A Curious Case of Social Media Overuse – When You Overdo Marketing
Every businessperson knows that it’s imperative for businesses to have an active presence on social media platforms to level the playing field.
It’s not surprising as the majority of customers spend time on social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest.
In fact, New York Times reveals that the average time a user spends on social media, particularly on Facebook is fifty minutes, a few minutes shy of an hour.
This fact alone is one of the many reasons why social channels are productive ecosystems for marketing.
While most dialogues on social media marketing’s focal points are on advertising, creating content, establishing a strong presence, getting more followers, boosting profile ranking and other such ways to connect with your followers, effects of social media overuse keep growing rampant.
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The Curious Case of Social Media Overuse
Case in point: Redundant or too many promotions on social channels is now the most annoying practice that most brands do.
Although consumers would say, they need to check the product on social media multiple times before they’ll buy it.
It is crucial to keep a constant presence on social media.
However, doing it too often or not posting the right combination of informative, promotional or entertaining contents may cause havoc on your overall social media engagements.
Thus, social media overuse begins.
Social media is within a broad category of overexposure. It happens when a brand tends to be repetitive with its message that it becomes annoying to the consumer’s part.
It can occur in any advertising or marketing context.
A company may overdo it when it comes to TV ads, magazine ads, billboards, and email marketing.
It is a case of repeating the same type of content or the same ads rather than overusing social media per se.
Either way, consumers will perceive your brand as annoying and social networking affects your goals.
If it’s the case, how do you know if you’re overdoing your social media marketing and what are the solutions?
Posting Too Often
Facebook categorize its stories according to its algorithm which means that even though you’re spacing out your posts every couple of hours, that’s not how it works on people’s feeds.
As a matter of fact, your posts might dominate the feeds of the users who follow your brand.
Or worse, if you fail to obtain sufficient engagement, Facebook might think that you’re spammy and will decrease your visibility on the news feeds as a consequence.
Solution:
The ideal duration is 2 to 3 posts per day. Anything more than that can be overbearing which can result in unlikely consequences.
Writing Too Much
It’s such a pain in the eyes to see marketers posting paragraphs over paragraphs in their social feeds.
These posts are probably full of useful insights and pieces of information, but chances are, many people will not read them.
Why? It’s because it’s too much for them.
Solution:
The adage ‘Less is more’ is perfect for this one. Create a quality and concise contents that the readers will enjoy and devour.
Cross-Posting at Its Finest
Cross-posting is good for occasional updates, but if you do it on a daily basis, it may irk the consumers and may cause you the engagement opportunities on social media.
You need to remember that Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms have different designs for different audience and purposes, so you need to treat them accordingly.
Marketers and business owners, take heed. Success does not stem from the number of posts you publish on social media. It’s the quality.
Solution:
If you plan to post identical contents to multiple social channels because you want more people to benefit them, you can cross-promote.
But, you must tailor the text to make sure it suits the audience who will be seeing your post and the network where you plan to post your contents.
Posting the same content to multiple social networks as fillers is such a bad practice, so don’t do it.
Having Multiple Employees Posting to Your Business Pages
It’s true that best advocates are the ones inside your company. Your employees could be your best influencers as they are the people who know your brand better.
However, having multiple employees post on your page is too much as it can cause redundant postings.
In some cases, over-enthusiastic employees might post inappropriate contents that could jeopardize your business that’s why it’s best that you set firm rules for social media posting in your business.
Solution:
Employee Advocacy programs can be a win-win situation for everyone, but only if the roles and rules are transparent.
Create a structured program and train your team on how to make balanced and credible feeds on social channels.
Takeaway
While it’s desirable to maintain a presence on many social media platforms, you should take into account your resource limitations and boundaries.
You should ensure that your social media affects a meaningful engagement with a target audience through serving contents that will gain approval and adds value to the lives of the users, regardless of the number of platforms.
Perhaps, more is better than less but not at the expense of your business and your brand.
Author’s Bio:
Patrick Panuncillon has been an SEO strategist for more than 8 years and currently running his own outsourcing business solutions firm in the Philippines.
Connect with Patrick on Linkedin or check out his company Facebook Page, Creative Working Playground.