STA Blog

As a financial journalist I get access to all sorts of email – solicited and sack-loads of unsolicited, research papers, books to review, reader comments and so on.  At the STA I am their e-journalist, writing this blog on www.technicalanalysts.com (free for all to view), posting on social media to increase the profile of technical analysis and make people more aware of the society and what it does.  Perhaps you have seen the posts on Twitter (@STA_ORG) and Facebook.  Some of you are dab hands at this, and I see many of your feeds.

With this in mind I thought I’d highlight results from a paper called ‘The Best Times to Post on Social Media’ from Simply Measured, a Sprout Social Company.  Chicago-based, the firm makes social media management, advocacy and analytics software for businesses.  First and foremost they suggest one carefully consider the best outlet for your content.

Twitter, they say, was rebranded in 2016 to focus on what it was originally intended to do: be a place to ‘see what’s happening’.  As a business it has two main strands: as customer service and for research.  With the former quick response time to complaints, positive feedback and other issues is essential.  They suggest response times should aim for half an hour.  For research it’s used as a database and monitoring system that like-minded, actively interested, people have in brands, events and issues.

For business to business (B2B) posts Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays are best.  For business to customer (B2C) choose Saturdays and Sundays the latter the most effective day and best between 10 and 11 pm when, naturally enough, people have more time – and oddly enough on a Wednesday.  Thursday is the most popular day peaking between 12 and 1 pm.

Facebook, with over 2 billion active users, tends to have more social content and an increasingly older user profile – as the very young have migrated to Snap Chat.  Not surprisingly the best days are weekends, Thursdays and Fridays.  They suggest that one times one’s articles based on geographical time zones and local habits.

LinkedIn, the network for professionals, is most useful for B2B as it can hone in on industry sectors, location and job titles.  It has 467 million active users and by far the best days are Tuesdays to Thursdays.

Instagram, the photo-sharing platform, where one can also upload videos, now has a polling function that allows posts to be rated and engagement monitored.  Cats are a big topic!  Best days on this one are Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Now you know how to prioritise your week!

This is their home page: https://sproutsocial.com/about

Needless to say you can also follow them on LinkedIn.