The Best Times to Post on Social Media [Infographic]

How to gain more followers on instagram and posting awesome content on social media platforms doesn’t work without a strategy that takes timing into account. The key to successful social media engagement is to post content during peak hours and days — for your audience. Of course, the “best times” change periodically, but if you pay attention to the times when your followers are active on social media, you will increase web traffic and the number of shares.The best time to post is different on every social media network. Thanks to Quick Sprout’s detailed infographic, you can learn the best times to post on your favorite social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+.While Normal and Valenda may be among the most popular filters, they aren’t necessarily the ones that will net you the most engagement. According to this research by TrackMaven, using Mayfair, #nofilter or Inkwell will result in the highest levels of interaction.Engage with your competitors’ audience. You will need to tread carefully here, but reaching out to your competitors’ audience can be a great way to gain new, targeted followers. In an unofficial experiment posted on eCommerce University, one marketer set out to determine how many of his competitor’s followers would follow him back if he engaged with them. The results?Seek out other businesses in your niche, ‘follow their followers’ and then start interacting with their pictures and videos!Photo challenge: This is likely the most popular type of Instagram contest. To enter to win, a user has to post a photo on their personal account using a specific hashtag created by the brand.Lots of brands have been hosting selfie photo challenges or photo challenges that inspire their users to feature their product(s) and/or store in a creative way. The retail company Nasty Gal has taken both of these ideas ways to get likes on instagram to a unique new level with their weekly #NastyGalTruthorDare photo challenges. Here’s one example from the brand in which they ask their users to post their #StrangerSelfie and hashtag #NastyGalTruthorDare for the chance to win a Nasty Gal gift card.

Tactics for More Twitter Followers

Let's talk turkey! And by "turkey" I mean "followers." And by "talk" I mean "get more!" To start, put aside those quaint olden-times notions that seeking more getting twitter followers is unsavory. Heck, even Twitter promotes their tools as means to quickly get more:Of course, the early days of Twitter were very different than today. Back then, there were all sorts of spammy ways to get followers. Perhaps it is the hangover from those days that makes people queasy when thinking of "techniques" to get followers.Nowadays, though, Twitter has clamped down hard. Spammy techniques will get you banished quickly. And most of those old grey-hat methods don't even work: Twitter has radically limited how many people you can follow, as well as how many you can follow each hour.You might ask, why do I want more followers anyway? Twitter does little for SEO (at least not directly). And followers are just chaff that don't listen to me anyway (maybe so).Well, I don't want to get into a whole sales pitch for social media generally, but a few points stand out:Twitter is a lightweight, frictionless, and serendipitous way to engage customers. It doesn't require an email blast or the customer actively visiting your site. Once they follow you, they'll encounter you on their timeline during the normal course of their social experience. The little pings and pops you'll have with them accrue tremendous value.Your follower count is a good measure of your influence, and other people see it as such. The more followers you have, the more you'll attract, and the more you can use your influence to drive customers, conversations, and engagement.

Bands Want Facebook Likes, But Should They Be Chasing YouTube Views?

A recent survey undertaken by Reverb Nation suggests that facebook likes list are by far the most sought after thing on a bands agenda. I wrote about the reach of Facebook posts here suggesting only 10% of people see your facebook post and only 1% like it. It seems that bands are more worried about being seen with a fan base, hence the importance on the visible “like”, than actually building a database of their own with an email list.When you build you fan base through a third party site, you are at their mercy. If they decide they no longer want to support music, then you just lost everything. We saw this with Myspace - bands with 200,000 fans were left starting again, switching priorities to Facebook and trying to build numbers from the ground up. Now this is not to dismiss the importance of being able to demonstrate the strength of your fan base. Potential fans, promoters, and what’s left of A&R will certainly take an interest in the capacity of your following. The thing with Facebook is that it is now so integrated with people, that if you are creating a buzz elsewhere it will reflect on your Facebook page.A More Accurate Barometer. A far more accurate barometer of your engagement, is not how many likes you have, but the number of interactions your posts get. I come across many acts that have invested money into campaigns to acquire likes, and Facebook advertising can be very effective in increasing doing this. However, when you study how many interactions they get with their posts, it demonstrates how little those new followers actually engage. This is why for bands to simply chase likes, doesn’t mean you are actually creating fans.The trouble with Facebook is that it isn’t primarily a content provider. People don’t go there to necessarily watch or listen. How youtube views work Internet has made us a very visual society. Ever since the new Facebook has been introduced, those photos with an amusing caption have become extremely popular, but this is pretty benign for bands. However the audio/visual medium of Youtube is ideal. You see and hear the band, and if a band has good product, then the potential reach is endless.