There was an excellent question in my O365 Yammer Network, and since I answered it, I thought I might as well include it on my blog, too!

Here’s the question:

“What are the peak times for Yammer traffic, or is it specific to each organization? Trying to find out the best time to post content for high visibility.”

The short answer:

It’s specific to each organization.

Here’s how you find that out:

Let it be known that I also manage the external social media for my company, and my caveat is we’re a niche B2B organization, and social media is far more B2C.

So all those articles about “THIS is the best time to post!” didn’t apply to us at all.

What does apply is that the most accurate benchmark you can do with this kind of thing is to measure against yourself.

So it took us some dedicated time (and a helpful third-party company, SimplyMeasured) to find out our own peak days and times for each social media platform.

I still wasn’t comfortable until I had a year’s worth of data to crunch.

Yammer is no exception to the need for testing and analyzing.

So even if you do find a great comparison to your organization that looks like it’ll work, I still say…

Experiment!

• Pay attention to what’s going on offline. For example, every Thursday in my company, we have an “All Company” meeting where everyone available in our office gathers for 15 minutes to share updates. The meeting notes are posted in Yammer, and I always see an appreciable spike in views on Thursdays, because we also have a lot of traveling trainers who know they’re missing that in-person meeting but still want to get the updates.
• Watch the analytics, either the O365 ones that are being developed or a third party (I use tyGraph). You’ll be able to spot trends once you get an appreciable amount of time & data.
• It’s never a bad idea to let people know what you’re doing. One of the things I still do is reinforce this message: “Put it in Yammer.” Now I have people saying things such as, “You want an update about X, you have to go to Yammer to find it.” Over time—and it did take time for us—people start thinking about Yammer as part of their Things to Check During the Day. This helps when you have those important updates going out.

What To Do When You DO Get Data

Here’s something else I did just the other day. When I was compiling my monthly report for my External Network, one of the slides I included was “Message likes by day of week/month.”

I ran this over the past 4 months and it showed me some interesting spikes here and there.  But even so, I’m not about to go saying “Wednesdays are THE best days!” because I also have to remember all the variables that went on: Was there an event that month? A special promotion?

And most importantly, is 4 months enough data? I’d feel more comfortable with at least 6, but see, that’s where you have to determine your own benchmarks and milestones.

What I can do is cautiously posit that Wednesdays are _a_ good day to try out the extra-good content, and see where it goes from there.

How do you measure your benchmarks in social media?