Social Media: How Much is Too Much

Posted by David Chism | Fri, Dec 28, 2012

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.

About David Chism

David Chism started his business out of a passion for helping small contracting businesses grow, be more profitable and become better known to their target clients. One lifelong hobby of David is using techie gadgets. So this blog is a place where he writes about technology, marketing ideas, just for fun (humor), personal thoughts on small business and more.

     
   
       

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