In a short time, social media has become one of the most powerful marketing tools for businesses. Most businesses are trying to make a mark on social media with carefully designed posts.

However, it is getting hard these days to make an impact on social media because of various factors like information overload. 

There are services that assist a user in publishing social media posts at desired times. For example, a known service allows the user to queue up posts in advance and release the posts at times known to be most popular amongst target audience. Other similar services exist that aims to find the ideal time or schedule to publish social media posts. The existing services and products are purely time based to create time windows that are most ideal based on available audience. Such a generic solution is not always enough to create a high impact.

IBM has invented a method to elicit positive responses on social media. For a social media post, the method generates a set of topics. Then, based on monitoring of online activities of target audience, the method determines topic popularity corresponding to a topic in the set of topics over a plurality of time ranges. Further, the method generates a trending metric associated with the topic and a weighted topic popularity for a respective one of the plurality of time ranges, as a function of the topic popularity, the trending metric, and an elapsed time between time associated with the respective time range and a preferred time for posting the content.  Finally, the method selects a time range from the plurality of time ranges based on the weighted topic popularity for posting the content.

For example, at a user may compose a social media post about dinner recipes. At submission time, the server may observe that this is a post about dinner recipes, and finds or determines that the best time to post dinner recipes is 3 PM to the particular target audience of the user. The patented method then prompts the user that 3 PM would likely be a better time to send this message based on the findings.

In another example, a user may be about to publish a post related to technology in evening. However, only some of the users in the user’s social network really care about technology postings in the evenings and other users dislike the technology postings. The patented method determines that the post should ideally be delivered to a subset of the user’s social network at the given time.

The method patented by IBM ensures that users use their respective social media channels in the best possible way.

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