You are a small local coffee shop that opened. So far, there are a few fans and people love your coffee. Unfortunately, all your efforts are dwarfed by Starbucks and it’s fanatic coffee drinker base. They out marketing you and have a bigger social media presence. You had enough…

“If they want war… we’ll give them war”

No it’s not really war but social media marketing can be intense and extremely competitive. It’s not fun a lot of times. All you want is a little engagement to start the social media momentum going. You try and post the best content possible… suddenly you notice something.

Your competitor just posted the similar content few hours before and got all your engagement There goes any chance for the momentum you hoped to create. Now you have to try again.

This happens a lot. Content marketing is extremely competitive especially for spaces with large customer bases. There is only a small window of time to take advantage and everyone seems to always post when you do.

Welcome to the War of Content Marketing.

It’s tough to keep up, especially for startups and small businesses (like a coffee shop with already slim margins). The only solution is the optimize your posting schedule so that it undercuts the competitor. If only you can find out what your competition is doing….

Well good news. Crowdbabble aims to level the playing field. Here is how.

Operation Fair Game: Mine Your Competitor’s Posting Analytics
One of the best features of Crowdbabble has to offer is the ability to add public social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Public pages and accounts are fair game for social media data so that means anyone can mine the data to get their analytics.

All you need to do is sign up for Crowdbabble then connect your social profile which gives the platform ability to capture the data. Think of this as a ticket. Once the ticket is accepted, you will need to add the social accounts to Crowdbabble so we can capture it.

For the case of our indie coffee shop, Starbucks has a prominent social media marketing campaign so you can learn about how they post but most importantly, their followers and how they interact. So let’s go ahead and add Starbucks’ Instagram account to Crowdbabble.

Now go grab a coffee and roast some beans while we wait for the data to load.

Operation Guerrilla Content Posting: Post When They Don’t Post
Once the data is mined, head to Engagement > Time Parting Analysis. Let’s look at the data for the last two weeks. You will see two important graphs: engagement by the hour and engagement by day.

Engagement by the Hour provides you with an hour by hour breakdown of the peak post activity. There are two important parts to this graph, first is the peak post activity and the peak follower activity. The peak post activity is when the social media managers of the account are posting. For example, you can see Starbucks posting mostly between 10 am to 11 am. The peak follower activity shows when the followers are most active on the Starbucks Instagram, in this case it is 5 pm to 6 pm. We also see that Starbucks barely posts content at 9, 12, and 2 pm in the day time.

Engagement by day shows the same peak posts and follower activity but it is by the days not hour. In this case we see the weekly breakdown. For Starbucks, we discover Thursday is the peak post days and Friday are the peak activity days for followers. We also discover the Tuesday is the day Starbucks posts the least.

What does this mean? It means the best time to post content for your local coffee shop that will allow you to gain momentum on Instagram from people who also like coffee shops (this post will appear in the Instagram feed) would be on Tuesday at 5 pm.

We encourage you to post everyday at the optimal times but Tuesday at 5 pm is the prime spot for your best and exclusive content. This will help you get the most momentum without having Starbucks’ content get in the way, which can help you gain more exposure.

Take Away?

With Crowdbabble we are able to extrapolate the time and days for your post and follower activity. This works for any public account so you can level the playing field and wage an evenly matched content war if needed (please be nice). However, don’t forget to analyze your own data! You will be able to get same level of insights on your followers to see when it’s the best time to post for you.

Blog post was written with Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon