Take it Back to The Basics

We all know social media in one form or another. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+, the list goes on and on. Businesses know that they need to be on social media, but after that they don’t know what to do to make their social media presence effective.

Ideally, your business will leverage its presence online to either promote the brand, drive website traffic, increase sales, create brand advocates or any combination thereof. If you blindly post for the sake of posting, STOP, and keep reading.

Any company social media account needs to have a purpose. Are you announcing cool events? Do you want to host product giveaways? Do you want people to share and tag photos of their interactions with your product? These are things you need to keep in mind when managing your social media accounts. Too often a business will post incessantly to Twitter and Facebook in hopes of making a splash with consumers.

Think of that annoying Facebook friend you have that posts ten times a day about his/her dog, kids, whatever. How many nanoseconds does it take for you to see a post from them and completely ignore it? Well, that may be your business account if you take a machine gun approach and post too much.

How Often Should You Post?

How much is too much? It depends largely on the nature of your business/product, the quality of content you put out and your relationship with consumers. It’s great that Red Bull and GoPro post 20 times a day on Twitter, but that’s only because 1) they have full-time trained staff to do so, 2) their posts have amazing lifestyle pictures and 3) their consumers are a younger millennial audience that uses social heavily.

Here are some general rules of thumb for your posting frequency: Facebook and Google+, 1-3 posts a day at most. Most businesses get away with a few posts a week. For Twitter: 2-5 tweets a day if you’re really active. You can get away with more if you are live-tweeting an event or hosting a promotion, but otherwise you will lose followers.

Always Use Common Sense

At the end of the day social media is very much like a conversation with a person. Listen to what is said, respond appropriately, say interesting things and don’t ever be overbearing. Common sense plus a social media plan will do wonders for your business and help you effectively communicate with target audiences online.

Based on these suggestions, how often do you think your business should post on social media?

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