Social media has become a pivotal element in the marketing strategies for most brands because of its scalability and potential to reach a wide audience.
But not every post has to contribute to the bottom line of your business - you need to consider social media as an opportunity to personalize your communication with your target customers. But in that sense, how often is too often? Too many brands make the mistake of posting social media updates more often than consumers like, and this may prove to be an expensive mistake, causing irritated consumers turn away from the brand.
Striking a Healthy Balance Between Information and Frequency
Updates about your brand, or even messages to your consumers, should be undertaken in a manner that retains their attention. Even if it means less frequent posting, the goal is to strike a relationship with your clients in order to keep them engaged. Remember that high-quality and meaningful posts will resonate in the minds of your consumers far more than frequent posts every few hours. Brand updates should not annoy your customers, they should inform and educate them, every time.
Social media marketing is done to connect with customers. The first step involved, before you consider posting your first brand update, is to predict the frequency at which you should be posting. In order to do this, you need to conduct research on the social networking sites you're considering - check to see how many times other brands are updating on each site and use this as your starting point.
Studies Don't Lie -- How Often is Too Often?
Socialbakers, a popular contributor of social media analytics, conducted a study on different brands and their frequency of updates on Facebook. The study shows that the top brands don't post more than once a day to keep their audiences engaged without becoming annoying. Anything more than once a day and you increase the potential of annoying your audience.
When it comes to Twitter, Social Bakers studied 11,000 random tweets from brands and recommends that three tweets per day is an ideal frequency with which to engage your audience.
For some social media sites, the lifespan of an update is long and for others it's short - according to studies, the lifespan of a tweet is just 18 minutes, while Facebook posts last for around 90 minutes. This is why posting tweets more frequently is a necessary marketing strategy.
To be most effective, you'll need to schedule your updates to resonate with the online presence of your target audience. For example, people go online more socially after working hours, in the evening or night. This is perhaps the best time to post to engage with your audience. Holidays and weekends also present good opportunities to interact.
In Summary
Social media strategies are not always black and while. In fact, they need constant research to stay relevant. Try to make your updates interactive so you're able to gauge the responses of your audience. This will help you meet their needs in a more timely and consistent way.
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