One of the terrifying things when planning or organizing social media content is that timing is everything. You could have a well-thought-out strategic plan with nicely written posts and engaging content, but schedule it at the wrong time and it could be the difference between a post that performs well and one that gets lost in the ever-changing black hole called the internet.
Because I focused on the first podcast episode in my bike safety campaign last week, I went into week six of this project wanting to focus on both video and finalizing the last portion of my social media campaign, which included writing and scheduling posts.
Throughout the course of the week, I wrote a total of 18 different social media posts and went out to record footage and an interview for the video-portion of this project.
The social media posts consisted of 15 different graphics I created during week four, in addition to three posts that linked to my two podcast episodes and my video. I found that it made it a lot easier to write the post descriptions this week because the content had already been created.
After writing the posts, I scheduled the graphics throughout the month of July on the social media management platform Hootsuite. I read dozens of articles about how each social media platform has its own benefits depending on content type and audience, KPIs and goals and discovered the following on an article on SpoutSocial:
- Midweek mornings proved to be a successful time across most social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
- The best times to post on social media are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.
- The worst days to post on social media are Sundays
Based on these findings, I scheduled my posts Mondays- Friday and excluded the weekends. I also tried to keep to the 9-10 a.m. schedule, excluding a few days that social media management platform Hootsuite recommended that I schedule the post at 8 a.m. or 11 a.m.
Hootsuite’s findings were similar to SproutSocial and an article titled “The Best Time to Post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn,” stated that while there are common times to post, those are most often used as starting points for new accounts that do not have an audience to test on.
“Once you do have an audience though, it’s staggeringly easy to figure out the best time to post for your social media channels—especially if you have the right tools,” the article stated.
Another thing to keep in mind was the length of each post. Because Twitter has a character limit, there were several times I had to remove entire sentences or edit down posts to the word to ensure I was able to keep the overall structure of the post.
Check out all my social media posts here:
VIDEO
One of a cyclist’s worst obstacles is weather. If it’s too hot outside, they can risk dehydration, if it’s too cold, they can risk losing control of their bicycle because of of ice on the road, if it’s raining, they can lose sight of the road and crash due to slippery roads. Unfortunately, the latter is what I dealt with after a week-long rainstorm hit central Texas resulting in wet roads and no cyclists in sight. This meant I had to keep pushing when I could go out to record until Sunday.
After the sun finally came out and dried the roads, it was time to go out and get what I needed! I arrived at the city trails at about 3 p.m. hoping I could use the natural sunlight, but this also meant it was 110 degrees in Texas, which going back to my initial point, meant there were still not a lot of cyclists out. I was able to get a few bike riders swooshing by every not and again and captured what I needed after a few hours of hopping from trail to trail.
In an article by author Casey Frechette titled “What journalists need to know about interviewing for video,” she states that interviews are a cornerstone of video storytelling because they provide Interviews are a cornerstone of video storytelling because they offer viewers “emotion, content and structure, especially in documentary-style stories with little or no narration.”
In short, good interviews make for good videos.
Interviews have always been my favorite part of the storytelling process, and I was able to land a solid interview with a cyclist that should drive the entire video-element of my project forward.
After scrubbing through the 20-minute interview, I found that I had more than enough to edit this story this week.
THE FINAL STRETCH
This week I was able to finish writing and scheduling all my social media posts on Hootsuite so they could go out throughout the month of July. This means that in the next four days, I will need to edit my video, wrap up my final podcast episode and excitedly conclude this seven-week project!