans from the US so in the middle of the night for North Americans, there’s not really that many people on, which makes sense and would be expected. But our best posting times look like they would be probably between about 2:00 PM and 6:00 or 7:00 PM based on the little kind of bump in the graph during those times of day. So, that’s kind of when the most people are online of our Facebook fans. Now that doesn’t mean that all of them are going to interact with our content of course. But that generally just kind of shows that might be the best time to try posting things.
19:29 So, the last thing you can look at in your Facebook Insights to help you figure out your best times to post would be to take a look at your most popular posts on Facebook. You might not know that you can do this, but I’m going to show you how. So, again, you’re going to use the post tab in Facebook. And you’re going to be able to filter this by engagement or reach. And then you can pay attention to the times that you posted. So, I’ll show you that as well.
19:54 So, for example you’re going to go into your Insights. Click on overview. Scroll down to where you see your five most recent posts and then click on that link that says “See all posts.” It’s going to take you to this page where you actually have all of your posts. I don’t know exactly how many months Facebook goes back for this, but it’s at least three or four months that you can kind of filter. And then across the top here, Facebook doesn’t do a great idea … or a great job of making those look like links, but they actually are. So, if you click on reach or engagement Facebook Insights will actually filter this or kind of reorganize it to show you posts with the most engagement or the most reached depending on what one you clicked on. So, here I clicked on engagement and got it kind of ordered by the most engagement to the least.
20:48 I prefer to do it by engagement rather than reach, because sometimes a post might get a lot of reach and not really so much engagement. And for me engagement matters a little bit more, because like I said before that’s reflective of the people who are actually clicking on things and commenting and interacting with your page. So, this is filtering by engagement. And so, then what you can do is kind of scroll down and look a the times where you were posting these things that got a lot of engagement. And we can see here that out of the 10 posts that are currently on the screen, 7 of them were posted between 3:00 and 5:00 PM. So, that’s kind of interesting, but it does definitely match up with what we were just seeing with when your fans are online glide before. So, again this kind of little bump in the graph, is between let’s say 2:00 and 6:00 or 7:00 PM, whereas this slide a lot of our most popular and most engaged posts were also within that time range.
21:55 So, this kind of is just … I mean you don’t have to do this part, but it can maybe reinforce what you’re finding in your Insights to kind of say oh hey, these really are the best times to post, because people are actually interacting with what we’re posting. And of course you’re going to have some outliers. We have some other items in here that weren’t posted during those hours, but actually the majority of these were within that timeframe. So, kind of interesting to take a look at once again.
22:25 So, I’m going to give you one other tool that you can use to look at some information about Facebook. Like I said, the best place to start is going to be your Facebook Insights, because that’s really specific to Facebook and your audience, but of course it’s always good to get some info from elsewhere as well. And as personally, as a person who is not so great with stats and data, like I was saying before, sometimes being able to visualize things in more than one way can be helpful.
22:53 So, I’m going to tell you just really briefly about a site called Fanpage Karma. And it’s just at fanpagekarma.com. It is a site that gives you some free insights and reports about your Facebook page. I believe they have a paid version as well where you can obviously pay to get even more insights and reports. But the free version actually gives you a lot.
23:16 So, it gives you stuff, details on your best posts, your weakest posts, your engagement rates, the words that you tend to use the most in your Facebook posts. That’s kind of interesting. Your most engaged users and more. So, a lot of it is really similar to what you can find in your Facebook Insights. But there are a couple of things that are a little bit different. And just the way that they present things, they’re slightly different kinds of graphs and charts and things like that, so again, it’s just kind of a different way to visualize some of that data, which might be helpful for some people.
23:52 One thing that I like in Fanpage Karma is this little tab called “Times and Types.” So, once you connect your Facebook page, you get all this info. You can look at all of your content, which kind of gives you similar things to what you’d find in your insights. And Times and Types also similar, except for this graph is kind of interesting, or table, whatever you want to call it. It shows you kind of the … in shows you when your page tends to post more. So, the bigger the circle, the more posts you published during that time. And then it’s also color coded, so the more red that a circle is the less engagement a post got, whereas the more green it is, the more engagement posts at that time get.
24:38 And it’s kind of interesting to look at, because if you can see here and I know the numbers might be a little bit small, but this kind of bottom line of circles is almost all green, so that’s good. Green is good in this case. And you can see that those are all posted between about 4:00 PM and 8:00 PM eastern time, so this is set to eastern time. And again, that fits in exactly with what we were finding in our Facebook analytics as far as kind of the best times to post. And this actually shows that not only are those the best times to post because that’s when the most people are on online, but it’s actually when people tend to be interacting with us as well. So, again, just a different visual way to look at some of this data, but this is kind of cool. And Fanpage Karma has some really neat stuff you can learn about your audience. So, if you haven’t heard of it before, check it out. Again, it’s free. Okay, let’s take a little break from Facebook and jump on over to Twitter. So, Twitter is the second and well, last social network we’re going to talk about today. On Twitter you want to first start out with your Twitter analytics, because again this is going to info about your followers directly from Twitter itself. So, you can get to your analytics by clicking on to your profile icon when you’re logged into Twitter and scrolling down and clicking on analytics. So, you’re going to want to start in your demographics tab inside of your audience insights. So, then demographics is going to show you things like age, gender, occupation, and again location. So, that’s really what you want to look at. But it sort of gives you a lot more info than maybe you would probably need.
26:22 So, this is kind of what it looks like. So, again, you’re going to click on your audiences tab and then demographics. It also gives you info on people’s education levels and incomes and occupation. I’m not sure how I feel about Twitter knowing this about everybody, but it’s there. At least as much of it as they can find. And actually in your audience tab, you can find out tons of other info about your audience, such as their consumer behavior and types of interests that they have. So, there’s a lot of good info in there there might even help you with your content that you’re posting on Twitter. But, I’m just going to focus on the stuff that can help you figure out those best times to post.
27:02 So, again, you want to look at the country here in your demographics tab. And again, on Twitter it looks like our largest audience by far is from the US, with the UK again number two. So, that kind of matches up with what we found in our Google analytics and also even what we found about our fans in general in Facebook. So, very similar between the two platforms so far.
27:27 You can also head over to the tweets tab inside Twitter. So, Twitter analytics have actually improved a lot just in the past maybe six months to a year. They’ve added a lot more features and you can find out a lot more info about what you’re sending out there. And in the tweet tab, you can click on where it says “Top Tweets.” And you can actually use this to see what time all of your top, most engaged tweets were posted at. And of course it’s not an exact science here and maybe your top tweets were top tweets because they were retweeted by a huge account. Maybe the time has nothing to do with it. But, I think it’s still worth taking a look at. So, again, your going to go to the tweets tab. Click on “Top Tweets.” And then you’re going to get this list of tweets with the highest impressions, engagement that’ sort of thing. And in order to find the exact time they were posted you just click on the date next to your Twitter handle there and that’ll actually take you to the full Tweet where you can see what time it was posted.
28:30 So, I wrote the times in here and it’s kind of interesting because these times don’t necessary match up with what we were finding on Facebook, that kind of late evening time. These are kind of earlier in the day, more lunch time and a little bit after for east coasters in the US. But again, this is just kind of interesting. I wouldn’t necessarily take this as the end all, be all for best times to post. It’s just kind of worth looking at. But again, some of these might just be flukes so to speak. Like this top post here was a tweet that we sent out during a Twitter chat, so obviously it must have got favorited and maybe shared a couple of times, but it was necessarily new content that we were putting out so you might not even count that. So, again, take it with a grain of salt, but still take a look, because it’s kind of interesting.
29:25 I will say this though about Twitter is that its analytics … they don’t really give you nearly as much information as Facebook does. So, I have another tool that I want to tell you about as far as finding your best times to post on Twitter. This tool is called Tweriod. It’s kind of a tongue twister to say. But, it’s just at tweriod.com. And it’s kind of a cool site.
29:48 So, you just sign in with your Twitter account and you can generate free reports about your last 1,000 followers. And you can do that once a month. They do have paid subscriptions as well where you can get more frequent reports and I think you can look at more than 1,000 followers. But I mean as a rule, looking at info about your last 1,000 followers, so these would be your most recent followers, it’s still worth it. I would still say to do it even if you don’t want to pay for more reports or more followers. But here you can find out information, when your followers are online, when your Tweets tend to get the most exposure, and also when you get the most at replies, along with a bunch of other stuff. But, this is all kind of info that you really don’t necessarily get in your Twitter analytics, so it’s just kind of cool to supplement it with some extra info.
30:40 For example, some of the things you can find in Tweriod, you can look at when your followers are online. So, you can look at general stats as well as hourly graphs. So, here’s the hourly graph for our followers. And here this again kind of lines up with what we found on Facebook and also what we would kind of expect based on what we know our audience is from. So, here it’s kind of all after 1:00 PM. It starts kind of growing … or kind of at a higher rate than earlier in the day. It actually looks like it peaks at about 10:00 PM with the most people online at about 10:00 PM which is interesting, but again makes sense, because that would be night time for east coasters, but still kind of in the evening for west coasters. But those fans who are in Australia or the UK or other parts of the world, they’re still going to be, well maybe not so much the UK, but Australia, they’ll be awake at at time. So, it kind of interesting just to see when your fans are online.
31:42 Again, you can see … you can look at per day and you can also compare weekdays to weekends, which is well … it all just depends on the demographics of the audience. Some of them might be more active on social media on the week. I feel like younger generations definitely tend to spend more time on social media when they’re supposed to be doing work or at school. We’re all definitely kind of attached to our phones all the time, whereas on weekends it might be a little bit different. So, you can compare those two things inside Tweriod.
32:17 You can also look at when your tweets are getting the most exposure. And again, you can compare weekdays to weekends. So, this is interesting. So, for us on weekdays, it’s actually later in the day that our tweets are getting more exposure and getting more engagement. Weekend a little bit earlier in the day. So, kind of afternoon and early evening. Well, 7:00 to 8:00 PM and we’re talking eastern time here. So, they are a little bit different depending on when we’re tweeting.
32:49 You can also learn about when you’re getting the most mentions on Twitter. So, Tweriod again will put together a nice little graph for you and show you the average number across different times of day. And this might be a little bit different than when the other graphs that you see when people are online or when you’re getting the most engagement, because obviously at replies are a little bit different. But, again, info that you can use.
33:14 So, I know I threw a lot of graphs and stuff at you there and now you might be thinking or later on when you go to figure out all this info on your own, you might be asking okay, now I have all this info, what the heck do I do with it? What do I do once I figured out the posting times and when people are online and that sort of thing? What do I do with it?
33:37 Well, the next steps. So, as you’re going through finding all this info. As you’re digging through your Facebook Insights and your Twitter analytics and using some of these other tools that we mentioned, make sure that you’re taking some notes about your best times to post on each network. Whether you’re going to us a table or a graph or a spreadsheet or even just a Google doc if spreadsheets and graphs are scary. You can use whatever you want that will help you kind of visualize when those best times to post are. And again, a lot of the stuff that we looked at just kind of reinforced other info that you find. So, when you’re looking at the post that did the best on Facebook, that kind of reinforced when our fans were most likely to be online, which kind of reinforced where our audience was from, what part of the world. So, based on that you can probably pick out a couple times a day that are going to be the best to post on each network and just make sure that you’re writing those down somewhere.
34:34 The next step though is going to be to schedule out those updates on each network to make sure that you’re posting at the best time. And you might be wondering well, why would I schedule this stuff out? Well, there’s a couple different reasons and one reason again is consistency. So, like we talked about at the beginning, you want to be consistent with when you’re posting. And again, I mean if you remember some of the times that we just saw on Facebook and Twitter for our account at Edgar, a lot of our fans were online in the evenings, so on Twitter it was 10:00 PM that the majority of our fans are online. None of us are working at 10:00 PM. We all kind of work a regular nine to five schedule, most of us at Team Edgar.
35:17 So, how are we going to reach those people who are online at 10:00 PM or who are in different time zones without having to hire someone to work at night? And the easiest way to do that of course is to schedule out your updates so that you can actually be posting at the best times, even if it means that you’re not online when those best times are, because that’s pretty common actually for a lot of social accounts that your best times might not even be when you’re at work. They might be on the weekends and that sort of thing. And of course Edgar can do this for you. I know we did a little poll asking if you guys are Edgar users or not. And a lot of you are not using Edgar yet, so if you’re not really familiar with what Edgar is, it’s a Social media management tool and it allows you to build a library of content that you can kind of cycle through and share more than once on social media. But the cool thing is you can schedule everything out in Edgar and just let Edgar do the sharing for you. So you can be really specific, you can say, “Okay, at 10:30 AM I’m gonna share something to Twitter and at 11:15 I’m gonna share something to Facebook because that was a good time to share on Facebook.” And you can be really specific, schedule everything out and then you don’t have to worry about remembering to log in to be consistent or you don’t have to worry about being online at 10 PM to post something to Facebook or Twitter because that’s when your analytics and your insights told you was the best time to post.
36:43 So you can use those best posting times that you wrote down and you just input them into a scheduling tool, whether it’s Edgar or something else that you’re using. That’s definitely what you should do with it. If you haven’t tried out Edgar and you’re interesting after hearing how you can actually use it to help you post at the best time, we do have a free trial that you can try for free, obviously. So 14 days, no credit card required and you can check that out at meetedgar.com/freetrial. Head over there, check it out, play around with it, see if it maybe can help you be more consistent and optimize those posting times to make sure that you’re posting at the best time for your audience.
37:28 So to kind of wrap up everything that we talked about today and then we will go ahead and get into some discussion. So first of all, you need to find the best times to post for your specific audience. Don’t just rely on those blog posts that kind of have done studies of other social accounts. Dig into your insights, look at your analytics, try different tools and find out what are actually the best times for your audience to be posting. So again, use your insights, your analytics, any other tools that are gonna give you detailed info and write down those best times. And then once you have all that info, schedule your posts out using a tool so that you can actually get the most mileage out of every single update that you put out there so you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time on social media because that’s like the worst feeling ever.
38:16 So I’m out of breath now. But that is essentially our presentation today but now we wanna turn it over to you. So discussion time. What sort of tactics have you used to figure out the best times to post? Do you have suggestions for other tools that maybe we didn’t talk about today. I mean, there are a ton out there and a lot of them are really great so if you have other suggestions, feel free to share. And of course, if you have any questions for us, I know you guys were asking questions kind of as we went along but if you have more please feel free to pop those in the chat. I’m just gonna minimize this screen a little bit so I can go and see the chat myself. But yeah, feel free to send us more of your questions and talk amongst yourself and ask us whatever you want.
39:06 All right. So some questions from earlier in the webinar. Jasmine was asking how do yo go about getting more followers on Twitter? So that’s a great question, Jasmine. We actually have done a webinar before about how to get more followers, which we’ll probably do again, so keep an eye out for that. But in general, I’d say my biggest tip would be, again, to just be consistent. You can actually use a lot of the stuff that you heard today in order to find out more about your current audience and just make sure you’re posting at the best times. But also to focus on the content. So on Twitter right now visuals are huge so attaching images to your tweets and just making them as eye-catching as possible. Also, I would say getting involved in Twitter chats, there are tons of Twitter chats about just about any topic you can think of that you can join and usually just use a hashtag during the chat and you can follow the hashtag and see what other people are saying.
40:04 And sometimes that’s just a good way to just kind of get involved on Twitter and just being active on Twitter is just really the best way to get more followers. Stephanie was asking are there analytics in Edgar that I can view? We do have some analytics in Edgar that will tell you info about all the posts that Edgar has shared for you but there’s not really any analytics about your audience like there is on Facebook and Twitter. So as far as learning about your fans and your followers and figuring out the best times to post, Edgar doesn’t help too much with that but there are some analytics just about the content that you’re putting out there. A lot of people were asking about Instagram and Edgar and whether we’re going to be adding that and the answer is unfortunately no, not at this time and that’s simply because Instagram actually has a closed API and an API is essentially what a developer users in order to connect a third party tool to a social media network.
41:12 So, for example, Instagram’s API is closed, meaning that a third party app like Edgar cannot legally post pictures to Instagram on someone’s behalf. So there are some tools out there. There are some workarounds, things like Latergram and even I think Hootsuite added this recently, where you can upload your photos online and write your captions and stuff but it doesn’t actually post to Instagram for you. It sends you like a push notification and you still have to go onto your phone and post the picture on Instagram. So since it’s not really true automation it’s not something that we’re looking to add to Edgar, although if Instagram were to open up its API and let you automate things a little bit easier then it might be something we would consider in the future.
42:04 Some people asking about Edgar, which is awesome, and what differentiates it from some other tools out there like Hootsuite? So the main difference with Edgar is that Edgar is an online library. It’s not just a place for you to type in and update and send it out or schedule it on social media. It’s actually a place where you build a library of content and the content stays in your library even after it’s shared. So the library is organized by category and what Edgar does is he cycles through your categories so he starts at the top, goes to the end and then when he gets to the end of the category he starts back at the beginning again. So you can really build up your library, you can put hundreds of posts into your library, set up a schedule and let Edgar go and you don’t have to worry about your feeds running out if you forget to add new stuff or you forget to post or that sort of thing.
42:57 Any other questions? I know that Tom and Stacy are answering some things in the chat as we go as well. Somebody was asking about any tips for the best times to post on LinkedIn? And Patrick, I’m afraid I don’t have any great tips there. I’m not sure that LinkedIn does analytics the way that Facebook and Twitter do and in which case you would need to be able to find out about your audience, where they are and when they’re online and that sort of thing so I’m afraid I don’t have any great suggestions there. But maybe somebody knows of a tool that will give you some info on your LinkedIn audience so if anybody does know of anything please throw it into the chat because I’m not really 100% sure on that one.
43:56 Let’s see. Rose just asked, how many times should you post on Facebook and Twitter? That, of course, is a tough question to answer Rose because it completely depends on your audience, what they tend to interact with the best and that sort of thing. And again, you can figure out a lot of this just by finding out the best times to post but in general, I mean, I know a lot of people will say you should at least be posting once a day on all of your social networks. So once a day on Facebook, at least once a day on Twitter but of course Twitter you probably would want to post a little bit more since Twitter moves so much faster than Facebook. At Edgar, we post a lot more. We post, I’d say, at least probably like 15 times a day on Twitter and maybe four or five on Facebook but that’s just our strategy. So I would say definitely experiment with it, see what your audience responds to because there’s gonna be a sweet spot. There’s gonna be a number of times to post that’s gonna work for your Facebook page and for your Twitter account.
45:00 And I can’t really tell that you to, you just have to kind of experiment and try it out. Some people asking about Google Plus in Edgar. Another good question. Google Plus, so we’ve applied to Google to get permission to use Edgar to post to Google Plus and we’re just kind of waiting on them now. I think part of it is that Google doesn’t know what it’s doing with Google Plus so we certainly do hope to add it to Edgar but there’s no ETA on that, unfortunately, because the ball is kind of in Google’s court as far as that is concerned. And the platforms that we do post to at Edgar are Facebook, so that’s Facebook profiles pages and groups, Twitter and then LinkedIn profiles and company pages in case anyone is curious. Any other questions? I know there were kind of a lot going through.
46:20 So Finme just asked a question kind of clarifying about Twitter. I mentioned that here at Edgar we sometimes post 15 times a day to Twitter and she’s asking, are you publishing the same thing or different posts? Yeah, it is different posts. So posting the same exact thing multiple times a day is not good practice and actually Twitter can mark you as spam if you post the same exact thing too often. But as far as how often you post, if you’re mixing up your content and sharing different types of things you can definitely get away with posting that much so yeah, at Edgar, we set our schedule up. So, again, Edgar is all based on category so we have, I don’t know, at least two dozen different categories so each time we post it’s almost always coming from a different category so it’s different content every time.
47:13 Again, some other people asking about Instagram. Like we already said, Edgar does not connect with Instagram and it’s not in our plans simply because Instagram doesn’t allow tools like Edgar to automate posting to Instagram. So you still have to get a reminder. It’s not gonna automatically post for you because Instagram doesn’t allow that. Somebody asking about Edgar versus Buffer. So just like we said with Hootsuite, main difference with Edgar is that it’s an online library of content. So you build up this huge library and Edgar fills up your cue, cycles through it and it just ensures that your social networks are never empty. So with Buffer and Hootsuite, you load things in and after they’re shared they kind of disappear whereas with Edgar they stay in your library so you can use them again or you can keep adding to your library and Edgar’s gonna keep those social network cues filled up.
48:08 Jocelyn, so would Edgar make a social media manager’s job obsolete? Not at all because Edgar can’t write content for you. It’s a great tool for helping you schedule out your updates and making sure that you’re posting at the best times possible but it’s not a content creation tool. So you still have to write those update, you still need to make sure all the links are working and that you’ve got photos attached and all of that content. So it’s definitely a tool to help social media managers and other people who do a lot of social media but certainly not a tool to replace them because Edgar is very smart but he’s not quite that smart. So I think we have a couple more minutes, does anybody else have any questions either about anything we talked about today in the webinar or about Edgar in general? I think we’ve tried to get through most of your questions. If we happen to miss any I do apologize, we’ve had quite a few coming through.
49:24 I see that somebody back there, Keilan, had asked about Facebook reach and how it seems to have dwindled in the last couple of weeks and if there are any tips to bring it back up? And definitely something that I think frustrates anybody that is using Facebook for marketing and that sort of thing. And unfortunately the answer is you just have to keep trying different things. With Facebook’s algorithm, it’s constantly changing and so what works one week might not work a month from now. And so if you do find that your reach is just not the same as it used to be, unfortunately, part of it is just because that’s what’s happening on Facebook. But another part of it might just be you just need to try some different things so try posting different types of content, try posting other people’s content and not just always your own stuff, experiment with photos and video and maybe posting at some different times of day. And of course, make sure that you’re using your insights to figure out what the best times to post are for your audience. Sometimes people just kind of throw stuff out there randomly and if it’s not really at a good time for your audience, that’s gonna kind of not be the greatest as far as reach and engagement either. That’s the majority of questions so unless anybody had anything else I think we’ll go ahead and wrap up here. Again, if you are interested in trying out Edgar, since we had so many questions about Edgar that might be something you guys wanna check out, again, meetedgar.com/freetrial is where you can go to check out that two weeks free trial of Edgar in case you have questions about it. Sometimes the best way to kind of get a feel for a new tool is just to go and play around with it so just like those other tools that we mentioned today, like Sand Page Paramon, Tweriod and things, you might just wanna go play around and see what you can find or see if it’s gonna work for you.
51:34 So check out Edgar and we will be sending out an email with a link to a replay of today’s webinar as well as all of these slides. So if you wanna go back through and look at all of the things that we suggested you do in your insights and analytics and that sort of thing, you should have those later on tonight. So thank you guys so much for joining us and spending part of your Thursday afternoon with us. You can always reach us, if you have questions about Edgar, feel free to send us an email, [email protected]. Our customer service team is fantastic and will be happy to answer any kind of questions you have about Edgar or what Edgar is or how it’s different or how it works and that sort of thing. So, again, thanks so much and we hope to hear from you and see you inside Edgar. And keep an eye on your email as well because we’ll let you know about upcoming webinars from Team Edgar. We do at least once a month on a social media topic. So, again, thanks and have a great rest of your week and a fantastic weekend. Bye guys.
