Social media promotes your content, helps you engage with patients and clients, and can even help your website’s SEO. So how original does your social media content need to be? Is social media repetition a problem?
It depends on the kind of repetition. For social media, there are a lot of possibilities. Let’s look at some of them.
Post the same thing everywhere
Different social media platforms have different uses, customs, and standards. When you’re talking to fellow professionals at LinkedIn, your Instagram post might not be exactly what you need. Equally, your Facebook post might not be the best Instagram post.
On the other hand, if you’re thoughtful about your duplication, you might be successful with posting the same thing at Twitter and Facebook. For example, you can use Yoast tools to customize your Twitter and Facebook introductions at your blog, and use Publicize to post automatically at both Twitter and Facebook when you publish.
It’s not the best possible social media, but it tends to get results that are similar to completely custom posting… in way less time.
Post multiple times
Your posts and tweets don’t reach everyone in your audience. Sometimes people are busy doing something else and miss your post. Or they don’t have time to click through. If you post an identical 200 character announcement three days running, you might be overdoing it. But posting more than once gives your followers a chance to enjoy your post if they missed it the first time.
Try posting once with the title, once with a quote from the content you’re sharing, and once with an additional thought. Occasionally go back to older content and share, too. Lots of new visitors may appreciate tweets they missed the first time around.
Guy Kawasaki says that you’re not posting enough if you’re not making anyone angry. Keep posting until you start to lose followers. That’s when you can tell that you’re posting too much.
Scattershot @s
Sometimes we see folks post the identical message using @ a variety of people. They figure only the person they’re sending it to will see it. As though it were an email.
Actually, you can show up as a long line of identical tweets if someone looks for a conversation with one of your hashtags.
The only thing worse is sending a message that is only a long list of @s.
Post the same kind of thing all the time
You can post glamour shots of your products, dishes, and “after”s pretty much all the time. If you have specials all the time, you can promote your specials quite a bit. But 100% sales pitches will irritate your followers. There has to be some real appeal.
Quoting Guy Kawasaki again, it’s not how much you post, it’s how well you post. “If you provide enough value, then you earn the right to promote your company in order to recruit new customers. The key is to always provide value.”
Kawasaki is a fan of great curated content. Your strategy might be lots of backstage photos. Maybe you go with links to original content, or original content posted directly on the social media platform.
But you should mix it up. Provide plenty of value for your followers, and then they’ll be happy to let you promote your organization.
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