How often should you post to social media to be informative, and not annoying?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for you if you know you've got value locked up in your organization and you're just trying to find some cost-effective and some simple ways to share that with everybody that you believe should know about it. My name is Jim James, and I've been running my own international public relations company for over 25 years, but I've also built businesses on 3 continents. So I'm here to share what I know works and the fundamental plan of the SPEAK PR program, which stands for Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. And today we're going to talk about the amplification part, which is really about social media sharing. Now, what stage is our attempt to be informative drifting into being annoying? And at what stage does our desire to share end up as being plain intrusive? We're going to look at metrics today for social media sharing. How often should you tweet, post on Facebook, and LinkedIn. Thank you for joining me. Now, I think we've all got this question of how much social media is enough. Now, we might consume a lot. The question is, how much should we be producing? And I'm facing this because, as I've got East West PR, we do this for clients, but also with my own company, East West PR, and with a new mastermind we've just launched called the Speak PR Mastermind. And I've just signed up for a platform called Lately, which helps me to auto-generate content. And I was on the phone with their content manager yesterday who's in San Francisco. And I was asking Ankit, Ankit, how much really should I be posting? Now, Ankit was very helpful and really said what we need to do is to track the analytics because it's not just how much we're posting, but it's also about the engagement levels. That we've got. So I had a look using the Lately platform at the engagement and the posting of East West Public Relations since June of this year. Now I've got 6 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 in terms of total reach? I have ended up getting close to 600,000 in terms of reach and impressions over 30,000. Now, is that good or bad? I went to some experts to find out whether I'm on track or not. Now, according to a blog post by Constant Contact, Facebook is now a low-volume, high-value network. And what they're saying is that we should be posting But not too frequently because people get too frustrated if there are too many posts. I guess they can't keep up. So we've got to make each post count by offering something valuable or interesting to the audience. And there's a view that the frequency should be somewhere between 3 to 10 times per week. It seems to be as well that your personal posts could be lower than your professional ones, but still not a great deal more. A Social Bakers report shows that big brands are posting an average of just 1 per day. So Starbucks was not even posting a whole post per day. So obviously they're doing, uh, for example, 3 to 5 per week. But iTunes is doing 2 per day on average. So the idea was to not post too many times into your Facebook company account. The, the challenge here is that if we post too little, once per week for example, then we can lose connection with our audience. So this is the balance that we've got to find between posting too much as to be annoying and too little as to be forgotten. Now one of the benefits of a platform like Lately is it helps me to take the same content and repurpose it, changes the headlines, changes the body content. So I don't necessarily have to think about new content all the time. I could be repackaging the existing content, and I'll share with you why that might be useful. But Facebook is valuing fresh content. So the issue is not so much that you just post, you know, one or two times the same thing each week, but you have to think about it being new content. There's an EdgeRank study posted on the Moz blog, and I will share the links to these, that said if you can increase your frequency, that's great, but it has to be compelling and fresh content each time. So the recurring theme seems to be that if you're posting to Facebook, not too often and great quality. Now on Twitter, Social Baker is another group, had done a study and they showed by researching over 11,000 tweets from top brands, that 3 tweets per day is where the brands start to see big engagement. So they are suggesting that 3 tweets is the magic number for a company account for optimal posting. So what they're suggesting here is that once you go to 4 and 5, for example, that the response per tweet Peaks and then drops off. But actually, when you look at the charts that they've produced, they don't drop as steeply as you might think. But if you've got a time value equation on Twitter, five times a day for a company is the optimal number, apparently according to Social Bakers. Now the other issue, though, that they're talking about here is that because on the 6th, 7th, 8th, and so on tweet, it's, it's not the case that there's no response. Actually, you're still getting engagement and reshare on the 5+ tweets. So what they're suggesting is if you wanted to— and again, the caveat is that you've got fresh content, which you can create with a platform like Lately, for example— you can then post up to 30 times a day And not lose any followers. Now, what's important about that is that if you're like me and you've got a global presence, you need to actually be posting 24 hours a day. When I wake up in the morning, my colleagues in China and Japan and Singapore and Australia have already had most of their day. So I need to be posting for them in their day. An optimal time is about 6 to 7 o'clock in the morning for Twitter, and then 5 to 6 in the afternoon, and then later in the evening. I kind of need to have 3 different tranches of Twitters going out. So we are starting to think then about geo-targeting the tweets as well. So what the report from Social Bakers is saying, or the chart showing, that the more opportunities that you want to have, the more often you need to tweet. But the content does need to be individual each tweet. In fact, Twitter won't let you repost the same tweet twice. Can you say that? The same tweet twice. So 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 the percentage of engagement rate will decline with volume, but the total number Will have gone up. So there's a view from someone called Alexandra Skay of Spockal, and I'll put their link again in the show notes. Small business owners, they recommend, are better off sticking to the five tweets per day rule because gets you the maximum bang for your buck. That's great if you've got a one time zone business, in my view, and you are spending it's an average of twelve minutes. To write one social media post, so that's taking you about an hour then, isn't it? To to post and then to schedule those out. It's still an hour of your midday. Now the other dimension of this is that each tweet lasts for approximately 18 minutes. So there is a person called Peter Bray who 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. So the issue is that that 12 minutes that you've written, that 12 minutes that you've taken to write the post, 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 and there, it'll be gone by the time that they finished finishing their coffee, dropping off the kids to school, or checking their email. Facebook interestingly has a half-life of 90 minutes. So a post that you might share on Facebook has a 90-minute shelf life. Again, that's a better ROI than your tweet if it takes you 12 minutes to write a Facebook post. The challenge here, of course, is if it's not taking you 12 minutes and you do it too quickly, then it's considered to have no value, and then it's considered to be annoying, and then you can get unfollowed. So the bottom line really is the first 20 minutes of a tweet is their life, and the first 90 minutes of a Facebook post is the life. So within 2 hours all that work you've done is gone. Now for LinkedIn, which is one that all of us that are working on businesses will think about because of the 590 million plus LinkedIn members all around the world as well. The guidelines come from LinkedIn itself. It seems to be the one platform that isn't interrogated particularly, uh, diligently or efficiently, or just can't be. Maybe the IP APIs are too closed. But their suggestion is that 20 posts per month allows you to reach 60% of your audience. So 60% of your audience will see 20 posts per month. So in other words, it's one per weekday. Now I can see from my metrics that I have in 6 months on LinkedIn to my company account posted 255. So I am probably in danger of overposting onto my LinkedIn company page. There is a view though that if you post to your own website, to your own LinkedIn profile, one a day is good, but you can post 2 to 3 on your company page. And that's just because those people have already dedicated themselves to your business. And I think also this doesn't take into account posting into groups, because actually each post into a group is counted as a separate post and doesn't appear on your feed. It appears within the group itself. So I think you could probably increase that frequency, but it is a lot of work because each post into each group is a dedicated piece of work. So the thing though there for the ROI for me, my East West 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, uh, it, it's, you know, getting you some, some traction for what is effectively, of course, free on other than your time. So the next dimension here is to think about time and when we schedule posts. I mentioned that for me, I have clients and teams on time zones in Asia, Europe, and the US. So I have to now think about really sort of 3 time zone scheduling. And that's where a platform like Lately, but also with Zoho, for example, or Buffer or HubSpot. They've all now got quite sophisticated targeting. And in the same way that with the mailing lists, you can actually now start to create campaigns by geography so that people are receiving these newsletters at the appropriate time. Social media is just the same. This becomes quite a big scheduling And really quite a big time issue. I was speaking to Ankit, as I mentioned, from Lately last night. He was in San Francisco, I'm in the UK, and he said there are companies with dedicated social media managers just working out which posts have got the right content for their engagement levels, and then which is the right platform and which is the right timeline. Now, of course, each platform then will deal with your content differently in different levels of engagement with different kinds of content. Now the, the Lately platform is quite interesting, and it's showing me kind of a scattergun graph. I've got a very nice scale here, either a linear scale or a logarithmic scale, and I've got a bigger and bigger cluster with engagement where I'm able to see now that I'm being quite effective with my company Twitter with 11, for example, retweets, uh, and my Facebook with 8, and my Instagram. But my LinkedIn, for example, is providing me almost no engagement at all. What it means is that we need to start to develop separate content specifically for the different platforms. I'm sure you were wishing I, I wasn't going to say that because that just means even more work. I've got 6 platforms, and I'm currently developing what you could argue is generic content across all 6. Having now looked at the performance of the Lately dashboard, what I can see is that my content that is created generically and shared at the same time across all time zones is really not getting me very much, uh, engagement So big intake of breath because that means that I either have to stop doing it or do it more efficiently and more effectively. And there are other tools like Lately, um, which you can use. It's a $200 to $300+ subscription per month, and there are others around as well that can help you to create and to schedule the content with different levels of support. Headliner.com helps you to just generate appropriate headlines but doesn't then schedule for you. You just cut and paste the headlines. Lots of different tools, and we talk about this in our Speak PR program and also on our website at speakpr.co. You'll find the technology applications directory that we've got, which has got over 100 of these platforms listed in it. But coming back to you and what you might be doing, let's simplify all this. And where I'm going to be going with this is looking at my content plan. And what Ankit was also suggesting was that we really do need to have an editorial calendar. It's no longer sufficient to be just posting content at will. He talked about Gary Vee, the sort of social media sensation. Who is creating content, because I was asking what happens when you create content every day as we do with this podcast. We make this then into a newsletter and an article, for example. And he said that you can schedule this content, and people like Gary Vee have got 2 to 3 years of legacy content already loaded. In other words, when Gary Vee stops working, he'll still be online. And posting for another 24 to 36 months. Now, I recently did a, a podcast about batch processing for podcasts, for example, and writing articles. And now this is obviously the social media distribution part of batch processing, is lining things up in advance by channel and by time zone. But coming back to what would be, if you like, a minimum workload. If we can post to Twitter 5 times a day— if you can get up to 20 posts, that's great, but 5 will be sufficient— and every couple of hours between 7 in the morning and 11 o'clock at night. Posting to Facebook 5 to 10 times per week, 7 times a day between 10 and 3, 10 to 4 o'clock. This is assuming you're doing this for your business. And LinkedIn, just the once per day, 20 times per week, before 10 o'clock in the morning or at lunchtime. Those would then get you the 3 biggest channels. Of course, there are Instagram, YouTube is another world as well, but most of us are not using those for business. I'll put the links in because this is a lot of content by some fantastically generous researchers in America who are sharing this detail. There is a methodology in all of this social media madness. 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. So hopefully with this podcast, I've answered some questions for you about what you should be creating, how often, and where you should be sending it. As always, thank you so much for listening to this Speak PR podcast. My name is Jim James, and you can find me on LinkedIn, and you can also find me at eastwestpr.com, where you can sign up also for newsletters and find the Speak PR podcast and all the players. That we are on. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, that you have a profitable business, and that you keep on posting on social media— just not too much.