Excuse me, when is the next communication due?
Timely communication used to be a thing. Like a train schedule, or a bus service.
Things ran like clockwork.
Newspapers were printed and made available to all at the same time every day. Radio news bulletins ran at specific times, on the hour, every hour. TV news bulletins followed a pre-arranged schedule.
This was a time when professional communicators were focused on relevance of message and precise co-ordination of timings.
Announcements were designed to be as simultaneous as possible. Leading with the medium most desired. All the media ducks neatly lined up so that important communication was thorough, effective and timely.
Then along came the internet and we discovered we could publish stuff online any time we wanted. Never since the times of the 17th century town crier had such freedom of information spread been so available. Hear, ye! Hear, ye!
Then social media happened, and we lost all sense of time, scrolling deep, deep down to the bottom of our aptly named timelines. Time is meaningless now.
Those algorithms that built our expectations around shared moments online? They have deliberately disabled the timeliness of that approach.
Post something on LinkedIn on Monday at 10am and you’ll be lucky if your followers see it in their feed three weeks from now.
Facebook and Instagram are not much better, content showing up long after it was posted, infrequently enough to be useless. Although, on those platforms there’s so much advertising that you’ll be lucky if your followers see your posts at all.
Yet we’re all still communicating like it’s 2010.
We’re sending out timely messaging like “the swimming pool is regrettably closed today” or “we’re fully booked tonight” and placing it into the void of someone’s future timeline. Not now, not today, but sometime in the future, determined only by a faceless algorithm somewhere on a cyber farm in California. By the time your followers read it, it genuinely won’t matter. Maybe it didn’t to begin with?
If the message is important and timely, there are more reliable solutions than social media platforms. Your own website, for instance. If the message relies on the user looking to find out information, that’s as good a place as any. 100% control.
If the message must be with the individual quickly, and get their attention, Royal Mail is faster (and more likely to get read).
If the message needs to reach individuals quickly, email or SMS are the most direct media formats. 100% control.
Why, then, are so many communications campaigns reliant on social media content to convey their message?
If your messaging is important, why post it somewhere it might not be seen?
If it doesn’t matter when or if it’s seen, then why post it at all? It’s just wallpaper. Noise. Blah blah in a room full of blah.
As communicators we have zero control over the delivery scheduling on social media platforms, yet we continue to bake them into their channel delivery strategies and plans to work like they did almost 15 years ago. They don’t.
If the answer is that you are communicating out of fear of not being seen to communicate, then that’s not good reason enough. You are putting the information out there, everywhere, so no one can accuse you of not doing it. It’s throwaway wording. Meaningless twaddle. But it’s ok, you can show you tried, right?
Forgive me for being old fashioned but I believe that timeliness matters when it comes to communications. As does relevance.
Let’s get back to some basics and stop filling future voids.
Less is more. Be precise. Be timely. And be heard.
There’s more where this came from. I share more of my thinking on Cunningly Good Marketer on Substack. Subscribe to get my opinions, experience and real-world lessons straight to your inbox.
