Trying to gain traction on social media is tough when there are so many posts created every day. Twitter sees 200 billion tweets every day, and the typical Facebook user could potentially be subject to 1,500 posts in their News Feed. To get through the sea of posts, you have to ensure that your post can get maximum exposure. Is reposting your content by “retweeting” on Twitter, or “resharing” on Facebook the key to higher exposure and engagment on social media? Watch today’s Daily Brown Bag to learn if you should be reposting your content on social media.
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Hello, and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. I’m Chad Hill, and today we’re going to be talking about re-posting your social media and how to get the most out of the content you’re creating. I’m also joined by Adam Stetzer.
Yeah, good morning, Chad. This is an interesting topic. Everybody knows that social media is gaining importance, and more and more, we’re hearing that it’s integrating with SEO, marketing, and PR, and yet the volumes on social media are just astronomical. So, we’re talking today about how to get the most out of the content you create. I know this is a favorite topic, Chad, internally among our team, because we spend a lot of time making great content, and we want to get the maximum amount of promotion out of it. The idea here is how you can put this content to work for you when the social media volumes are really going through the roof. So, I want to go through a few of those numbers and then talk about strategy.
According to Nielsen, the average adult is spending more than five hours online each day, which is a really startling number when you think about it. Specific to social media, eMarketer did a study, and they broke it down by the different channels. They’re saying that the average number of hours per week on Facebook per adult is 6.8, 4.3 hours a week on G+, and 4.2 hours a week on Twitter. That’s actually a little surprising to see that G+ has overtaken Twitter. Seventy-five percent of adults either log into Twitter or Facebook every single day. They’ve done some studies on what people are spending their time on on Facebook, and they’ve found that it’s 40% in their news feeds, and I think that is probably also true on Twitter. So, there are people there.
The audience is there, and you want to get in front of them, but I think the idea that anyone reads their entire feed is probably just out of the question, because of the volumes. We know there’s somewhere North of 500 million tweets every day going out. We’ve seen some higher numbers, but we’re not sure what’s accurate at this point. I think the point is that if you have this idea that you can make something great, Chad, and then tweet it once and expect someone to see it, that’s a little naive in today’s volume. Then you start thinking, “Should I be re-tweeting, re-posting, re-Facebooking, re-G+ing my content over and over again?” But, at some point you start to feel like a spammer, so how can we help our marketing community out with some tips on how to do this well?
Adam, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that when I first started using Twitter, I felt like it was a little like my inbox where I had to go through all the messages, but pretty quickly realized that if your objective is to look at every tweet in your feed, you’re going to go crazy. So, you sort of get this firehose approach where it’s like, “I’m gonna go in, get a little dose of Twitter, and then I’m gonna leave.” I think that’s how a lot of people use Twitter other social media platforms, so let’s talk about some tips. I think the first thing you have to think about is that we’re conditioned to be afraid of duplicate content. Because of this firehose approach to all this content going through Twitter and other social media platforms, you do need to mention your content a few times to get maximum value out of it. We have four tips today that we wanted to go through in terms of how we recommend doing that.
1. Create unique posts and tweets. If you’re going to re-post three or four times, don’t verbatim use exactly the same content. Every piece of content you create or thing you want to share has a couple different angles. Play with that. Write a couple different headlines and different ways to share. Make sure you do have unique tweets and posts when you do re-share content.
2. Try different times. If you’re conditioned to always come into the office on the East coast at 9 AM and tweet your content, you’re missing a whole audience out on the West coast that maybe doesn’t log into Twitter and look at what’s going on until much later in the day. So, do it at a couple of different times.
3. Look at the relevance of your tweet and what else is going on contextually, because there’s a good chance that a hot topic on one day might not be the same topic two or three days later, but the content you have could be relevant to that same topic with just a slightly different angle. Watch what’s trending and see how you can get involved in the conversation, and maybe again refer back to a piece of content that you had previously posted but are giving new life because it’s a different angle you’re using.
4. Engage in your community. You don’t want to be just a sharer of your own posts. You want to re-tweet content, be an active member of the people who you’re following, and provide good value to the people who are following you, so you want to make sure you’re sharing other peoples’ content, re-tweeting, and then again, with the right mix, posting your content and re-sharing it.
So those are the four tips that we wanted to share with you today. Adam, do you have any thoughts on this?
Yeah, I think it’s interesting what you said about being conditioned around duplicate content. That’s certainly true for us, coming from the SEO side of things. Everyone knows about duplicate content there, but I think there are a lot of people who come from a different background, and they might be thinking from a pure marketing standpoint, “Wait, what? Repetition is the key to advertising! We know that from years and years of consumer behavior research on radio ads and TV ads.” So, it is interesting to watch these two worlds collide a little bit. I do think there’s a happy medium, but I think the idea that you can only tweet one piece of content once is probably silly and is probably a holdover from SEO. I think anyone in advertising is saying that you want to get these folks again and again.
But, I like your points Chad. Try to do that with different headlines, make sure it’s mixed up with engagement, and recognize that nobody is reading your entire Twitter feed. There’s just too much information. But, if they’re spaced out appropriately at different times of day, over a couple of days, or maybe once a day, sending something out that’s really good for two weeks as part of a campaign, worded differently each time or with a different angle, I think there’s lots of creative ways you can get bigger bang for your buck through some repetition, but make sure that you don’t offend anyone who is super engaged, because you don’t want to lose that engagement. Those are our thoughts. We’d be interested in yours! Please drop us a comment. Let us know a topic you’d like covered, and we hope you’ll subscribe to our YouTube channel and come back to see our Brown Bag tomorrow.
