Social Media & its Best Practices
When planning and strategizing the best way to approach my personal interest profile project, I tugged to platform best practices to guide me on how to curate the best profile for my topic. Doing skincare/makeup/hair product reviews along with fashion is not a very niche category, so making sure that I think about best practices is very important. I chose Instagram as the platform for my project because it is a visual platform that allows you to create an aesthetically pleasing environment, while also being able to be descriptive in your captions. The main best practice I have focused on for the Instagram platform is posting engaging, high-quality images.
I try my best to make sure all of the content that I post is interactive, high-quality, and visually appealing. I take a great deal of time to think about the content ahead of time and how I want it to look on the feed once posted. Whether it's just a picture I take or going the extra mile and adding the image to more graphic elements, I think about the editing, color scheme, and the “vibe” I want it to give off. Since most of my content fit into particular categories, those categories are at the top of mind when designing it to be as engaging as possible. I also try to make as many data-driven decisions especially after reviewing the performance. So far for my content, I noticed that the content I design and add graphic elements tends to perform a bit better. This means when posting I have to allocate the time to curate more posts that have a design element to them to keep up the consistency in engagement on my posts from my follower base. An area of best practices that I should work more to integrate into my content is adding hashtags for discoverability that are more niche to get more reach on the platform and gain followers. It is something I am going to be researching more hashtags tailored to the topic of my page to see what works best and gains more traction/visibility.
If you’re creating content for social media at any scale, you know that a key challenge is rising above the noise and getting eyes on your posts (Arens, 2020). So on the topic of posting times, why is it important to know when is the best time to post for your account? Well as social media platforms evolve and so do their algorithms, platforms are starting to stray away from showing timelines in chronological order and more towards relevance-based curation. This makes it harder for social media marketers to make sure their content is seen. Social media marketers must now continually refine their tactics in creating high-quality content and maximizing opportunities to earn engagement (Arens, 2020). So knowing optimal times when your audience is on the platform or optimal times to post, you can utilize this data to analyze the peak times to get more interactions with your campaigns. You can even utilize this information to capitalize on quieter hours on social networks. These insights can be aligned to your strategy and implemented within your pages social media calendars as you start to plan posts with greater purpose. A great tool I have used yearly that provides a great report on optimal posting times per platform is Sprout Social. They work with their data science team to pull information based on Sprout Social’s own customer base and understand when their 20,000+ customers’ content was most and least frequently engaged with, broken out by platform and industry.
For the Instagram platform, they say the best times to post on the platform, in general, are Wednesdays at 11 a.m. and Fridays from 10 a.m.-11 a.m. and the worst day is Sundays. According to Sprout Social, Instagram is the second most logged-in social media site for daily use, and claim that it is only projected to increase in its user base over the coming years. Instagram data shoes that their peak engagements occur during midday and during the week with lower engagement on weekends which was surprising to me. Their data shows that when you look at the platform as a whole, the most consistent engagement can be found Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.–4 p.m. It has scattered points of engagements particularly on weekends and mornings, which they believe to be fueled by the increasing popularity of short-form content of Instagram Stories that is quick and easy to check-in at any time.
I've found from a professional standpoint utilizing the data provided by Sprout Social especially when broken down by industry and platform is an efficient way to drive content strategies to perform best. at the agency, I work for we utilize this social media management tool for our clients, and it provides additional insights with their Viral Post tool as you schedule content giving you the optimal posting time depending on the client, platform, and day. I believe all social media marketers should consider looking into posting times for their content strategies and I will be trying to implement them as well as hashtags to my personal interest project moving forward.
Arens, E. (2020, August 31). The best times to post on social media in 2020. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/
Arens, E. (2020, October 06). 7 Instagram Best Practices to Build Your Audience. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-best-practices/
Clarke, T. (2020, April 23). 14 Social Media Best Practices You Should Follow in 2020. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-best-practices/