There’s too much noise on social media, and brands need to have the right social media marketing strategy to be heard online. However, it’s also easy to get carried away and start trying to rise above the noise without a clear voice. Doing too much social media posting (posting too often, displaying the wrong things, or being present on the wrong social channels) can harm your strategy.
Why is This Happening?
Social media users understand the purpose of advertising, so they tolerate it. However, they don’t always recognize the content presented to them in their news feeds as being promotional. People follow brands on social media because they offer engaging, exciting, and valuable content. Once they start seeing too much unoriginal and repetitive content, they realize that they are simply targets for advertising. They become frustrated and irritated because the brand they’re following isn’t creating anything innovative or new. At this point, it’s easy for them to hit unlike or unfollow and disconnect from a brand. And that’s social media marketing’s poison pill.
Avoiding Overdoing it With Your Social Media Posting
Take a Step Back
If you’re losing followers or aren’t getting the engagement you want in spite of taking proper care of all the technicalities, take a step back and reassess your social media audience. There are so many different social media networks, which can make things overwhelming and stressful. Regularly, enterprises feel that they must check networks to keep pace with everyone. When reassessing your strategy, ask yourself these three critical questions:
Are you losing followers and fans?
If your follower count is decreasing, it’s a strong indication that you’re sharing too much material with little or no value. People won’t stick around if they feel like your social media posting is irrelevant or if you’re spamming them. When reevaluating your strategy, make sure that what you’re posting is relevant. They should align with your audience’s concerns, behaviors, pain points, and interests. Consider who your audience is as well as what they want to see.
Once you start posting engaging content and stop posting too frequently, you’ll likely see an increase in followers along with higher retention.
Whose content are you promoting?
People like to follow the leaders in the industry. They want to get updates from you or your brand, but they also want to see you being social. That’s important to identify yourself as a thought leader, develop relationships, and engage with like-minded individuals in other ways. So, are you promoting your content or do you have a balance? For this purpose, you can apply the 70/20/10 rule in your social media posting practices. Break down your social media posts into three categories: – Sharing to provide your audience value . – Sharing the content of other brand and individuals . – Promoting your brand. Only 10% of your content should be self-promotional. Also, you should know how algorithms of particular media platforms rank shared content. For example, to determine how posts will rank in users’ news feeds, Facebook’s algorithm takes your posts’ engagement into account. When people share, comment, or like content on your page, Facebook will deem it popular and help all your future posts get seen by more people. Turn your social media into a resource for your audience, where you will engage and educate without pushing your services to your audience.
Are you promoting relevant content?
Always focus on quality instead of quantity. If you’re sharing content that your audience doesn’t want to read or that doesn’t provide value, then you shouldn’t be posting anything. Also, make sure that users share your content for the sake of your profile looking active. Provide tips, advice, guides, fun facts or trivia, or industry news. Your content needs to give your audience what they need or want to know – with an original spin on it. Share things your audience care about but take that as an opportunity to show your experience by infusing it with your point of view. There is a reason why people started following you, so don’t give them a reason to unfollow.
Striking the Right Balance
Research and experiment. Find out when is the best time to post on specific social networks as well as how often. Schedule your posts to remove the need of you being present to save valuable time. Try posting at different times and try various types of content.
eClincher
Automating your social media marketing is something that can be of great help, but will produce adverse effects if you rely on it too much. With eClincher, you’ll have a unified tool that contains all the features required for taking control of your social media endeavors. Use it to schedule and publish your social media posts as well as to analyze their performance. Produce customized reports and use the data to tweak and adjust your strategies to perform better. Communicate with your audience from the unified social inbox, monitor hashtags, mentions, and keywords, and make the data accessible to all your social media team members. Also, one of the most valuable features is the Suggested Content Feed. It helps you to find and curate content your audience might find relevant by solely entering a search term, keyword, or phrase into your saved content feed. As long as you’re not overwhelming your audience with your content, not being too self-promotional, and addressing them in a tone they are open to receiving, your consumers will love to engage with your brand on social media. Regarding engagement and reach, one image post per day can make a more significant impact than four to five posts per day. Every consumer is different, so take time to experiment and discover how your followers react to posts of different types and at various times of the day. Remember, balance is key to many things in life and business. Your social media posting strategy is no different.
