Now is the time of year when we see many “best practice” lists flooding the internet. The unfortunate truth however, is that no one can truly tell you how many times you should be tweeting, posting or sharing content on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. The truth is that the answer will be different for everyone and wholly dependent on target audience and market sector as well as individual goals or objectives.
Consider Your Tweets
For instance, don’t tweet first thing in the morning because someone told you that is best practice. Instead, look at the data you have readily available to you and make an informed decision to determine your level of activity.
There are plenty of tools out there to help you with this, like SocialBro which analyses your followers’ activity to provide valuable information, such as what the best time of the day is to tweet to ensure you reach the widest audience.
If you’re sharing links to your content through your Twitter account, then practice A/B tests on the tweets you send out accompanying the link. By using a URL shortener like goo.gl you can assess which tweets receive the best CTR (click through rate) and at what time users have engaged with them. Try using different calls to action and measure how that affects your CTR.
Consider Your Blogs
Similarly, in a dream world it would be brilliant if you could blog once a day, maybe even several times a day if you were feeling especially ambitious. The truth of the matter though, is that not many of us have a) enough resource to do so and b) a constant supply of news and topics to blog about; despite this it doesn’t stop a lot of businesses from trying.
The problem is that you will at some point have to face up to the age old battle of quantity versus quality. Yes it’s ideal to keep a consistent flow of blog posts, but if you begin to write about any old tosh in order to meet your quote you will risk damaging the overall quality of your blog.
There are plenty of popular blog authors who write ad hoc when they’ve genuinely got something worthwhile to say. If you start to blog for the sake of making noise then you will inevitably lose any real readership and credibility your blog has. Before you know it you’ll just be another traffic hungry news site, who swaps well informed useful articles for whatever the latest hot celebrity gossip is to milk it for all the clicks they can muster.
The Wider Context
The real answer to this question is to test everything. Then test again and keep testing.
People like Dan Zarrella of HubSpot already conduct fantastic experiments with various social platforms and regularly share their findings on their blogs. Ranging from what words and phrases increase CTR in tweets to what time of the day is best to blog in order to receive the most comments.
Although as Dan even says himself; it’s important to realise that this research won’t always represent the best times or frequency for your own industry, but what it does represent is an ideal set of data to experiment with using your own audience and content.
Ultimately it about testing and researching where and when you need to distribute your content; relying upon sound psychographic data to ensure that the medium (blog, video, tweets) and manner of delivery (Twitter, Facebook, email) is aligned with your target audience’s interests and behaviour. Get the what, when, where and why right and it is possible to make the most of your content and specifically, make your social media content assets work harder.