Both marketing and sales are constantly walking a fine line: you have to stay engaged with your leads and customers, while never becoming overbearing. Contact them too much and you’ll annoy them; don’t contact them enough and they’ll forget about you. How can you successfully walk such a tightrope? It’s enough to make you feel like poor Linus Caldwell in my favorite film, Ocean’s 11.
You might feel similarly conflicted regarding your social media accounts. Social media is all about collaboration, interaction and sharing, but it’s a very inexact science. If you don’t post often enough, your following will remain small and customers won’t be engaged. And if you post too often, you’ll irritate your supporters and they’ll unfollow you. So how do you find the sweet spot?
It depends on the platform
Admittedly, “it depends” is a very unsatisfying answer to a question, but it’s the correct response here. The frequency of your posting should differ from platform to platform. Each social media site has its own tendencies and idiosyncrasies.
The most popular social site (and it’s not even close), you should be posting on Facebook at least once per day. In fact, posting on Facebook twice a day isn’t a bad idea, because most of your followers won’t even see your posts. When Facebook went public, it began to limit the organic reach of business pages in order to force companies to use their paid advertising services. That means that only a fraction of your followers will see any given post, unless that post becomes popular – the more popular it is, the wider your reach grows.
The Twitter timeline is like a river that never stops flowing, and sometimes the current is very fast. Therefore, any individual Tweet can easily be missed by your followers as they scroll through their timelines. Why does this matter? Because it means you shouldn’t be afraid of tweeting too much.
Furthermore, the best thing about Twitter is also the worst thing about Twitter: each tweet is only 140 characters. It’s awfully hard to be annoying in 140-character bursts (although don’t take that as a challenge). You should strive to Tweet at least 4-5 times per day, and don’t be afraid to send all the Tweets in the morning, and then repeat those exact same tweets in the evening. Everyone uses Twitter at different times of the day, so this practice will help you reach more of your followers. Many accounts utilize this strategy with little, if any, negative blowback.
An Instagram feed is similar to the Twitter timeline in that it tends to move quickly. However, because it takes a little more effort to post a picture instead of banging out a 140-character message, the Instagram feed has fewer posts. You should aim to post twice a day on Instagram, but don’t repeat posts as we advised with Twitter. This is not a common practice on Instagram.
The career networking site is a different animal compared to its social media counterparts. The vast majority of users don’t share content with their networks, although businesses certainly do. Instead of worrying about the number of posts per day or week, focus on providing informative, quality content on LinkedIn. Unlike the aforementioned social media sites, most people don’t use LinkedIn recreationally to kill time. Therefore, your followers will look to your page to provide valuable content instead of a link to Buzzfeed’s latest “15 Signs you Grew Up in the 90s” list. Post good content as often as you can find it, up to a couple of times per day.
Comments