Is your company timing its social campaigns wrong?

We recently told you that half of the world’s biggest companies weren’t effectively using social media to talk to their customers. Now it turns out that some of the biggest names in retail are getting the timing of their social media campaigns wrong.

That’s according to the latest research from tech analysis company Yesmail Interactive, which looked at companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Aeropostale, American Apparel, American Eagle, Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, Diesel, Eddie Bauer, Express, Forever 21, The Gap, Guess, H&M, J Crew, Kenneth Cole, The Limited, Old Navy, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Urban Outfitters.

The company claims it “tracked and analyzed each retailer’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email campaigns over a three-month period to assess how effective they are in driving consumer engagement”. The results, it says, show that “many social media and email campaigns do not match up with consumers’ patterns for when and how they engage with brands”.

“While marketers have plenty of tools at their disposal to put these multi-channel strategies in place, they have been slow to effectively harness the power of customer data available to them,” said Yesmail president Michael Fisher. “When properly collected and analyzed, this type of digital intelligence provides in-depth, actionable insights that can definitively improve a brand’s marketing strategy.”

According to Yesmail, each social network has an optimal day for pushing content. Facebook campaigns, for instance, achieve the highest level of engagement on Tuesdays while the most interaction on YouTube occurs on Monday.

“We also found that there are opportunities for marketers to utilize different types of content to engage consumers,” said Fisher. “The data revealed an upward trend in consumers’ interaction with video on Facebook, yet this format was only used in 6.5 percent of deployed campaigns. This is just another example of how crucial it is for brands to not only measure the success of their campaigns, but to dig deeper into the insights to find ways to improve future campaigns based on trends in the way consumers engage with the brand.”

Yesmail also reckons that combining social and email campaigns is more effective than using either on their own. Again, you have to get the timing right though. If you send out emails before launching a social campaign, those emails “drive social engagement via share buttons and calls to action that promote interaction with the brand”:

It also says that tailoring the email to the social medium that’s going drive the campaign works well:

• On Facebook, engagement grew by roughly 50 percent when one email campaign was deployed on the same day and by 100% when two email campaigns were deployed.
• Twitter campaign engagement levels reached a 25 percent increase with one email campaign and a 40% increase with two.

“In today’s digital age, marketers must communicate through multiple channels to ensure they provide an opportunity for their audience to interact with the brand,” added Fisher. “The correlation we found between email and social media is just another example of how marketers can boost the effectiveness of campaigns when they strategically weave each communication channel together.”