The best time to launch your events in the New Year

2023 is upon us, and here at Skiddle, we want to assist you on the best time to launch your events in the New Year. You’ll likely have a rough idea of the events you’ll be planning for next year, but we thought we’d look at some of the optimal times to launch your event and give you some ideas on posting to social media. 

When considering the best time to launch your event, thinking about specific days, dates and times will help you. For example, paydays in Britain fall on different days, and you can launch your event around these to try and maximise ticket sales. 

In addition, there are widely used best practices when it comes to posting on various social media outlets. You can use these as a guide, carry out tests and of course dive deeper into the analytics by looking at your own audience’s viewing habits. 

We’ve also looked at some historical data from the Skiddle website, giving you an idea of when traffic spikes and the times people are most active on our website. Discover our tips on the best time to launch your events in the New Year below.

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Launch on the first payday of the year

Launching your event on the first payday of the year can be a helpful strategy. The festive period is in the back of your customer’s minds when the end of January arrives, and with no major holidays around this time, people habitually begin to look ahead for events to attend in the spring and summer. You could begin your promotion earlier in the month, teasing the details of the return of your event, eventually launching on the evening when wages land in your customer’s bank accounts. 

This way, your marketing campaign will hopefully catch the eye of a potential customer with disposable income. It’s also worth thinking about when payday falls on Friday. Historical data from the Skiddle website shows that Thursday, Friday and Saturday are some of the busiest days on our website for traffic. 

If the payday falls on Friday, you could use this in your promotion, writing a call to action on Thursday across your socials to entice people to buy tickets the next day. When Saturday arrives, do the same, amending the wording to try and target people who haven’t yet found an event.

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Mix it up between daytime and evening launches

There is a benefit to alternating your launches between daytime and evening. A weekday afternoon launch, for example, can be timed to attempt to catch people on their lunch breaks when they’re at work. Some of your potential attendees may have time off in the week, so they’ll be free to browse for events and set their alarms for your onsale. 

When looking through the Skiddle data, traffic on our website tends to peak at the times of 7 pm, 8 pm and 9 pm. It’s important to note that this could be people browsing for an event or looking for ideas on what to do on a certain date. But it could be helpful. If traffic increases in the evening, you could launch your event at night, potentially taking advantage of this activity. 

Potential attendees will have finished work at these times. They’ll be able to put the time aside to buy tickets, and you won’t be interrupting their day with an event launch. It’ll give you a little more time to drive sign-ups and some more hours to squeeze in some last-minute promotion, too. 

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Social Media analytics

If you’re using platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to promote your events, the analytics feature can be a powerful way of measuring the your content’s reach. On Instagram, you can see the times and hours of the day your audience is most active. In addition, you can also see how many link clicks your posts have gained. It’s worth looking into these two stats, analysing the data and using them in tandem. You’ll be able to get an idea of when your followers interact with your page and how they interact with your event launch posts. 

If you find that the majority of your audience is active on a specific day, you could tailor your event launch content to go out then, using the day that’s the second busiest to post-event promotion content. 

To attract new customers, consider creating a giveaway on the day your audience is most active and ask them to share the post on their story. Hopefully, you’ll have gained new followers that you can attract on the next event launch.

Twitter Analytics allows you to view Engagement Rate, Link Clicks, Likes, Retweets, Replies, and Stats around Video Content. Link clicks are the metric to look at when posting ticket links; likes and retweets are the metric to look at when posting memes. A high amount of likes and retweets could lead to extra followers, which you can hopefully convert to attendees on your next launch.

Facebook’s analytics tool, Insights, can give you granular results based on your posts. There are eleven main metrics, then various sub-sections. For example, in the Views section, you can see Total Views, Total People Who Viewed and Top Sources.

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Look at general guidelines

The internet features lots of guides on posting guidelines for various social media platforms. It’s important to note that these guides are a general overview, and variables will be at play: content created for the purposes of a test might perform differently than content created to offer value to your audience. But, if you’re just starting out and have a small audience or want to test out the optimal times, these guides can give you a starting point. 

Event launches are delicate things, and getting them wrong could jeopardise the potential of your night. So we wouldn’t advise you to launch an event on the advice of a general guide. You could, however, assign a portion of posts to go out across various platforms at the times recommended.

Make sure that they still have value to your audience, and when the week is done, analyse the findings and see how you can use the data to find a launch time. 

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Got a question you need an answer to? Give us a call on 03333010301 or ask us a question over on the Skiddle Promoter Twitter account by clicking or tapping on the button below. Alternatively, you can also find a list of our most frequently asked questions over at https://help.promotioncentre.co.uk/