What is the easiest way to get in trouble on your social media accounts? By not knowing what’s important to your audience and staying on top of that.

Not having this kind of connection can lead you to post at the wrong time with the wrong content. And doing either of those can make you look insensitive and lose trust with your audience. When you’re dependent to exist, one wrong move can call into question whether you should exist. That’s not a position you want to be in.

Am I saying your audience should absolutely rule your marketing? Absolutely not. But you need to at least factor them in when you’re deciding what to do.

When is your audience on social media?

I can’t tell you how many times I have seen an organization post at six in the morning on the east coast or some other early time that is easier for them for to post at. And then at the same time, they’re telling me they’re a national organization. I even ran into one that told me that their biggest audience was on the west coast while they did this.

That last one pointed to the fact that their engagement was great at that time. I scratched my head. They were telling me their audience was mostly on the west coast, but that they’re engaging heavily at three in the morning. This is a moment where I had to tell them they weren’t interpreting the numbers correctly. Because how many people are up at three in the morning on social media engaging with an organization? My theory was that they weren’t actually engaging their audience and that theory proved correct.

This was an important lesson to not just look at those reach and engagement numbers when you are deciding if a certain time is important to your audience. But also look at who is making that number up.

And I always like to do a schedule of what the audience’s day might look like. I then look for those down times where they might potentially look at social media a bit longer and engage with a bit more. I build times for social media based on that. That’s not to say I get it right the first time around. I tweak it as we post and get real time results.

On the other hand, if I just went with the timing social media tells me works, I run the chance of missing my real audience completely and not engaging them with my content that might get them to buy from the organization. But keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. You can attack timing with both ideas in mind while you zero in on the times that work for your audience.

What news stories are important to your audience?

If you didn’t already know this, it might come as a shock. So let’s hold hands as I tell you this: Your audience cares about more than just your organization. CRAZY, I know. But they have full lives and do more than just stalk your content on social media.

What does that mean to your marketing? You have to know at least a little bit about what it is that they care about beyond your organization. Yes, you can use that information to craft content, but it also gives you good information about when to post.

For example, if you know that most of your audience is full of fashion fans. Posting a ton of not-relevant content during fashion week or a big fashion event like the Oscars wouldn’t make sense. Their feed is likely full of content, and it will be especially hard to get through. So you either go down until things get quiet again or you only post laser-focused content that is relevant to what your fans are currently paying attention to. Otherwise, your content will stick out in a bad way and will likely get ignored. And then that algorithm isn’t going to serve your content to as many people next time.

How often do your fans want to hear from you?

I have had clients try to post ten times on Facebook. TEN TIMES. Most that try to do this listen to me as we determine what needs to be posted right away and what can be posted later. And then we spread things out so that we are reaching out to fans at a consistent pace.

Why is posting ten times in one day so bad? First off, it crowds up the feed. Let’s say that each post lives for about three hours (this is the theory that I work with because it tends to give me the best results for clients). So if you were to post every three hours, that’s a maximum of eight posts a day. But that supposes you are posting every three hours within a twenty four hour period. A lot of pages post between nine and five since that is when they are in the office. So that’s eight hours, which means three posts max.

What happens if you post more than that? Your posts start competing against each other for the same spots in your fans’ feeds and will likely end up hearing from you less since every post is doing worse and worse and worse. Yes, posting more can end up making your fans hear from you less.

But this isn’t about the algorithm. I just wanted to throw that in because some of you seriously need to hear the facts about why posting this much will hurt your reach.

What this is about is thinking of how much do your fans really want to hear from you. Do they want countless pointless posts at random times? I’m gonna guess no. You know your fans better than I do, but as a whole, most fans want fewer, more impactful posts. They want just enough to remember you still exist and know when to take actions.

With all of this in mind, I usually recommend clients start off with one post a day maximum, two posts if you’re in a busy time period and three if you’re in a busy time period with breaking news that needs to go out. Try that cadence and see where your metrics are. If it’s not getting what you want, then experiment with less or more. But go slowly to fully get the results of these experiments.

And yes, live events make this all go out the window. It’s when your fans want ALL the posts to keep up on what’s going on.

There are more ways to keep your audience in mind as you’re crafting and posting content. But these are a few that you can really concentrate on and really make your content connect better with them. Start with these and then worry about everything else later.

How are you keeping your audience in mind?