Your Blog Post is Worth More than One Tweet

Dary, a student in my social media course, posted this link to our class hashtag on Twitter: How to Get Better Social Media Engagement. Here’s the line that stuck out for me…

One of the most neglected elements of strategy we see is a commitment to repurposing content and recognizing the varied habits of social media users.

So, we spend lots of time creating content, but we get nervous about posting about it on social media more than once.

I see this in class sometimes. Students don’t want to be too self-promotional, or are nervous about people seeing their work. It’s also easy to forget that social media doesn’t work like email, and your followers don’t necessarily see your messages every time you post.

For example, technically, I have about 1900 followers on Twitter. But guess how many times this tweet showed up in people’s timelines:

Anyone else feel kinda decadent when they type out the whole month in a tweet? #February, not #Feb. 😛

— Jared Lenover (@autoblot) January 20, 2016

The answer: 263. That’s a lot less than 1900.

I know you wouldn’t bother posting that particular message more than once. But if you were talking about something important, or trying to let people know about something cool you made… that’s different.

I face this issue at work too. My team writes articles for our website. I want to make sure people in our community see them, especially if they’d be helpful. How many times should I post on different platforms? How do I know when to post to reach people who will be interested? At what point do people start getting annoyed?