Are your clients having trouble engaging with customers in social media venues? If so, there may be many questions you're both asking yourselves and each other. Are your client's social media postings in sync with what their competitors are doing? Should they try to post when other businesses do? Or should they try to stand out by doing things differently? One way to start this analysis is to check out new statistics provided by Hootsuite.

Engaging with Customers in Social Media Venues

Popular Days to Post on Social Media

Twitter sees the most business posts on weekdays, specifically Tuesdays through Fridays, with 16% of activity occurring on each of these days. Facebook posts peak on Wednesdays at 16%, while all other weekday posts clock in at 15%. For LinkedIn, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays each score 17% of business posts. On Instagram, business posts are evenly distributed at 16% for every weekday. 

You might be considering about engaging with customers in social media venues on weekends. Postings on Saturdays and Sundays don’t rise above 12% of the total for any of these sites. So, it's best to stick to weekday postings.

Popular Times of Day to Post on Social Media

Not surprisingly, just over 50% of business posts on social networks take place between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. For Facebook posts, the pattern is slightly different. At least 35% of posts on that site appear after working hours. Another 18% pop up before the workday begins. These posting patterns hold true across the days of the week.

Social Media and ROI

Is engaging with customers in social media venues paying off for your clients? For business-​to-​consumer operators, the answer is yes. The average telecommunications services company has over 21,000 Twitter followers. On the other hand, the typical industrial company in the business-​to-​business sector has about 4,900 followers.

Social media marketing scores a 3.3 out of a possible 7 in terms of contribution to an organization’s performance. Despite this mediocre rating, 88% of firms believe social media is a great tool for branding, according to the CMO Survey findings.

Is there anything else you can do to help your clients optimize their return on investment while engaging with customers in social media venues? Earlier this year, Megan DeGruttola reported on the importance of authenticity when brands appear on social media. Consumers love it. But how do your clients prove their authenticity on social media? 

Instead of spending all kinds of money developing branded collateral, your clients would be better served by highlighting and managing user-​generated content. At least 79% of consumers say that user-​generated content impacts their decision to make a purchase, while only 13% say the same about professionally developed images.

What kind of activity do your clients see from their social media efforts? Run a Digital Audit at AdMall from SalesFuel to find out. Then use that data to start a conversation about how you can help your clients work with UGC to up their authenticity and their ROI.