Timings

Impact on

Social Success
Getting reach in the age of declining reach

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM

Introduction
There are two equally important aspects to social media success:
Creating great content and reaching your audience so they can
consume it. As Marketers and Publishers we are only able to truly control
one of these items: content. The other, reaching your audience, is more
difficult because of all of the possible variables that impact when your
audience is active and online.
Unlike other more traditional channels, such as email, social messages
do not sit in an inbox waiting to be seen and acted upon. If social
messages are not seen in nearly real-time they are most likely not going
to be seen. The constant flow of content in and out of peoples feeds
is both the challenge and the opportunity. As more marketers take to
social as a primary channel to connect with prospects and consumers,
a new approach to publishing and distribution needs to be embraced in
order to effectively compete.

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Many organizations are still relying on first generation social management

platforms that utilize traditional methods, like scheduling, that simply do
not provide an impactful ROI. An agile distribution process that relies on
real-time information is the only way to be able to react, in real-time, in
order to reach people at the right time with the right content.
To fully understand the value of this new approach, first take a look at why
the traditional method of publishing, scheduling, is now ineffective.

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM

The Peaks & Valleys

of

AUDIENCE

YOUR AUDIENCE
POST 3

POST 1

POST 4
POST 2
POST 5

TIME OF DAY

Imagine you have scheduled five posts throughout the day. Without
knowing when your audience will be active and engaged you are simply
hoping for the best. Post 1 and Post 3 would have good reach and might drive
decent engagement but Posts 2, 4 and especially 5 would miss the mark.
The end result would be you and your peers discussing why the content did
not perform well. You might question the topic, call to action, headline, and
relevance all while completely missing the true culpritbad timing.

Not only are audience levels

shifting constantly, but
what they are talking about
changes just as quickly.
What if you had to predict
what people would be
talking about one week
from today at 2pm. Do you
think you could get it right?
Or what if a breaking
news story hit at the exact
time your scheduled post
was published. While
your audience may be
active and engaging with
social media channels the
topic may not resonate,
ultimately resulting in low
engagement levels.
You need to take both
audience levels and trending
topics (or keywords) into
account when determining
the best time to publish
your content.

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM

AUDIENCE

Not All Peaks Are Equal

Content Marketing continues
to be a focus for brands and
marketers alike. The issue
that many organizations have
run into is creating a scalable
strategy that generates both
great content and great results.

POST 3
POST 1

POST 2

POST 4

TIME OF DAY

POST 5

If we look at the same graph but also take into account that not all of the
peaks and valleys in audience engagement are the same you will begin to see
how differently these posts would perform. Dramatic shifts in activity are
caused by outside factors that publishers and marketers have very minimal
control over.
You need a way to monitor real-time changes in audiences and use that
information to automatically publish when the time is right. Without a datadriven approach opportunities to engage your audience are being missed.

Smart companies have

begun hiring journalists who
have the ability to effectively
transform marketing
messages into compelling
stories. Too often marketers
get caught up in their own
agendas while writers are
more in tune with their
audience, therefore creating
thoughtful pieces that they
connect with.
A data-driven approach
to publishing allows you
to focus on creating great
content rather than wasting
time trying to figure out when
to distribute it.

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM

THINGS Are

CHANGING Every Day.

Active Engagement
Today

Yesterday

Historical data, while important, cannot accurately predict the best time to
publish content in the future. This graph, from the SocialFlow UI, demonstrates
how audience levels fluctuate from day to day.
This additional layer of complexity supports the rational to move towards a
technology driven approach that relies on algorithms and keyword analysis to
find those peaks in audience engagement that drive reach and engagement.

Facebook continues to
make updates to their
EdgeRank algorithm that are
seemingly meant to target
and penalize marketers.
These changes seem to
validate what many in the
marketing world had already
been thinking and saying:
organic reach is essentially
dead, and Facebook will
ultimately kill it altogether.
But of course this latest
change must be put into
the context of a decline in
organic reach that marketers
have been seeing for a year
or more. The reality is that
these changes are not being
made to penalize marketers
but to support the creation of
quality content.
While the landscape has
changed the way companies
are managing their social
media publishing has not
Why?

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM

Finding the Right Time

and the Right Content
So how exactly does
this new approach to
publishing work? Well its
actually quite simple:

Step
ONE

You create
multiple pieces of
social content

Step
TWO

You feed that

content into your
SocialFlow queue

The rest is up to our data-driven platform which will:

Sort through posts in real-time to evaluate
business rules, audience availability and
keyword and trending topic data.

Utilize this information to predictively rank

and score social content to determine both
the best message and time to publish.
Automate the posting of optimized content to your social media channels.
THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM

Just as important as what to publish is when to

publish. With tons of content, and the amount of
time in the day to digest it remaining relatively
constant, a change in how social is distributed is
required to succeed.
Without question, the key to increased
engagement is increased reach, so hitting your
audience when they are active is critical. A datadriven approach is an effective way to combat
the decline in organic reach in social media and
achieve your business objectives. Without realtime data to inform your publishing strategy you
are merely guessing.

Quantity

Conclusion
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ABOUT
SocialFlow is the next-generationenterprise social
platform, built around the objective of gaining
audienceattention onsocial networks. As increasing
quantities of content compete for consumer
attention, publishers and their advertisers need more

effective, data-driven approaches to their social

publishing. SocialFlow dramatically improves the
delivery of content to consumers feeds acrossmultiple
social networks, delivering significant increases in
audience attention.

THE ATTENTION PLATFORM

SOCIALFLOW.COM