Visual Contenting April 2016 | Page 23

SOCIAL MEDIA The caveat to this is that social media frequency guides are just suggestions. Buffer has found that engagement tends to decrease after the third tweet each day, but that doesn’t mean you need to stop posting after the third post. Rather, it just means that the first three posts should be the ones you want to get the most engagement. It will also vary from brand to brand. If you have a larger audience with more mixed demographics across different time zones – and thus different peak hours – you can afford more posts per day and can just eat the slight loss in engagement. If you’re a small brand with a smaller audience, you run the risk of flooding their feeds if you post too often every day, so it’s better to go with a more focused plan. At the same time, the Pareto Principle is not set in stone. You don’t need to heavily regulate your marketing and, like a clockwork robot, guarantee every fifth tweet is a marketing tweet. The more you try to automate and roboticize your marketing, the more you’ll come across as fake and exploitive, hurting your brand presence overall. Tweet and Retweet are on a Boat… Another trick that can dramatically boost your Twitter Visual Contenting marketing is simply posting the same content several times. Twitter does not enforce Robot9000 rules; it doesn’t require originality on threat of punishment. Nothing stops you from sharing a blog post or image more than once. In fact, it should be encouraged! Twitter doesn’t filter your feed, other than the very basic “while you were gone” curated box when you first sign on. Tweets appear in reverse chronological order, the most recent at the top. As you scroll down, you’re scrolling back in time. Most users scroll for a little ways, but they don’t keep going; after all, Twitter keeps moving while they’re digging into the past. They need to pull up for air some time, and when they do, it’s time to keep up with the current feed. That means if you tweet out a link, after half an hour or so – depending on the number of people your followers follow – that tweet will be buried. Some people will see it later, but many others won’t. The solution to this problem is to post it again, later, so a different selection of people will see it. With a blog post and a reasonably sized audience – maybe in the thousands or higher – you could follow a sample scheme like this: 1. Tweet once when you publish the blog post. 2. Tweet once with the link an hour or three later. 3. Tweet the link again the next day, with different Tweet copy. 4. Tweet again a few days later, maybe with an ICYMI (In Case You Missed It). Whether or not you tweet more often, or continue tweeting after the initial week, depends on the quality and timeliness of the article you’re sharing. Evergreen posts can have reminder posts every month for a year. News-focused posts lose value quickly and won’t need further promotion after a few days. Additionally, larger audiences can support more frequent posts, because more activity means fewer people see the initial posts. Smaller audiences are more likely to see it several times and may grow bored with the same post over and over. Put all of these rules and tips into action and you can go from mediocre Twitter nobody to marketing powerhouse in no time. From Follows.com Check out this infographic on Visual Contenting.