I’m rapidly approaching a bit of a summer break in my work. Because I work with quite a lot of small-to-medium-sized businesses, and a lot of them are owner/marketers, we find that the summer isn’t the best time to run training. People are on holiday, kids are off, and there are better things to do than attend free training sessions.

Compared to last year, I’m quite looking forward to it. Last summer I completely filled my time with website projects and other things, and it completely burnt me out. This year, I’ve promised myself that the summer will be quieter. It’s a level of comfort that only comes with time, I think. At first it would panic me, but knowing that freelance work goes down as well as up means I’m going to enjoy the down time.

Onwards, to business.

Undoing the work

A lot of my time spent delivering training involves undoing and debunking a lot of the myths that circle around social media. One of the main ones is…

There’s a best time to post on social media.

The reason this particular myth continues to get spun is that it suggests there’s an ‘answer’ to creating good social media content. Sadly, there isn’t. At least, not an easy one.

Like a lot of myths, it reduces social media management to simply putting something - anything - online at the right moment. If you miss the moment, you miss the attention. It’s an easy thing for consultants to spin out - “oh you need to post at a different time and it’ll all be OK” - and it’s seemingly backed up by thousands of words of research.

The problem is that there is no “right” way to do social media. There’s also not a “wrong” way. Put simply:

The right way is the one that works. The wrong way is the one that doesn’t.

Algorithmically speaking

Social media networks use technology to decide what appears in your feed and what doesn’t. In a nutshell, they use some of the following:

• Relationships.
• Interest.
• Recency.

They all apply them in different ways, but broadly speaking they’re the same.

Relationships

How often do you interact with an account? If you always click on the ‘like’ button when an account appears in your timeline, you’ll see more of that account’s posts.

Interest

What kind of stuff do you tend to interact with? If you like pictures of dogs, you’ll see more of those. If you like more photos, you’ll see more of them.

Recency

Social media sites want you coming back for more. Every time you log in they’ll try to show you new and interesting content that you haven’t seen before.

And that’s why there’s no “right time to post”.

A ‘good’ social media account should be posting useful and relevant content regularly. Make it so that people want to see you pop up in their feed. Avoid sales stuff - nobody likes the account that constantly demands time, money and attention - and instead focus on quality.

Some advice about how you do that will be in next week’s newsletter. I’m such a tease.