Skip to content

Tag: HootSuite

Social Media Balance

Social Media Balance

Social media balance is sometimes elusive. Yet much like everything else, social media needs to be balanced. Too much, and you’ll alienate your readers. And too little, and they’ll wonder if you’re still alive.

I’ll confine my comments to just blogging, Facebook and Twitter. Of course there are other outlets, but let’s just look at those three.

Too Much

During the 2012 Christmas season here in Boston, the oldies station began broadcasting all-day Christmas music early. How early?

So it was, if I am recalling correctly, before Veterans’ Day. Egad, it was awful. And then of course other radio stations also began their regular broadcast of holiday music. So it was very hard to get away from it all.

Now, lots of these songs are lovely. This is not me slamming religion – don’t misunderstand me. Rather, it was just … c’mon already! Because it was way too much!

It was not festive. Instead, it annoyed people (not just me!). And the same can be said of social media. If you’re a small outlet, a tiny company, a Mom and Pop operation, here’s a little secret. You don’t need to constantly tweet and update Facebook.

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Overdo It

  • You’ll oversaturate the people you’re trying to endear, and they’ll turn off to your message.
  • And you’ll burn out.
  • Also, you’ll run out of things to say.

Not Enough

It continually amuses me when people say something like, “I have a blog.” And they’ll post their link. However, the last time they updated was 13 months ago, or more, or they’ve never updated. Or it’s a Twitter stream with three tweets, and the account is over a year old. Maybe they have a Facebook page with nearly nothing on it.

Given the number of abandoned accounts, and the number of deceased persons’ accounts on Facebook and the like, followers might be wondering. Have you gone to the great computer room in the sky?

Per my SEO pal Garit Boothe, best practices is to keep everything fresh to the tune of nothing being over 3 months old (so, posts are updated and re-released at later dates).

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Underdo It

  • Your readers will leave you, big time. They may be loyal but today’s audiences are also pretty fickle. You’re no longer shiny and new. So they leave.
  • Google still indexes abandoned accounts, although the information is out of date. And it can sometimes end up making you look worse than not having a social media presence at all.
  • You show, essentially, that you no longer care about your subject matter. So why should anyone read what you write at all, if even you don’t believe in it?
  • The algorithms will smash your site into smithereens.

While the exact, perfect information on any algorithm is proprietary and kept secret from us hoi polloi, one thing is certain. Newness counts. No posting means you’ve got nothing new going on. And it will push your site down in rankings on Google and YouTube. Facebook also values recency. And as for Twitter? No one will be able to find your stuff.

Seeking Social Media Balance

It’s rather Zen, I suppose, to seek a balance here.

But how do you get it?

The easiest way is to consider the people who you follow where you just love their updates. They don’t seem forced or rushed, and they seem to come in, just at the right time.

Don’t think of really big wigs in social media, like George Takei, Shama Hyder Kabani, Wil Wheaton, Guy Kawasaki, or Ashton Kutcher, etc. Instead, consider your friends, colleagues, and neighbors, even if it’s people who aren’t making (or trying to make) a career out of social media.

Look at their Facebook walls and their Twitter streams and their blogs. What is it about how they handle those outlets that grabs you?

By the way, recognize that a person might be really good at one form of balance, but not at another. That’s not unexpected, as these are all rather different forms of media.

Your friend who crushes it on Twitter might be just plain awful on Facebook.

2 Reasons Why You Should Strike a Social Media Balance

  1. Posting too much at the beginning can lead directly to posting pretty much nothing later on, so spread things out over time, and you can avoid both issues simultaneously.
  2. Giving yourself a degree of posting responsibility can help you take it all more seriously. Of course you can (and probably should) be playful. But even the silliest of accounts have some form of a schedule, particularly if they’ve gotten large. They can’t just “forget” to post.

Schedule Those Suckers

  • If you’re really inspired and have a lot to say, that’s great! But unless it’s time-sensitive, use the scheduling features of programs like HootSuite. Or try Facebook’s own post scheduling feature. WordPress and Blogger both allow you to save drafts and schedule them to publish when you want them to. These functions are your friend.
  • Spreading the wealth over time will assure your readers that you’re not just some flash in the pan. It will also assure them that you’re still among the living.
  • Too many posts means that many of them will get lost in the shuffle. Too few means that they can loom large, and maybe seem more important than you think they should be. Spread the wealth, and you can avoid both problems.

One more thing about social media balance. While Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. should be mindful, it should also be kinda fun. Overdoing it means that you’re probably spending too much time online. While underdoing it probably means that it no longer interests you that much. Or, at least, what you’re posting and sending out to the universe has lost its luster.

Consider what either of those scenarios means to you. Because social media balance matters.

5 Comments

Almost Everything But the Tweet – Conquering Twitter (offsite connections)

Almost Everything But the Tweet – Conquering Twitter (offsite connections)

Are offsite connections possibly via Twitter? The semi-surprising answer is: yes. Because Twitter is so bare bones, any number of applications have sprung up around it in order to help you manage it and become as great as you can be.

Understanding the people you tweet with is, of course, a great way to determine if offsite connections are going to be worth it. After all, offsite connections that are hundreds of miles away are not likely to be easy, cheap, or even possible.

Other Software

Here are some more sites to check out:

  • HootSuite – a tweet scheduling service (and more) whereby you can track stats and import your lists.
  • Social Oomph (formerly TweetLater) – time tweets and gather simple metrics on shortened urls. You can set up more than one account this way.
  • Tweet Stats – a graph of, among other things, daily aggregate tweets, your most popular hours to tweet and who you retweet.
  • Tweepsmap – analytics and info on who unfollowed or followed you.
  • Twopcharts – look up clout, followers, etc.
  • Twiends – ways to grow followers responsibly
  • Legal Birds – find lawyers on Twitter.
  • Twitter Packs – find like-minded Twitter users (since this is a wiki, it depends on users to keep it up to date).

Offsite Connections: The Upshot

As Twitter continues to mature as a business tool, I predict that more and more of these off-site services will spring up. But understand that a number of older ones from just a few years ago are gone.

The most successful one will, in my opinion, combine the best features of all, coupled with ease of use and an ability to show trends over time.

And finally, Twitter changes things almost as much and as fast as Facebook does. So keep in mind, these instructions may need some tweaking.

Oh, and if you do actually see or even meet your Twitter connections, you’ll get to see if their imagery accurately reflects who they are!

Leave a Comment

Almost Everything But the Tweet – Conquering Twitter (metrics and timing)

Let’s Look at Almost Everything But the Tweet — Twitter Metrics and the Art and Science of Tweet Timing

Metrics and timing. When you tweet may not seem to matter too much. In particular, if you don’t tweet too terribly often, your tweets will still be out there, so why bother to even care about timing?

metrics and timing

Not so fast.

Patterns

According to The Science of Retweets, Twitter users tend to follow some recognizable patterns.

First thing Monday morning is prime time for retweeting; so is five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. And it’s always 5 o’clock … somewhere.

Yet that makes sense, as tweeters are either settling into the work week or are just about to start the weekend. Weekend tweeting is another animal as well.

Noon is another good time for retweeting—people are at lunch or are about to go. That’s true for people who go into an office and also those who work from home.

Plus there’s also the matter of accounts (often for job sites) that pump out a good dozen tweets, one right after another. These have little individual impact and seem only to be useful for later searching.

Timed tweeting seems almost counterintuitive. But for a business to use Twitter effectively, the tweets should be planned anyway. Why not plan not only their content but also their timing?

Scheduling Software

Here’s where services like Tweet Deck, Social Oomph (formerly Tweet Later) and HootSuite can provide some assistance. By scheduling the most important tweets for the very start and end (and middle) of each business day, you can add to their impact.

Separating out your tweets can also get them all out there while simultaneously preventing a flood of tweets which many users are generally just going to ignore.

Another positive upshot to spacing out your tweets is giving you content that can be used later. For Social Media platforms, it’s easy to initially attack them with an enormous amount of enthusiasm and then taper off or even fizzle out entirely.

If you regularly spit out twenty tweets per day, you’ll be tweeting 100 times during any given work week. Even your most dedicated followers are probably not going to read every single one. Plus, you’re setting yourself up for burnout.

Repeating tweets is pretty much a given, particularly when you consider how many touches people need before they buy just about anything. If someone missed your “Everything’s on sale!” tweet, then you want to catch them on the flip side, eh?

Time Zone Scheduling

So, instead, how about scheduling only two tweets per day (say, at 9:00 and 5:00 PM in the time zone where you have the greatest market share)? That way, you’ll have more people reading and no one will feel overwhelmed. Plus your 100 tweets will work for a little over a month or even two, if you are judicious and don’t tweet on the weekends.

So long as your tweets aren’t intimately tied to a specific time (e. g. announcements of an upcoming event), it shouldn’t matter. And, if they are, you might want to consider splitting them over several Twitter accounts. Perhaps open up one for just events in Seattle, for example.

Now, what about metrics?

URLs

Unfortunately, Twitter itself doesn’t do much, so you’ll mainly have to cobble things together yourself and use off-Twitter resources. One idea is to use a URL-shortening service that tracks basic metrics, such as Social Oomph or HootSuite. You may not get much more data from them than click count, but it’s still something. Hoot Suite provides .owly link metrics, with two free reports.

Another idea is to use a unique URL for the site URL in your profile, say, https://yoursite.com/twitter. If you’ve got Google Analytics set up, you can track when that page is used for landings to your site, and its bounce rate.

For commercial ventures, you might even make up a coupon code and tweet about it. Or use your Twitter landing page as a means of communicating certain special offers available only to Twitter users.

This is also useful for segmenting your audience when you want to send them email (with their double opt-in permission, of course!).

Follower/Following Ratio Metrics

Your number of followers, and the ratio of followers to who you follow, is all well and good, but it’s hard to say what you’re measuring. On Twitter, as on much of the web, popularity tends to breed even more popularity. And, it doesn’t really mean much if you have a number of purely spammy sites following you. They aren’t reading your tweets, anyway, so what’s the point?

This dilutes any idea of what these numbers might provide regarding influence, but if for some reason you really want to be followed by a bunch of spammers, just place the term weight loss into your profile and never block the spammers. In fact, follow them back, and you can get even more of them.

It hardly seems a worthwhile trophy to be followed by the biggest-ever village of spammers, eh?

And for God’s sake, don’t buy followers! That way lies madness. And it’s a fine ticket to being banned, or at least it used to be.

Some Metrics

Some sites, such as Audiense, show number of followers and their influence and activity. You can see which inactive people you follow (so you can drop them if you like), which famous people follow you, etc. Some of these are admittedly vanity metrics, but they are helpful.

Tweet Stats demonstrates, among other things, a graph of daily aggregate tweets. And it also contains your most popular hours to tweet and who you retweet. You’ll probably have to pay a different site for stats like exposure and reach. E. g. this means impressions and mentions of any topic, be it a word, a phrase, a user id or a hashtag.

In conclusion, keep up with Twitter, but don’t overwhelm your followers with floods of content. And measure your influence as well as you can, both using your own and external tools. If you can adjust your tweets to better serve your followers, your true influence will surely rise.

Leave a Comment

Social Networking/Social Media Tips

Social Networking/Social Media Tips

Social Media Tips? Yes, please! A while back, Grassroots Giving Group published some great Social Networking tips. I agreed with their ideas but would like to expand upon them a bit.

And they were essentially exploring when Facebook and Twitter (X) are useful. Here are some of their ideas.

Ideas

Here are a few quickie ideas.

Announcements

Don’t just announce upcoming or new things but also add links in order to drive traffic. Agreed! However, I would add a targeted landing page.

If you’ve got people coming in from Facebook, why not create a new landing page to personally welcome them (e. g. Welcome to our Facebook Friends!). The best part about that is that, since it’s a separate page, Google Analytics will track the clicks separately.

You’ve got a fighting chance of getting good metrics, so you’ll know whether your announcement of the opening of a new branch of the Widget Factory played better on Facebook or on Twitter.

Sending shortened website addresses on Twitter – use an URL shortener. Of course! But why not use one (such as from HootSuite) where you can get some click metrics? Using both a personalized landing page and an URL with click metrics can give you an even clearer idea of how traffic flows.

Oh, and they don’t tell you why you should shorten an URL on Twitter (even if the URL fits), but I will: to make it easier for people to retweet.

Planning

Here are some tips for better planning.

Planning in Advance

There’s nothing new here. You should keep up with things and plan in advance. Absolutely. And that means, when you’re hot and creative, write, write, write! Keep drafts and ideas going, and also think about how you can expand on your own blog entries or others’ (such as this blog entry).

Get yourself a stable of other blogs/blog writers, news sources, etc. Who inspires you? Who interests you? And don’t repeat or steal, of course. Rather, expand and comment. These are perfectly legitimate ways to update your blog.

This Day in History

Commemorate occasions in your company! There must be something you’ve done that is good blog fodder. Of course, not every day is memorable, but it’s another way to keep the pipeline going. If July 12th is an important day in your organization, make sure that the July 12th blog post and Tweets are ready to rock and roll, and they are updated to the correct year.

Heck, in HootSuite and SocialOomph (mentioned above), you can schedule Tweets. Why not schedule the Tweets for July 12th (or whatever your special day just so happens to be) and be done with them?

Quotes

They said, “Quotes!”

Quote Collection

I like this idea, and I think it can be used for a lot of purposes. This is not only quotes about your specific organization or its work, but even more generalized quotations. Surely there is something from Shakespeare (“My kingdom for a horse!”) or the Bible that could work for you in some capacity or another. It can be another jumping off point for creativity.

Ask Your Audience Questions

I think this is more useful if you have a somewhat large and actively commenting readership. While a rhetorical question is lovely, I think it’s just better if you can get at least a little feedback. Otherwise, it feels like you’re just shouting out to the wilderness.

Staff Introductions

This is another great idea. While your site might already have staff biographies, that’s another way to get the readership acquainted with who’s making the product.

Notes From Your Day

I don’t know about this one. Your day, maybe. Mine? I guess this is, in part, centered around the event reviews I’ve done. But otherwise, my days tend to be spent, well, here, blogging. Which may or may not be thrilling to others. But I can see where my coworkers could have some very interesting days. The process of invention is pretty fascinating.

Social Media Tips: Takeaways

So there you have it. Some pretty amazing social media tips for getting and keeping things going. And, while the post wasn’t, specifically, about blogging, it rings very true for that very specific – and sometimes challenging and elusive – task.

Finally, many, many thanks to the Grassroots Giving Group.

For more information, see the December 16, 2010 edition of Grassroots Giving Group.com’s blog.

Leave a Comment

Jell-O on the Wall: Social Media Perfection is Fleeting

Nail That Jell-O on the Wall: Social Media Perfection is Fleeting

Is social media perfection out there?

Maybe.

Every few months or so, a new study comes out which provides what are purportedly the perfect times to post on various platforms.

Or it might outline the perfect number of words or characters or images. All of this relentless pursuit of social media perfection is, of course, is for the Holy Grail of social media, the conversion.

I don’t argue with the idea. Certainly everyone wants to minimize time spent and maximize conversions which, presumably, lead to profit or fame or some other personal or corporate milestone or achievement.

What amuses me, though, is that sometimes the advice is a bit conflicting.

Social Media Today posts a lot of articles like this, and here’s an example.

Articles

So back in May of 2014, four great and interesting (certainly helpful) articles appeared on that site. Let’s look at how they stack up.

Ideal Lengths

The Ideal Length of Everything Online, Backed by Research – this rather helpful article indicated, for example, that the ideal blog post then was 1,600 words long.

This figure put it into more or less direct opposition to Yoast’s Social Media Plugin for WordPress, which, if all other conditions are ideal, starts to mark blog posts are having good SEO at 300 or more words in length.

Now, the Social Media Today article was more about engagement, so I understand that this isn’t exactly apples to apples. But regardless of how ‘ideal’ in length a post is, it’s still … something. Fortunately, these aren’t mutually exclusive conditions.

In addition, that article listed perfect tweet length as 71 – 100 characters. But now we have more character space!

Social Media Perfection on Twitter (X)

The Perfect Tweet  – speaking of perfect tweets, this article, posted four days after the first one listed above. And it spelled out that tweets with images are ideal. Again, it’s not a true contradiction, but it is a bit of an inconsistency, particularly as this article didn’t talk about tweet length at all.

Yet isn’t ideal length a part of tweeterrific perfection? It seems like it should be.

Quick Management

How to Manage Your Social Media in 34 Minutes (or Less) a Day – this article did a good job in outlining the basics. And it added a bit of a reminder to try to engage the audience, provide good content, etc.

However, they didn’t include time blogging. And perhaps they shouldn’t have. Because if you prepare a 1,600-word blog post (or even a Yoast-approved 300 word wonder), you most likely won’t write it in less than 34 minutes.

At least, you won’t be doing so if you want to (a) include images, tags, and other extras and formatting touches and (b) credit your sources properly. Furthermore, you don’t want to even inadvertently commit plagiarism. And, of course, you need to be thinking about SEO with everything that you write. Ever.

The idea of using HootSuite, Buffer, and/or Facebook’s own post scheduler is, of course, a smart one.

Marketing Campaigns

9 Fresh and Effective Ideas for Your Social Media and Content Marketing Campaigns  – this article provided some quick tips on how to change things up. And this included an idea about engaging in a debate with competitors, and another about collaborating on content with customers.

I wish I knew how to do that in 34 minutes or less.

Let’s Update That Research

Ideal post lengths change.

Social Media Perfection on Facebook

According to a 2020 article from Sprout Social, the ideal length for a Facebook post is 40 – 80 characters. And the ideal length of a Facebook ad headline is 5 words.

Hmm, maybe I should change the titles of some of these blog posts?

Twitter

For Twitter (per the same article), the ideal length is 71 – 100 characters. This makes sense as it adds space to comment when replying. But make no mistake about it—having to go under 100 characters would force you to be concise.

Instagram

Caption length should be 138 – 150 characters. Not as concise as Twitter, but you’re still not writing a Russian novel.

Interestingly enough, the article also says that the number of hashtags can be 5 – 10. There’s nothing on Facebook or Twitter hashtags, but usually in those instances, less is more.

LinkedIn

The ideal number of characters in a LinkedIn status update is supposed to be 50 – 100. So in this case, Twitter comes off as looking more like The Lord of the Rings or any other long novels you may prefer.

However, the reason for this is that usually a LinkedIn update is a caption/status and then a link. And… that’s it.

But there are posts on LinkedIn. This length does not take them into consideration.

YouTube

Per the article, there doesn’t seem to be a bit of social media perfection when it comes to the length of YouTube titles or the like. Instead, these things are evidently defined by the software itself. If the limit on video titles is 70 characters, then your ideal YouTube video title is going to be 70 characters or fewer.

Otherwise, the end gets cut off.

And as for videos, well, less is often more.

TikTok

Not even in that article! But according to Later, while you have up to 10 minutes for TikTok videos, don’t go down to the wire. But they aren’t any more precise than that. In fact, some places say 15 seconds! But then again, that was the limit originally. So, who knows?

Social Media Perfection: Takeaways

Be that as it may, we are all pressed for time these days, and it’s only going to get worse. Undoubtedly, a new study will come out soon enough with new standards and ideals and concepts that are touted as social media perfection. Will they be? Maybe, but probably not forever.

In the meantime, don’t beat yourself up if your stuff is imperfect. Hey, it happens. And you may find that your character lengths are on the bleeding edge of the next ideas of social media perfection.

1 Comment