How do you know if you are over-doing it with the tweets…?

The story of Australian Jade Ruthven, and the letter she received from her ‘friends’ regarding her supposed over-posting of her tiny daughter’s progress on Facebook saw many people pose the question, can you really post too much on social media? Where is the cut-off point, if there is one? Who decides when it is too much?

The context

Jade Ruthven’s case is a personal one, as opposed to business which is what we address in this article but the letter she received, a copy of which subsequently went viral across the globe, produced a riot of opinions. Interestingly, they all seemed in favour of Ms. Ruthven but the crux of the matter was this – is it possible to post too much and give your audience too much of a good thing? Certainly friends of Ms. Ruthven seem to think so.

How much is too much, in relation to your business and sharing information, news, articles and general updates on social media?

How long is a piece of string?

There are so many questions, so many variables and factors that it can seem almost impossible to answer such a question. No doubt someone, somewhere is working on a magic equation right now but, until that magic formula drops in your inbox, we have scoured the Internet and come up with 5 indicators that you are tweeting and posting just about the right amount of times, not too much and not too little.

Indicator 1: REACTION

OK, you post a tweet, update your status and hit the send button… then you do it again… and then again but it may be that this is not actually doing your business much good.

The question you need to be asking is how is the audience reacting to your tweets etc.? Are you tweets and updates echoing, or just shouting out the once?

What you are looking for are re-tweets, shares, likes, favourites, pins and such like, all indicators that your audience is with you, reading you and understanding you?

If this isn’t happening…

… your followers are either jaded, with an over-kill of tweets and posts or, you are talking to the wrong people.

Indicator 2: the number of followers is growing steadily…

… and naturally. All too often, you will see accounts pop up that tell you for “$5 you can have 30,000 new followers within 24 hours” or other ludicrous claims. Think quality, rather than quantity.

If your content is spammy and overdone, people stop following. If you don’t tweet or update, people will stop following but, if they like what you do, they will share and re-tweet; their followers will see it and from those followers you may get a handful of people following you.

It is the way that social media works; the clue is in the name – “social”. Be social and appropriate and people will follow you. Your audience needs to grow naturally, and not be forced with sill $5 offers.

Indicator 3: the RIGHT people are responding

This is where you are effectively asking for a favour or two from the high flyers in your industry. A great example is a fledgling furniture company with a unique product – creating furniture from old wine barrels. They tweet, including the high flyers such as @Kevin_McCloud and he re-tweets etc. and the ball starts rolling.

You don’t have to look for just the famous celebrities, but well-known ‘icons’ within your line of business. Getting this type of response can create a much-needed reaction for your business.

Indicator 4: advertising vs. conversation

There is no right or wrong when it comes to how you use social media in terms of advertising and/or conversation with employees, but the response you get – and how you subsequently respond – will vary… or it should.

Some businesses do use their Twitter feed, for example, as an advertising or marketing space; in this, overdo it with hundreds of tweets a day gets a bit boring, hence people stop following.

However, if you are indulging in conversation with clients, customers and fans, then you can get away with tweeting or posting more. However, unless you have the time, energy and person to tweet and post all of the time, you could possibly never get on with anything useful, ever again.

Indicator 5: what the dashboard says

For those with a serious nature behind their social media presence, it pays to tap into the power of platforms such as Hootsuite or BufferApp. The premium or business services of these platforms allows you to connect all your social media presence together in one place.

You can post the same thing across all your platforms, or lead a campaign on just one to up the followers and shares. Likewise, you can also see from various streams how well your accounts are doing and what real results you are reaping.

In fact, you can see forming before your very eyes your magic formula as to how many tweets and posts are too much, too little or just right.

What do you think is the optimum number of tweets for a business to send in a day? What about other social media platforms?

Love it or hate it, Facebook is THE social media platform that the majority of us are hooked on. When we should be doing far more productive things – like working – we can be found sneaking our way on to the site, just to peek at who is doing what, with whom.

For businesses, it has been a fabulous platform for zoning in on customers and, on the flip side, for customers to zone in on us. There is engagement, comments, likes and shares abound with many being culturally and socially richer for it.

It has been a platform that has stood the test of time, with even is wobbles not really being a wobble, as such.

There is always a downside…

Apparently, 1 in 3 divorces in the UK mention some form of ‘Facebook factor’ as contributing to the demise of the relationship; maybe it is the photos, or the lists of ‘friends’, or maybe the interaction and the being caught somewhere where you shouldn’t be… proceed with caution, seems to be the tag line here.

However, putting aside all these aside, using Facebook in the way Mark Zuckerberg probably intended it to be used, can reap the rewards.

As a social platform, however, it is not standing still. It has improved and morphed time and time again, with some changes recently announced that could make it a far better place for businesses to be, providing that they harness of its power – and do it right.

F8 is…?

The recent Facebook developer conference held in the US that listed 7 important, upcoming changes to the product. There are 7 changes on the way…

Spherical videos – who can deny the excitement of 360 degree camera technology? Google Maps of course, has been using this for some time now but Facebook announcing that it soon will be able to support this technology within the news feed is rather exciting, especially from a product point of view. Google owned YouTube has also recently announced this technology will be available soon meaning that photos will be a given a real boost.
Track online purchases and communicate with businesses via messenger – we saw a headline recently that summed this up nicely “Now you are can argue with customer services via Facebook!” Messenger has, by tradition, always been for individual users, but Facebook announced at F8 that this app would now also be available for companies and businesses too. You can thank customers for orders, tell them it has been shipped etc. This will either be a very welcome addition to your Facebook business page or, it will be sending shudders down your spine.
Reply to messages using other apps – if you wanted to send messages using other apps, you would have to navigate and use it ‘the long way round’, e.g. by shutting messenger, copying and pasting etc. but now, the Facebook messenger app will let you do this within it; in other words, the development of messenger will now make it far more sophisticated.
Facebook videos can be embedded elsewhere – FB is all about creating and sharing, but in the past, you could only share a link to a video, not the video itself. In this sense, FB might be going head to head with YouTube with the addition that these videos can now be embedded from Facebook to other places on the web.
Comment on a story elsewhere on the web? It will show up on Facebook too – media companies love people commenting, sharing and engaging with the latest scandal, gossip or election debate and thus, by Facebook being everywhere, and linking comments elsewhere with your page, this engagement is broadened considerably.
The ‘Internet of Things’ – bit sketchy on the details but, developers build apps to do all kinds of things, from monitoring calorie intake to opening the garage door. Facebook, not surprisingly, have decided they want to be part of this but, didn’t quite give the detail.
App developers and analytics – again, for those technically minded among you, Facebook will offer a free dashboard to app developers so that they can be boggled by analytics of app usage.

What does all this mean for local, online businesses?

The 360 degree camera technology and the increased sophistication of Facebook messenger could be the aspects that you find most relevant. The ability to sell online, as well as to connect and engage with people takes effort, time and money; it could be that Facebook has just made it easier for you to do this via Facebook.

If nothing else, as this technology is rolled out across the network, it will rejuvenate interest in the social media platform, once again becoming a leader of its field.

Social Media