142 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING you need to speak to how your approach differs and why. It’s critical that you don’t feel like you need to replicate the efforts of your competitors and that you instead remain focused on the best approach for your company. If you are marketing in the United States, it’s helpful to know that the Eastern and Central Time zones represent close to 80% of the U.S. popu- lation. If you have to make a choice which time zone to target, time things for your U.S. audiences in EST. If you target international audiences, pay attention to which coun- tries and time zones are most represented. When Ekaterina managed the Facebook strategy and global presence for Intel, she knew that her interna- tional audience was so diverse that no matter when she posted something, it would always get immediate likes and comments. But even then, she made sure she was using analytics to help her reach the highest peaks of engagement. First tracking it manually (in the early days), then engaging tools such as PageLever, she looked at the days and times when the most engagement happened. It is also important to play with different times and to test what works best around various types of posts. At the end of the day, quality content is always going to trump quantity and volume, especially with the ability across most social media platforms to use paid media to enhance the reach of a post or tweet. You never want to get caught in the cycle of producing content for content’s sake, so frequency first and foremost needs to be in line with what’s interesting, important, and relevant to your audience. When evaluating frequency, a helpful metric to have is the shelf life, or life cycle, of your content by platform. Because each social media platform performs differently, measure your next 10 or so posts, tweets, Instagram photos, pins, and so on, on an hourly basis. Each hour, calculate how many engagements there are on the piece of content you posted—for example, likes, comments, shares, @replies, retweets, or repins. You may even need to go into shorter time increments for platforms like Twitter. Find out when that engagement starts to taper off and ultimately ends. Through