When sharing an article or blog post to Facebook and Twitter, don’t just blast it out indiscriminately, plan your postings with a goal for maximum exposure to your audience.
I have a mix of both personal and business connections on Twitter and Facebook. Most of the time, these people are using their platforms to share blog posts and information relating to their business. In the course of this sharing process many seem to forget to find value in who they expose the article to… blasting it out from as many accounts as possible right when they’re done hitting the “publish” button in WordPress. This is a bad idea.
2 Second Take-Away: Being sure to get your content in front of your audience at the right time, is arguably one of the most important steps in sharing your content. It’s not how much you share, it’s about sharing smartly.
Blasting your post out to Facebook / Twitter on your personal and company account – at the same time.
Stop it. This is really bad. Most small businesses have connections with their friends and customers. Blasting out a post on your company page and then sharing it via your personal accounts is an annoying spam technique that gets your friends to “hide” your posts on Facebook and ignore your tweets.
Stop and think about your sharing habits from your friend’s / follower’s perspective. Would you want to see a bunch of double-post spam coming up in your feed? You want to be sure that whatever you are doing, you are not devaluing the experience for your friends and potential customers.
Smarter Alternatives
Spread your Facebook shares out – If you plan to post your article to Facebook, share one article out in the morning via your business site, and then share it again from your personal account hours later, or even the next day.
Schedule Your Tweets - Use the sharing service like HootSuite or CoTweet to post your latest articles to your Twitter feed so that you don’t spam it with your regular use.
Timezones matter – I see East coast companies and groups sharing out blog posts at 4 am (yes, I’m up that early) and sometimes I don’t even see them later in the day. Not everyone rolls back through their Tweet history, or uses RSS to follow their blogs. Again, scheduling matters!
AM / PM matters – Some people have different reading / “internet time” behavior. They get on in the morning, catch up on their news and don’t really pay attention to the net till that evening or next day. Others, get on focus on work and then spend their spare afternoon time reading… you want to connect with both types of people.
As always… in any social interaction, remember my golden rule: “Social media is not about you, it’s about what you can do for others”.
I find that whenever I keep this rule in the front of my mind, several things happen.
1. I spend less time focused on Twitter & Facebook from a business perspective
2. People make more personal connections with me
3. The quality of my connections jumps ten-fold
Hey thanks for this info….I can now see that I was doing it wrong!
NP Chip, I like to see what you’re doing there in Sequim. Hope that you are able to grow in 2010.
Great info Sam. I am guilty of blasting my own article everywhere at one time. Only because I’m likely to forget if I don’t! I should be better about this…maybe your article will prompt me to do so!
Timing is so important, but another big factor in sharing is not pissing off the people you connect with.
Mariano, I don’t see you as doing this too often, I just noticed the other day when I logged into facebook, one particular “group” had shared the article from their fan page, then their personal page, then they got all the other people associated with it to share it to. In total my “live stream” was just SWAMPED with it. This is counter productive in my mind.
Hopefully this article gives people an alternative perspective for when they’re sharing content.
Oh, and Chip, you should sign up for a GRAVATAR! I wrote an article about them here: http://samhowat.com/using-gravitars-to-brand-your-online-discussions/
It’s a really important part of discussion and the more people we get to use them, the better! Besides as a business guy, on the internet, people need to see your brand.
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