Can Over Exposure Hurt Your Personal Brand?

Hey, guys. Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to discuss whether or not you can create too much content or get too much exposure in your personal branding efforts. I am a big believer in developing a personal brand because I think you can only be as successful as the relationships that you have. So if you happen to know a lot of other successful business people, especially in your industry, you will be exposed to a lot of opportunities and deals that you might, excuse me, you otherwise might not have access to. So, you know, I've worked pretty hard to develop my personal brand here in Sioux Falls. And the way I've done this, I've kind of taken some leadership positions in business and entrepreneurship organizations like Zeel and the Melting Cups and Startup Sioux Falls. And I've also thought work to become kind of a thought leader by publishing a couple books. I write articles periodically. I do videos like this one and just make some other content that people find useful. I've also worked to develop some key relationships with other business leaders and community leaders in Siouxvolves. These relationships and these other efforts have really opened up some great business opportunities and service opportunities that I probably otherwise wouldn't have been aware of or just wouldn't have had the opportunity to pursue. Falls Angel Fund is a great example of this. I wouldn't have been able to do that or be part of that if it weren't for all of the business relationships I developed over the years. I think I've been at least somewhat successful in my personal branding. But somebody that asked me an interesting question about my personal branding efforts the other day, and the question was really maybe a little bit of a challenging question, and I had to think about it. But it came from an acquaintance, somebody I know reasonably well. I'm in a business community I've met before. I think he's a smart individual. So I took the question that he asked seriously, and the question was, do you think you're overexposing yourself by producing too much content? This individual suggested that maybe I should spread out my content a little bit more and do the same content, but spread it over more times so that I'm not clogging up people's feeds and not overexposing myself. Now, the idea of overexposure is a concept in marketing that if people hear from you too much or too often, they're just going to lose interest and stop paying attention to you. The idea of overexposure comes up a lot with celebrities who will kind of intentionally turn down interviews because they think they've just done too much media recently, and they don't want people to lose interest in them. So, you know, I think. I kind of think that overexposure was a real risk when there were far fewer choices in the types of media that people consumed. You know, when there's only three channels on television, overexposure probably was a real risk, because if you were on tv, say, three nights in a row, there's a pretty good chance that some viewers would have actually seen you on TV three nights in a row, and people just might be sick of watching you and turn off the TV or stop paying attention to you. I think in kind of the modern era of digital communication, with social media, podcasts, YouTube, we just have far more. We have just exponentially more choices about the types of media that we consume. The days of the only thing being available are broadcast tv, radio, and print newspapers. They've just come and gone. It's not uncommon today for somebody to have a cable package on their tv, a satellite radio subscription, digital newspaper subscriptions, like to the New York Times, have a Netflix account, have a Hulu account, have a YouTube account, and a podcast app that's just filled with all sorts of different podcasts. So people just have a lot more media choices than they used to. So that means that the likelihood of somebody consuming any one type of media at any given time is lower. So in 2019, you probably wouldn't need to worry about being on the same TV station three nights in a row, because the likelihood of any one person watching the same TV station three nights in a row is actually pretty low these days. People just also just follow a lot of different things on traditional media and social media platforms. So if you are, say, one of 100 Twitter accounts that somebody follows, the likelihood of your tweets clogging up somebody else's account is pretty low, especially on some of the modern social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. These social networks have algorithms to kind of pick what to show their users. And these algorithms, one of the things that they do is make sure that your users see kind of a diversified set of content. So even if you posted 100 tweets a day, the likelihood of Twitter showing all 100 tweets to your followers is pretty low. So I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time just worrying about overexposure on social media accounts or email for that matter, just because people follow a lot of different people. And the algorithms will kind of prevent you from overexposing yourself to your users. So it's not really Something that I think is a problem. I think there are some other related problems that we should probably be aware of, though, and probably the biggest one is quality control. So if you are producing a large volume of content but the quality just isn't there, people are going to see you as a spammer or just somebody that doesn't provide valuable content, and then they'll unfollow you for that reason. So if the quality of the content that you are creating is suffering because of the sheer volume of content you're trying to produce, I think that can be a real problem. My recommendation is to kind of produce as much good quality social media posts, videos, Facebook posts, I don't know, blog posts, whatever it is you make, just make as many good ones as you can without letting quality suffer. For me, this is probably one or two blog posts a week that realistically I can do. And beyond that, I'll post some of my older content kind of on rotation back to LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook because I can only create so much new content per week and keep the quality up. So once the quality of your content starts to decline, you should probably stop posting new stuff because you really need to be able to produce interesting, useful, and entertaining content if you want to capture the attendance, or, excuse me, the attention of a media consumer. In the modern age, people have a ton of choices for the content they consume. So if you are just not producing good content, people are going to forget about you and move on to the next thing. I also think you need to keep up the quantity of content that you post to kind of capture attention in an increasingly competitive world. So this doesn't mean you need to be a content machine and produce dozens of videos or blog posts each week. But maybe you can do. What I do is reshare old content from, say, six months ago that we most people have forgotten about or never saw in the first place anyway. You can also post content on social media from other people's websites or podcasts that you think your followers might find useful. But of course, each social network has kind of different norms about how much content is okay to post. On Facebook and LinkedIn, one or two posts a day is probably about right. On Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, you really can't post too much. You really don't have to worry about posting too much on those networks. So just try to have a good content or a good mix of content of your own stuff and other people's stuff, and just try to match the norm of the social media platform that you're on. So there's a few simple thoughts on overexposure. People follow a lot of different accounts these days. It's just unlikely that your content will dominate someone else's Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook feeds and create an overexposure problem just because people follow a lot about other people and the algorithms will prevent that from happening. I would, however, make sure that the content that you are posting is high quality so that people find value in it. And I would just make sure you're not overstepping the norms of the social media channel that you're working on. So I'd be interested in hearing some of your thoughts on this. How do you maintain that good balance of quality and quantity in your social media posting? So feel free to share some thoughts in the comments below. I'd love to hear your opinion. So thanks for watching.