Are you being informative or annoying, too shy or too obnoxious with your posts? I've done some research and share it here on the frequency, nature and time considerations for any business managing their owned media channels.
In Summary: Post to Twitter at least 5 times a day. If you can swing up to 20 posts, you might be even better off. Every couple of hours after 07:00-11:00
Post to Facebook five to 10 times per week. 7 days per week. 10 + 3
Post to LinkedIn once per day. (20 times per month) - before 10:00
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Are you being informative or annoying, too shy or too obnoxious with your posts? I've done some research and share it here on the frequency, nature and time considerations for any business managing their owned media channels.
In Summary: Post to Twitter at least 5 times a day. If you can swing up to 20 posts, you might be even better off. Every couple of hours after 07:00-11:00
Post to Facebook five to 10 times per week. 7 days per week. 10 + 3
Post to LinkedIn once per day. (20 times per month) - before 10:00
SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
My SPEAK|pr program has five fundamental parts: Storify, Personalise, Engage, Amplify, and Know, and our focus today is on social media posting, which highlights the Amplification part of the program. We will determine at what stage is our attempt to be informative drifting into being annoying, and in what state is our desire to share end up being intrusive. We're going to look at metrics for social media sharing as well and how often you should post to to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I think we're all wondering how much social media is enough. We definitely consume a lot, but the question is, how much should we be producing? This is a question I ask not only myself, but for EastWest PR & the clients we handle as well. With a new Mastermind we've just launched called the SPEAK|pr mastermind, I've signed up for a platform called Lately which helps me autogenerate content. I was on the phone with their content manager recently and I asked how much I should be posting to social media, to which he replied that we first need to track our analytics. He said it's not just how much we're posting, but it's also about the engagement levels that we've got. Using the Lately platform, I had a look at the engagement and the posting of EastWest Public Relations since June of this year. I've got six channels, and I have posted a total of 1,800 posts, which sounds like an amazing amount. The question is, is it the right amount? I have ended up getting close to 600,000 in terms of reach, and over 30,000 impressions. Now, is that good or bad? According to a blog post by Constant Contact, Facebook is now a low volume-high value network and that means we should be posting not too frequently, because people get annoyed if there are too many posts. This means each post should be of value to the audience. They say frequency should be somewhere between 3-10 times per week. Your personal posts could be lower than your professional ones, but still not a great deal more. A Socialbakers report shows that big brands are posting an average of just once per day. The idea is basically to not post too many times into your Facebook company account. The challenge here is that if we post too little, we could lose the connection with our audience, so we've got to find the balance between posting too much as to be annoying and too little as to be forgotten. One of the benefits of a platform like Lately is it also helps me to take the same content and repurpose it. They change the headlines, the body content, and more, so I don't necessarily have to think about new content all the time. I could be repackaging the existing content I have. Facebook, on the other hand, values fresh content, so it's not so much about just posting the same thing in slightly different variations, but you have to think about it being new content. There's an Edge Rank study on the Moz blog that said A Socialbakers study researched ver 11,000 tweets from top br nds, and they found that three weets per day is where brand start to see big engagement. So, they suggest that three twee s is the magic number for a co pany account for optimal posting Once you tweet four or five ti es, the response per tweet peaks and then drops off. Actually, hen you look at their charts, t ey don't drop as steepl as you might think. But if ou've got a time value equation on Twitter, five times a d y for a company is the optimal umber, apparently. This do sn't mean to say that past he fifth tweet, there is no l nger any response. There will s ill be engagement, don't worry. hey are merely suggesting that, again, the caveat being that you can increase your frequency, but it has to be compelling and you've got fresh content, w ich you can create with a pl fresh content each time. The recurring theme seems to be that tform like Lately, you can p st up to 30 times a day and not lose any followers. If you' e like me and you've got a glob l presence, you need to be osting 24 hours a day. When if you're posting to Facebook, it should be not too often and wake up in the morning, my col eagues in Asia and Australia h ve already gone through most of their day, so I need to be p sting for them during their day too, and the optimal time is about six to seven o'cloc in the morning for Twitte, five to six in the afternoon and then later in the evenin. That's three different tr nches of tweets going out, so geotargeting is definitely so ething you need to consider. great quality. The chart from Socialbakers shows that the more opportunities you want to have, the more often you need to tweet, but the content does need to be unique for each tweet, as Twitter won't let you repost the same tweet twice. It's a study in scale, but as we talk about in the SPEAK|pr program, it's personalization at scale. Greater volume should correlate to greater total response, which it does, but as the percentage of engagement rate will decline with volume, the total number will have gone up. Alexandra Skey of Spokal believes that small business owners are better off sticking to the five tweets per day rule, because it gets you the maximum bang for your buck. That's great if you've got a one-timezone business in my view and if you are spending an average of 12 minutes to write one social media post. Apparently, a tweet lasts only approximately 18 minutes. Peter Bray ran a survey on the Moz website, and at the 18-minute mark, half of the tweets will have disappeared, and half of them then will have ceased to be of any value to you or your audience. So, after the 12 minutes it took you to compose that post, it will last for about 18 minutes. In a way, it's not a great return on investment, so we do have to think about when we post, because if we're posting at times when people are not interested, it'll be gone by the time they've actually had a chance to look at their social media. Facebook, interestingly, has a half-life of 90 minutes. That's a better ROI than your tweet if it takes you 12 minutes to write a Facebook post. The challenge is if it's not taking you 12 minutes and you do it too quickly, then it's considered to have no value and it could possibly annoy your audience and then you get unfollowed. The bottom line, really, is the a tweet lasts 20 minutes, while a Facebook post lasts 90 minutes, and so you have make your content count and worth your followers' attention, because within two hours, all that work you've done is gone. For LinkedIn, which is one those of us with businesses will prioritize the most because of the 590 million plus LinkedIn members all around the world, guidelines from LinkedIn itself suggest that 20 posts per month allows you to reach 60% of your audience. In other words, it's one post per weekday. I can see from my metrics that I have posted on my LinkedIn account 255 times over the last six months, so I'm probably in danger of overposting. They say if you post to your own website or to your own LinkedIn profile, one a day is good, but you can post two to three on your company page. That's just because those people have already dedicated themselves to your business, and this may not take into account posting into groups, because posting to a group is counted as a separate post and it doesn't appear on your feed. You could probably increase that frequency then, but it is a lot of work, because each post into each group is a dedicated piece of work. In terms of ROI for the EastWest Public Relations company account on LinkedIn, I have had 49 engagements with those 255, so it's not a bad 20%. I've had 4,000 impressions, and my reach is a staggering 166,000, so it's getting us some traction for what is effectively free, other than our time. The next dimension to think about is time and when to schedule posts. I mentioned that I have clients and teams on timezones in Asia, Europe, and the US, so I have to think about scheduling across three timezones, and that's where platforms like Lately, Zoho, Buffer, or HubSpot come in, thanks to their sophisticated targeting. With mailing lists, you can also start to create campaigns by geography, so that people are receiving these newsletters at the appropriate time for them. Social media is just the same. Scheduling becomes quite a big aspect, and so there are companies with dedicated social media managers working out which posts have got the right content for their engagement levels, which is the right platform, and which is the right timeline. Don't forget: each platform will deal with your content differently in different levels of engagement with different kinds of content. Lately shows me a scattergun graph with a very nice scale, either a linear scale or a logarithmic scale, and I've got a bigger cluster with engagement where I'm able to see now that I'm being quite effective with my company Twitter with 11 retweets, and my Facebook with 8, but my LinkedIn has provided me almost no engagement at all. It means is that we really nee to develop separate content specifically for different platf rms, and this unfortunately me ns even more work. I've got si platforms, and I'm cur ently developing what you co ld argue is generic content acro s all six. Having now looked t the performance on the Late y dashboard, I can see th t my content that is created generically and shared t the same time across all ti ezones is not getting me much ngagement. I either ha e to stop doing it or do it ore efficiently and more ef ectively. Lately is a $200-$300+ subscription per month, and there are others platforms like Lately as well that can help you create and schedule the content with different levels of support. Headliner helps you generate appropriate headlines but doesn't schedule them for you. You just cut and paste the headlines. There are lots of different tools which we talk about in our SPEAK|pr program and also on our website. At speak.pr.co, you'll find the Technology Applications Directory that we've got, which has got over 100 of these platforms listed in it. Looking at my content plan, we really do need to have an editorial calendar. It's no longer sufficient to be just posting content. Gary Vee, th social media sensation, h s apparently got two to three ye rs of legacy content alread loaded. In other words, even w en Gary Vee stops working, h'll still be online and posti g for another 24-36 months. Thi is connected to batch process ng your content, which I've spoken about, and this is obv ously the social media dis ribution part of batch pro essing. It's lining things up n advance by channel and by tim zone. In summary, a minimum workload is posting to Twitter five times a day every couple of hours, between seven in the morning and 11 o'clock at night, posting to Facebook five to 10 times per week, seven times a day, between 10am and 4pm, assuming you're doing this for your business, and for LinkedIn, just once per day on weekdays before 10 o'clock in the morning or at lunchtime. Those would then get you the three biggest channels. There's Instagram and YouTube as well, but they're a whole different story. There is a methodology in all of this social media madness, but it is possible to keep up and frankly, it is essential now to have a social media strategy. The secret is not to get overwhelmed and make it take over your whole strategy and your whole schedule. With that, I hope you take into consideration what you've learned today and that you keep on posting on social media, not too much, but just the right amount at the right time and on the right platform.