Social Media: How Much is Too Much

The dust has begun to set­tle on Social Media sites. The major­i­ty of the world is famil­iar with Face­book, Blog­ging, YouTube and Twit­ter. A few extra geeky peo­ple know how to use Google+ too. The dust has also set­tled on Social Media Mar­ket­ing. How’s that? What I mean is that the pace is slow­ing and the online cul­ture is matur­ing. Most con­sumers are famil­iar with the com­mon social sites, and have a cer­tain taste regard­ing what they want to see on their wall, their Twit­ter feed or their search results. Often peo­ple like to engage their pre­ferred busi­ness­es online, but fick­le opin­ions can turn quick­ly to annoy­ance and frus­tra­tion if the com­pa­ny is doing too much social media mar­ket­ing. Keep­ing it Social and Real We have all done some form of net­work­ing in our life. We begin a casu­al con­ver­sa­tion, chat a bit about what each per­son does, and end by exchang­ing con­tact infor­ma­tion. Sound famil­iar? The peo­ple that achieve suc­cess through net­work­ing are those who keep it real and are gen­uine. They are con­sid­ered good social net­work­ers. They know how to engage and talk to peo­ple. Who are the ones who fail at social net­work­ing? Those who talk too much and don’t have the per­mis­sion to keep talk­ing! We all know peo­ple who are just annoy­ing. They try so hard to get their mar­ket­ing mes­sage out that it actu­al­ly turns peo­ple away. At a net­work­ing event, we try to avoid this type of per­son like the plague – we just can’t stand lis­ten­ing to him toot his own horn. This same annoy­ing per­son exists today online. Folks have tak­en their same social strug­gles with them online. They think the tick­et to more busi­ness is post­ing more often, shar­ing more videos, lik­ing oth­er peo­ple’s post, and so on. I’ve watched numer­ous busi­ness­es who have hun­dreds (or thou­sands) of fol­low­ers, yet have almost no two-way engage­ment. In oth­er words, they are post­ing, lik­ing, and shar­ing, but not get­ting any real response from the audi­ence. That word, ​“audi­ence,” is the prob­lem. We need to invite them to be par­tic­i­pants. I once lis­tened in on a webi­nar where a social media expert on Face­book told her lis­ten­ers that Face­book engage­ment real­ly won’t take off until you have at least 500 fans (likes). What she did­n’t say is what type of fans. How about real fans: peo­ple who real­ly like your ser­vice or prod­uct. This is known as per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing. It makes per­fect sense. You use social media mar­ket­ing care­ful­ly, and to those who real­ly are fol­low­ers. Then you use com­mon sense to know how much shar­ing is too much. I per­son­al­ly don’t think a ser­vice com­pa­ny should be post­ing more than 1 – 2 times a week. The com­pa­nies that real­ly do well post­ing more often with good engage­ment are those who have a very unique prod­uct or ser­vice. For exam­ple, I’ve seen a start­up brew­ery get a lot of new likes and engage­ment when it post­ed pic­tures or a sta­tus update. Why? Because it is a very unique and new busi­ness. Peo­ple are excit­ed to be part of some­thing new. Now that busi­ness own­er will need to keep up with being real and engag­ing with his audi­ence. He will have to make sure he nev­er becomes the annoy­ing social out­cast (yes, it can hap­pen even to a brew­ery). A Quick Review: Be a com­mon sense busi­ness own­er, keep­ing your mar­ket­ing real, unique and engag­ing. Don’t embar­rass your prod­uct or ser­vice with mul­ti­ple annoy­ing posts a day, think­ing you’ll reach more people.