How often should I tweet for business?
Almost every client we work with raises the question, at some point, of how frequently they “should” be tweeting, posting to Facebook or updating their other social networks.
It’s another of those areas where there is some absolutely terrible advice doing the rounds (some of which we’ll share with you below) so an article here seemed to be called for!
Tweets and Facebook posts – back to basics
Hopefully, before you even think about tweeting or posting on your business Facebook page, you already have a strategy. You know who your likely audience are, and have figured out what you can offer them that they value. That means, you have an outline idea of the type of content you’re going to be sending out. If you haven’t done this, go back a stage and get your strategy sorted; it’s amazing how much else will then come into focus.
Like the answer to today’s question. You know what your value is to your Twitter and Facebook audience, so you should Tweet or post….when you have something interesting or relevant to say.
But won’t we lose followers?
Let’s explore this a bit further. I’ve been told, just this week, by the social media team in a large and prestigious organisation that they have to post constantly because
“we were told by a big Social Media company that we must tweet and post several times each day”
Unpacking that a bit further, it seemed that the “reason” was to do with not losing followers, and with gaining new ones.
Will somebody please think of the children users!
As with so many things in marketing and comms, if you’re able to put yourself into your audience’s shoes for a moment, the lack of logic behind this becomes pretty clear.
From the point of view of one of your Twitter followers or Facebook Likers, they have connected with you because they think that your content is going to enhance their Timeline in some way.
If, after a few days or weeks, they often see content coming into their timeline which is not interesting to them, what will their likely response be? They will unfollow you. It might take a while for the irritation to build, but sooner or later, they will depart your social media shores.
Now let’s look at the alternative. Someone connects with you on social media, and in the first couple of weeks they only see a couple of pieces of content from you in their timeline – but both of those are useful or funny or whatever.
Who on earth would think “ah, but two days have gone past and I heard nothing from that company, so dammit, it’s not good enough. I’m unfollowing them.” Nobody, that’s who.
Silence is golden
Basically, very few people will break their connection with you on social media because of what you don’t do – unless your account really does go completely dormant for a significant period. You get unfollowed because of what you DO do. Posting irrelevant, repetitive or just plain dull stuff repeatedly into their social media feed.
So in summary, never, never post or tweet for the sake of having posted or tweeted. The only exception to this is if you are actively pursuing a spam strategy of the “chuck enough mud and some will stick” variety, like the one suggested in the helpful article here. Nobody likes mud anyway, and you might not like what it sticks to, but as with all kinds of spam it must do something for someone or nobody would do it. However, if you’re a reputable company, this is not a road you want to travel. In fact, “...to get noticed, you will need to tweet a lot more frequently” may be one of the worst pieces of social media advice we’ve ever seen – time to start a Hall of Fame, perhaps…
Five Cheap Facebook Tricks (that audiences sometimes love….)
This post is coming to you courtesy of inspiration from the funniest and most feared (by marketers) page on Facebook – Condescending Corporate Brand Page.
They do a great job of bringing together the most wince-inducing examples of Facebook marketing, proving the old adage that the road to corporate embarrassment is paved with a desperate need for Likes.*
Painful though they may be, most of the posts highlighted are just extreme forms of techniques that many businesses use, to some extent, and some definite themes emerge over time.
So just for you, here is our roundup of the top five Facebook Cheap Trick techniques.
*you’ve not heard that one? Yeah, it’s old as the hills. Honest.
1: The Lowest Common Denominator
This is the Facebook equivalent of those ridiculous phone “quizzes” at the end of TV shows. You know the ones, those with the oh-so-tricky questions to ensure that nobody in possession of a phone is ruled out from picking it up. The “What’s the capital of England, is it A)California, B) London, C) Fish” variety.
Only on Facebook, we have the space to be more creative, and that’s how we end up with posts like this:
Ooooh Walkers, we don’t know. It’s a toughie.
2: The Awkward Piggyback
Desperate for engagement, any engagement, the poor Facebook admin jumps on any subject which they know will get people talking. No matter how irrelevant it is to their brand. The usual example of this involves neatly-scheduled Saturday evening questions about the X Factor.
Sometimes, they get away with it, and sometimes the post falls foul of the slippery slope from irrelevant to actively inappropriate. Controversial current affairs are particularly dangerous territory here – of which more later.
3: The False Dichotomy
This is a concept that we first saw coming out of the US, where unsavoury characters were using it to scare kids into the equivalent of the old email chain letter forward. A scary horror-movie style grisly ghoul image with text along the lines of “share if you’re scared, like if you’re very scared – do nothing and she’s under your bed“. You have two, and only two, choices – you can Like, or you can Share.
Never let it be said that marketers don’t spot the zeitgeist…..
(with bonus points for the use of kittens, obviously). LIKE or COMMENT or SHARE but for the love of God, doing nothing is not an option!
4: Stating the bleedin’ obvious
A variation on the above, where the longsuffering audience is asked to click Like in response to something that pretty much everyone on the planet would agree with.
The go-to here is “Click Like if you’re happy it’s Friday“, but we’ve also seen “Click Like if you believe we should stop killing {insert endangered species here}”.
It’s only a matter of time until “Click Like if you’re a fan of breathing!” comes along.
5: The Current Affairs Hijack
As mentioned above, this is seriously, seriously dangerous territory. It’s a post about that thing that’s dominating the news right now. Yes, it’s topical. Yes, everyone’s talking about it. But unless you have something genuinely witty or insightful to add, maybe just count to ten before hitting that Post button.
Shoehorning (pun intended) your own brand into the mix is particularly risky, as illustrated by the gem below in response to the recent school shooting in the US:
Ouch. Seriously, guys??!
What do we learn from this?
Here’s the thing, though – despite the (hilarious) snarkfest over on CCBP, the numbers on these posts speak for themselves. Often, that brand’s Facebook audience (or at least, some part of it) love that stuff. No matter how banal, ridiculous or even borderline offensive some of these tricks may seem, thousands of customers will happily chat back or click the Like button just as they’ve been told to.
And everytime a punter clicks like, that activity feed tells all their friends, and on we go. This stuff works – for now, and for a certain demographic.
And for all Facebook marketers, there are useful lessons here about the psychology of engagement. Don’t demand too much thought or effort of your audience. Talk about stuff they’re interested in, even if you’re not. Be playful. There are ways that most of the cheap tricks above can be refined into valuable party pieces, if you give them enough thought.
Buying Twitter Followers / Facebook Fans: Does it work?
Buying Twitter or Facebook followers is easy - but is it a smart move?
Buying Twitter or Facebook followers is easy - but is it a smart move?
Twitter followers and Facebook Likers for sale?
The thriving underground economy around buying Twitter followers and Facebook Likers was highlighted recently during the US elections, when Mitt Romney’s Twitter base expanded by an implausibly large extent seemingly overnight.
Most people are now aware that artificially boosting their social media audience is a risky venture, even if they’re not sure exactly why. Having said that, there are a few scenarios where doing this still looks like the logical way to meet specific needs within a social media strategy.
So if you’ve ever wondered how that tedious “business guru” with 55,000 Twitter followers managed it, and whether it could be beneficial to your account to do the same, here’s a quick lowdown on the industry, how it works, when it might help you – and when it won’t.
How does buying followers work?
A quick Google search turns up pages of websites offering to sell you Twitter followers, Facebook Fans / Likers, YouTube views and so on. Twitter followers are usually the cheapest, from as little as $5 per thousand, and Facebook Likers the most expensive.
The costs are directly related to the amount of hassle involved in setting up a fake account, making it look vaguely plausible, and preventing it being deleted by the platform owner. There are other methods, but the majority of the dealers who are selling these followers have set up thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, of fake accounts which they then control. On receiving payment they begin following your Twitter account with the appropriate number of their accounts, or use them to Like your Facebook page or watch your YouTube video.
With the help of some clever software, this can take the dealer a matter of seconds, so it’s more than possible to make large profits even at the kind of low rates they’re charging.
The key point, though, is that none of these accounts have real people behind them. So the potential for them to use your services or buy your products is absolutely zero.
They won’t buy…so what can they do for me?
This fake follower industry’s been around almost as long as Twitter has. In the early days, it’s likely that most people didn’t understand what was happening here and genuinely thought that they were taking a short cut to a large and genuine audience on social media. These days, many users know what they’re buying – but do it anyway. What they want from the deal is something different.
Here are a couple of logical reasons people buy followers, even when they suspect they’re fake:
1. Credibility. At first glance, a Facebook page with 3,000 likers or a YouTube video with thousands of views, gives the impression that it must be a quality resource. There are still plenty of social media users out there who can’t be bothered, or don’t know how to, see past the basic numbers. Having that big number visible can lead to interest from real people.
2. Sheep syndrome. When a business launches a new social media account, it’s friendless and lonely. They don’t want to show it to existing or prospective customers because it’s the social media equivalent of the empty wine bar – there might be nothing wrong with it, but if there’s a packed bar next door, most people will choose that. Fake followers can act as “extras” to get past that stage.
3. Visibility boost. Some of the social media directory sites weight their search results heavily by follower volume, so the more followers you have, the more likely your account is to show up high on the list for, say, your local town. YouTube search results are also influenced by viewer numbers.
These are all perfectly logical reasons for buying in fake followers – provided you don’t get caught. Artificially inflating your numbers is against the terms of service of all the major social media sites, so ultimately anyone using this approach is at risk of being kicked out, and for that reason alone we’d strongly advise against it.
That short cut could be making life hard for you
If that’s not enough for you, there are a few other good reasons for being wary of fake followers.
Those great first impressions won’t last. If a Facebook business page apparently has a huge audience of Likers but nobody ever responds to the organisation’s posts, what impression does that give? Visitors are likely to assume that it’s a dull place to be, and may be less forgiving of that than a company which is honest about being in the early stages of building an audience.
Socially savvy users will run a mile. Anyone who’s experienced in the social media world will spot fake audiences a mile off - a quick look at one or two of the Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts in question will reveal obvious giveaways in terms of who else they follow and what else they do or say. There are also services like Status People’s Faker app which claim to reveal how many fakes follow an account, and have been known to call out some big names in the past.
Skewing your metrics can have unforseen and damaging consequences in the longer term. For example, assuming you’re aiming to build a Facebook page with a genuine community, and you’ve bought Likers to bridge the gap until your audience recruitment strategy delivers results. A year down the road, Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm will be using the proportion of your followers who interact with you to determine how interesting your posts are – and how likely it is to show them in your Likers’ timelines. If 50% of your Likers are fake accounts who’ll never engage, you’ve disadvantaged your Page from the outset.
If a job’s worth doing…
…it’s worth doing legitimately. There are “best practise” ways to build your audience, credibility and visibility which will provide great foundations for your longer term social media presence, without any of the risks involved in buying an audience. If you’re stuck with those, we can help.
Why posting via Twitter can ruin your chances of Facebook success
All those handy “timesaving” tools for managing your social presence, which let you blast out the same old content, sometimes repeatedly, across all the social networks you use, are as dangerous as a chainsaw in the hands of a chimp if you don’t use them thoughtfully.
You *know* that your audience on Twitter is very likely to be different from that on Facebook, right? And that your LinkedIn connections will almost certainly be a different kind of person, and expecting something a little less chummy than the tone with which you approach Facebook. So, using your social management platform to send the same thing everywhere is just going to ensure it’s not going to push anyone’s buttons.
We’ve also posted before about why it’s a bad idea to cross post from Facebook to Twitter, and vice-versa – but that really focused on the unappealing user experience that results, and a possible penalty in Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm which means your post won’t show in as many Timelines as you’d like. Just this week though, we’ve come across something even more fundamental.
Facebook’s #1 superpower
Beyond being a handy platform for conversations with your Likers, the real power of Facebook is the access is can potentially provide to your existing customers’ social networks. Whether you’re selling to extreme sports enthusiasts or young mums, the chances are that your existing customers are going to be above averagely well connected to others who share their enthusiasm for jumping off of cliffs or finding ingenious ways to get a shower before 2pm.
The real gold dust of Facebook marketing is building a relationship with, and providing valuable enough content to, your customers that they want to share it with the rest of their social network.
Posting from Twitter ruins your Sharing potential!
So, here’s the biggest reason of all why you should think very hard before setting up that cross post link. The image below shows a couple of posts on Facebook which have come via Twitter -notice anything unusual?
Yup – the “Share” link is completely missing. So no matter how great a job you do of posting great content, you’re significantly limiting your potential reach on Facebook. This is a really big issue, and one which more than justifies the extra few minutes that a direct post would’ve taken.
Save time elsewhere
Everyone, unless they’re lucky enough to have a well-resourced social media team, sometimes struggle to keep up with the workload. But there are so many better ways of saving time than this. For example – learn to use the prescheduling feature in Facebook, and a good software client for Twitter. Make sure you’re crystal clear about your strategy and audience, so you don’t waste time searching out irrelevant content or wondering what to talk about today. But cross posting is an enormous false economy – it’s really high time that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all took those tempting “connect to…” buttons out of their signup routine, don’t you think?
Facebook Post Scheduling – now you can do it within Facebook!
sorry i missed your party, I had to stay in & update Facebook
sorry i missed your party, I had to stay in & update Facebook
Why do we need a Facebook post scheduler?
If you’re managing a busy Facebook page, or just trying to develop a good Facebook community, then publishing your status updates at the right time of day can be the difference between a small audience and a significant one. For example, research on big brands’ pages has shown a definite peak in engagement for retail brands around the weekends, and for fashion and beauty on a Thursday (planning outfits for the weekend, perhaps?).
That’s all well and good, but you might not want to be at your desk on a Saturday evening, or you may know you’re going to be tied up in meetings all day on Thursday. Until now, the only option you had was either to post at a less optimal time, or to use a third party tool such as Hootsuite or BufferApp to preschedule posts. And although we love Hootsuite for many reasons, we’ve found the success rate of scheduled Facebook posts to be pretty hit and miss; plus, we know that Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm tends to de-prioritise posts which come in via a third party tool.
How to schedule posts within Facebook
So we know it’ll come as very popular news to many of our B2C clients that it’s now possible to preschedule your posts directly from within Facebook. Here’s how it’s done.
Start creating your update as usual, using the Status box. At the bottom left you’ll see a new clock icon:
click that, and you’ll get the option of using the scheduler to post in the future. You can also add posts retrospectively if you need to fill a gap in your past Timeline.
The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to fill in a “start” (founded, created, born) date for your page if you didn’t already set that up. Once that’s done, you’ll get access to the full scheduling function.
You can then set the exact post time you require, down to the minute!
Amending your scheduled posts
Once you’ve clicked “schedule”, the post will disappear, and it won’t become visible on your Timeline until the publish date.
If you need to amend it in the mean time you can, but the function is slightly hidden away in your Admin panel, under the activity log. You can find it here:
Once you’ve clicked into the Activity Log you’ll find that there’s a new Scheduled Posts section, above the details of your other activity:
Just hover over the post to bring up the drop-down arrow, and from there you can opt to amend the time, publish immediately or cancel altogether and start again.
This new function will definitely make life easier for many community managers. Just be careful not to fall into the “scheduled and absent” trap – if you’re posting something which is likely to result in a lot of responses, or raise questions, you’ll need to ensure that you respond reasonably quickly and don’t forget about having made the post altogether!
