WSWilliams Consulting | Creative Web Content Strategies | Ann Arbor, MI

I’m often asked by clients, “How often should I tweet/blog/change my status on Facebook?”

There is not really a perfect answer for this, but if I were going to take a stab at it, I would answer, “When you have something relevant to say.”

Social media channels are filled with a lot of noise and quasi-adverts from many businesses. I saw this a lot in the music business when some clients suggested sending out “email blasts” and invites for any number of events that might or might not have been relevant to the list they were (not to put too fine a point on it), spamming.

This is a flawed strategy. Your recipients will hate you for it.

When people give you permission to send them email, and to a lesser extent, follow or friend you, they will only engage if you send them a GEM (something worthy and relevant) when you post something that ends up in their newsfeed on social networks or in their inbox. I have seen people blow this concept time and again in an effort to cover a lot of potential followers without thinking how offended people will be if they are fed irrelevant information. I still get invitations from people in New York who simply spam their whole list of followers for an event only a handful can attend. I see businesses mixing personal messages and observations into their social media (annoying)…if your followers can’t count on what you say to be relevant to them, they will opt out of your feed.

Everything you send out via social media channels should be weighed in terms of relevance and usefulness to your audience. There is always room to be spontaneous and even a little off-message (posting something you found someplace else), but in the end, you have to think of your social media outlets like the bins in a record store…does the content fit the genre?

I’ll be writing more about this.