Social Media Marketing – How Much Is Too Much?
Social media marketing can be a great tool to help build brand awareness, traffic and interact with old, new and potential customers. Placing content about your product or the service you provide in front of people at a specific time can generate business and leads. However people don’t like to be bombarded with buy me, buy me status updates or Tweets on a daily basis. There is a fine line between providing helpful and useful information and annoying the visitor.
If all your Facebook status updates are hard sell or sales orientated pitches the customer will quickly lose interest and feel spammed which could leave to an unfollow or unfriend, not what you want. Yes you want their business but if they are still undecided the last thing you should do is virtually hound them via content and status updates.
So how much is too much? Well if every one of your updates is a sales pitch or buy me post then there is your problem. The key is to mix in sales pitches, product updates and business announcements with content that’s light hearted and sometimes humorous. You can still keep a hint of subliminal messaging with regards to what you offer or sell. Facebook for example we recommend on maybe 2 post updates a day, 1 being sales orientated and 1 being light hearted, it doesn’t even have to be related to your business.
Take our Facebook page for example, we always post stories we may think our followers would be interested in, usually of a tech nature though we do like to post stories totally not related to our business and services, these could be movie related or just light hearted stories in general and not confined to the areas we offer our services in. We usually try to inform people of what we do or specific services once a day however sometimes we don’t even do this, at the very least once every other day. If there are any recent industry updates we like to use these as topics also to keep people informed on the latest happenings in PPC, SEO and web design.
All this does depend on the industry you are in. If you are in a fast paced ever changing industry, say sports results then obviously 2 posts a day on Facebook won’t be enough. Instagram is different as the updates are mostly visual, however we still advise to not spam your followers with random nonrelated content for this social media platform. For example if you are a florist then your followers will more than likely be interested in flowers and gardening, so posting photos of cars, people or what you had for tea is hardly likely to appeal, so in this instance keeping it all related to your code product or service is a good idea.
One thing Social media is good for is customer interaction. Every now and then it’s good to encourage your old, new and potential customers to interact. This could be via online polls, questions or just feedback requests. Though try to keep this to every now and then otherwise you could see yourself spending more time then you would like to answering questions or replying to comments on your social media platforms.
A good social media strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming, simple, informative updates on a regular basis mixed in with the odd sales pitch is a good basis for using social media for your business.
