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People working at social media with a different time zone from your main audience, how do you cope with it?
At my company, our boss wants us to organize ourselves so we can answer users on social media with diligence. However, we live in a different time zone. Our main audience is America, but we’re from Spain, which usually means around 5-6 hours apart. Anyone in a similar situation?
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1 Reply
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That’s why you use a scheduling and a management tool.
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[deleted]
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embrace the night owl life
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Flexible Working Hours: Depending on your company’s policies, consider adjusting your working hours to overlap with peak activity times in your target audience’s time zone. This allows you to respond to users in a timely manner.
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**Handling** a time zone difference between your **social media team** and your primary audience can be challenging, but with proper planning and organization, you can effectively cope with it. Here are a **few strategies** to help you manage this situation:
**Extend Working Hours**: Consider adjusting the working hours of your social media team to have some overlap with your primary audience’s active hours. This may involve shifts or staggered schedules to ensure coverage during peak engagement times.
**Prioritize Response Times**: Determine specific response time goals for your team, keeping your audience’s expectations in mind. Communicate these goals clearly, and ensure team members understand the importance of prompt responses to maintain a positive user experience.
**Utilize Scheduling Tools:** Use social media management tools to schedule posts and responses in advance. This way, you can prepare answers during your working hours and schedule them to go live during your audience’s active hours.
**Monitor and Listen**: Use social media monitoring tools to keep track of conversations and mentions of your brand during non-working hours. This way, you can identify urgent or critical issues requiring immediate attention and assign team members to handle them promptly, even outside regular working hours.
**Implement Chatbots or Automated Responses**: Consider setting up chatbots or automated responses for frequently asked questions or common inquiries. This can help provide instant answers to users, even during non-working hours, while reducing your team’s workload.
**Outsource or Hire Remote Help**: You could explore outsourcing social media management tasks or hiring remote workers in time zones that align with your primary audience. This can provide additional support during crucial times.
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Unfortunately, since American typically treat social media as a glorified customer service platform, you will need someone to answer questions immediately. Hire freelancers in the country that can work normal shifts.
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I do have similar circumstance. The way my team tackled this was by dividing shifts and days.
Let’s say there are 3 members in the team and we roughly need to monitor 18 hours (that’s extreme but let’s assume)
We divide 6 hours each. And then also decide which shift on which day would be allocated. This way everyone works async + we are able to track our responses.
Every few weeks, we shuffle our days so others get rest and reset their mental health.
This is one way, it’s not perfect but works for us.
All ears to some better solution though (AI Chatbot is fine, but there’s things that require human conversations)
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