I'm just back from vacation and as I get back into the roll of developing and implementing social media programs, I'm sifting through a variety of observations.
The first few concern timing and social media programs. Summer is known throughout the blog world as "vacation time". August is, for implementing social media programs, much like to trying to land a job in August...nobody's home.
While Back-to-School programs, including both on and offline ads, drive purchases from late July to August, the same cannot be said of social media, efforts. Traffic to social media sites is down, bloggers are on hiatus and everyone's outside and not in front of their computer...well almost.
This leads to my second set of observations. - technology is everywhere. This is obviously not a new thought. It really struck home for me though as I camped in one of our National Parks last week...and a good 75% of the people there had their cell phones or laptops out at one time or another...taking pictures of bears (I did that)... checking email and, quite a few, using VOIP on their computers to attend conferences and playing games to while away the time. Now that we've confirmed that, though...what is everywhere? Looking at the trends, certain social media applications lend themselves to vacation or travel or holidays....Facebook comes to mind. But other social media sites are updated once everyone is back home. Summer lends itself to developing blog fodder...not writing posts.
Extrapolate beyond summer and it seems obvious that timing is becoming an integral part of social media planning. As we all know..this is also nothing new, since we do this all the time with advertising and promotional programs that happen outside of social media...just one more step toward using social media as one more tool in the marketing mix.