I attended a Memnet conference this week with sister company Refreshed Membership. Whilst it was aimed at membership groups, a session on social media raised one particularly interesting point. If a relevant incident or issue arises out of office hours would you be able to respond to it via social media?
Social media doesn’t operate traditional hours, it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and anything can happen at any point. Yesterday, news broke that this Sunday, News of the World will close. The twitter reaction was incredibly fast and soon my tweet deck was filled with nothing but related comments. Essentially it became a live news feed. News doesn’t operate within standard hours, so why should social media use?
In the Memnet conference, a point was raised that one particular newspaper updated their Facebook page with breaking news before they updated their own. Social media has become completely integrated into people’s lives. We rely upon it as a core source of information.
So we return to the starting topic- brands shouldn’t stop engaging with their customers simply because the office has finished work for the day.
I’ve come across a few statistics regarding the use of facebook and twitter. One infographic from Kissmetricssuggests the best days to tweet are midweek and weekends. However, if your team aren’t in the office on weekends, then chances are the tweets stop. Likewise, the best suggested day to share a post on Facebook is Saturday. The pattern follows; if people aren’t at work then their social media activity is likely to be higher. Your weekend posts and tweets will gain greater exposure simply because people are more likely to pay attention.
This differs for B2B as shown by a report from Buddymedia which shows there are differences between industries. The report indicates that generally the best days to post are midweek and weekends.
Brands need to adopt a 24/7 social media strategy and ensure that they can act at any point if they need to. Schedule blog posts for the weekend and keep an eye on your twitter feed at weekends comparing it to activity on weekdays, you’ll notice to big differences. Have you changed your social media strategy to a 24/7 approach? Let us know how you’ve got on.
