Is Your Social Media Calendar Stochastic?

 

Stochastic: randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.

When I studied Economics back in my BYU days, one of my favorite new words I learned was stochastic. The closest synonym to stochastic is random. Usually, the term is used to describe random variables in business or academia. I bring this up because it seems most social media sharing is stochastic. You share twice one week, ten times one day, then nothing for weeks or months. If social media is meant to play a significant part in your personal branding, stochasticity (or randomness) is your enemy. Consistently dripping out quality information over time (think of a leaky faucet) is your friend.

 

While working with thousands of busy lawyers, accountants, and recruiters on their social media usage, I’ve found that this randomness is the norm, unfortunately. 98% of professionals are simply too busy to post multiple times per week and 99.5% aren’t organized enough to schedule out posts for their entire week. I’m not talking about over-sharing either, I’m talking about sharing the ideal number of times each week on each individual social network. Following all the latest research a well-organized weekly calendar of social media sharing would look a little bit like this:

Let me explain the above graphic. In the above calendar I am sharing daily to LinkedIn and Facebook at the ideal windows of time each day, and then multiple times each day on Twitter. Let me make an important point here: this is NOT oversharing. Research shows that this frequency of sharing falls far short of the point at which you will see diminishing returns for your sharing. Translation: people will keep clicking on your articles at a high rate of clicks per share at this frequency.

There’s one more hidden gem in the calendar that I need to explain because it seems counter-intuitive. When you share an article to Twitter, don’t just share once, share it thrice. You read that right. Research shows that when you share the same article to Twitter three times over three days, it gets almost three times the clicks. Keep in mind, Twitter is like a river constantly flowing by. If you share three times at different windows of time, you will maximize the reach of each article you share. If someone goes to your Twitter account, are they going to see the same articles repeated sometimes? Maybe, but even if they do, the research still shows you it is still worth it because you will get far more engagement from your network.

At this point, we’ve already lost most busy professionals reading this. They simply had too much to do and the thought of stopping their work at 25 scheduled intervals throughout the week to share an article, is somewhat daunting. Others who are more organized may stay up late Sunday night using a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule the articles for the coming week. The rest will likely continue on their merry stochastic sharing ways. It’s difficult. We are all busy. I get it.

What if you could receive an email with the suggested articles to share for the week, with a “share all” button at the bottom that would magically build this ideal calendar for you? You click one button, the software service does the rest. Full disclosure, that’s exactly what the new PeakTime feature recently released by ClearView Social does. Marketing Directors send out emails to their professionals, the professionals hit one button, and their social media calendar is set for the week. Good-bye stochasticity, hello 10x visibility. Want to see PeakTime in action? Visit clearviewsocial.com or email jacob@clearviewsocial.com to Get A Free Demo with me.

One more thought. Don’t leave your future success in the hands of stochasticity.