It’s Not Me, It’s You: Are You Annoying Your Followers On Social Media?
We’ve all heard the expression, ‘you can’t have too much of a good thing’! As social media strategists, we love to litter our Instagram feeds with beautiful photography, share thought-provoking posts on LinkedIn and promote insightful articles on Facebook. Until suddenly you notice a trend that your beautiful images aren’t getting those dopamine triggering likes, and people are un-following you on social media…and then sparks the question every company dreads, “am I annoying our followers”?
What to Expect When You’re Expecting…More Social Media Engagement.
Social media does not have a “THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT ON SOCIAL MEDIA” handbook like they do for pregnancy or motherhood. In one quick Google search, you can find contradicting suggestions on different websites:
One article suggests posting no more than twice a day on Facebook.
The next one says you should post to LinkedIn on weekdays only, preferably between 4 pm and 6 pm.
Another one says you must be Tweeting daily- one even said up to 17 Tweets a day! That’s a lot of chirp’chirp.
In reality, there is no magic formula. What works for one brand, is not guaranteed to work for another. You may have a completely different product or approach to your business that will not resonate the same as another company. It is always important to admire and study the success of competition, but it is equally important to take the information with a grain of salt. Social media strategists must collect and analyze their own accounts analytics on an ongoing basis to determine what is working for your brand.
To Post Or Not to Post, That Is The Question
Back in the ‘good ole days’ of social media, organic reach was readily available. All it took was a trigger happy individual to constantly post and the platform would allow it to be seen by as many people as possible. Now a days, platforms like Facebook and Instagram are limiting organic reach to be seen by approximately 2% of your audience. That is why it is more important than ever to post quality content that your followers will engage with.
Here are a few points to consider in your social media strategy:
- Quality vs. Quantity: An ExactTarget study asked consumers why they unlike brands on Facebook and 44% said it was because the company posted too frequently. When asking Twitter users why they unfollowed a brand 52% said that the content was repetitive or boring.
- Switch up the content on different platforms: Those who are most interested in the brand are likely to follow you on multiple platforms, and can become annoyed with the repetition of identical posts. Each platform is also very different mediums so the language and content should be personalized to each medium for more eye-catching posts.
- Constantly track what posts are getting higher engagement and factor that into your future strategy: We recommend keeping a social media journal to track most active time of day and what content gets the best reaction from your followers.
- Know what you want to achieve through social media: Is it to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or sell a product/service?
You Can’t Teach a (ro)BOT to love: Don’t fall for social media bots
One avenue businesses take when losing engagement is to BUY followers. Companies purchase a certain number of followers to comment and like your posts. This is a major NO NO. Buying followers is most common on Instagram, but can occur on other platforms as well. Instagram bots can never replace human interaction. It is easy to detect that the comments aren’t from a real person with handles like ‘growthhacker’. The truth is you will never find ‘true love’ with a spam bot! Secondly, Instagram recognizes when your activity is unnatural. The consequence is shadow banning or closing down your account all together. Shadowban means that your content will be invisible to non-followers. That means that no matter what hashtags you use in your post, your images won’t appear in the feeds of others or on the explore page.
Social media can be a tricky place to navigate as the game is constantly changing. It is important to stay current but also know what is working and not working specifically for your business. One fact that has remained true through all changes to social media, it that it is much better to have an engaged audience than a large one!
