You can overdo it when it comes to social media marketing.
After a while you just know when you are pushing it, but for you newbies, here is a guide to help you know when to say when. Use the EFT Ratio, a social media marketing law developed by me for GuestFeed. The EFT Ratio states: Maximum effectiveness is achieved when for every 200 Tweets you send, you share 50 Facebook Posts, and send 1 Email. This means you are shooting for 13-15 Tweets per day on average, 3-5 Facebook Posts per day, and 1 Email every Two Weeks. If you want to push the pedal to the metal with your social media marketing, while staying in a safe zone, be sure to respect the EFT Ratio. We employ this for our GuestFeed clients and it works, at some points it is tedious, at some points they request three emails a week, but at all points it is effective and that is why I am sharing it.
-Email Marketing this is tricky, because it is proactive, delivers measurable results, and is the most familiar social media vehicle to relative newcomers it gets abused the most. Do not take for granted the emails on your list, they are hard earned unlocked doors that can be taken away with the click of a mouse. If you send too many emails, uninteresting emails, or bland come spend money here pitches of desperation, your result will be a shrinking list, and an apathetic or worse subscriber list. When in doubt wait longer, enrich the email more, offer more. Always bring new info to the table, share media, highlight what others are saying about you, deliver value to the reader. Despite being the least used social media outlet, email marketing could be the most productive if you do it right.
-Facebook Profile & Page This is generally easier to gauge… if you have a personal page you check it to see the updates from your friends and the business that you have ‘liked’ or friended. You see your stream and the updates on a regular basis. You probably have a friend that is constantly spouting the same message, you like him so you don’t delete him, its personal. Still his repetitive mentions that he can re-finance your house no matter what your credit is is a bit over done. But again its personal. As a business you don’t want your messages to get stale in a Facebook stream, keep them fresh and keep the friends. The difference from email is that you can post multiple times a day, unlike email its cool to share a picture, a status update, a link, a video, a menu etc all in one day. Just be original. Facebook has more permanence than Email, but it still is non-intrusive, and pushed old down the feed without interaction by the recipients.
-Twitter So the next step is your twitter account, and its ‘NOW’ quality. Twitter is all about now, as in right now, not 30 minutes ago and not 30 minutes from now. You can Tweet the same picture, status, link, video, and menu at 9am and 6pm and chance are very few of your followers will see both. Those that do will skim past with much less thought do to the nature of twitter, and your result will improve if you share away. The more content you create the better, so take pictures, videos, share specials, talk about your special events etc… and get used to posting throughout the day on twitter.
Let me know about your experiences, here or on Twitter @spirocks. If you want me to tell you what GuestFeed would do for your business simply ask. Happy holidays.
I am Spirocks on Twitter.