If social media is way down on your list of priorities for the week, you may need to revisit them. If you’re only getting round to managing your online presence come the end of the week, you may as well not bother. Here’s why.

Admin on a Monday? Calling all your leads on Tuesday? Spend Wednesday in meeting with potential collaborators and on Thursday you’re planning your next big campaign. By the time Friday (or ‘Friyay’) comes round you’re exhausted and looking forward to the weekend. You can chill out, plan the weekend or even next week if you’re feeling particularly productive. Besides, no one answers the phone on Friday and you’re not going to seal and deal – pencil it in for Monday morning admin!

So what do you do as a creative and innovative marketer on your dragging Friday afternoon at work? Jump on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, of course. Start blurring the lines between work and pleasure and market the company in a new way without spending any of your cash-strapped marketing budget. Your boss (or bank balance) with thank you for it.

One problem. Did you know that Friday afternoons, specifically between 3pm and 5pm are the quietest times on social media during waking hours! What a complete waste of time. Unless you’re using a great scheduling tool to schedule your posts for when your customers are actually online, you might as well just draw a promotional poster and stick it to the window. This is, of course, if what you’re actually posting is compelling content. If not, you might as well draw your poster and stick it in the shredder. But this is an entirely separate blog post.

All is not lost. You have three solutions.

1. Prioritise your social media management because it’s really important – get some specialist social media training and post your material at better times than Friday afternoon.Other lazy social media approaches include Twitter Tuesday. Social media is more than just a promotional brand awareness platform, find out how to use Twitter as a sales tool.

2. Get an agency to do it – they have the time, resources and expertise to represent your business whilst you’re getting on with other tasks during peak times of the week. Find out if you should outsource social media management.

3. Buy a premium Hootsuite account. This really is the very least you can do! If you’re happy with the content you’re creating – at least make sure it’s consistent and posting at optimal times! You can even find out exactly when your audience is likely to be online by using tools like Followerwonk.

For more tricks of the trade books into a social media training session for a bespoke strategy overhaul as well as learning how to generate some return on your investment. For more productivity hacks, check this out.

Don’t let spending your valuable time on social media management become a completely false economy. You’ll thank us later.