“Say something once, why say it again?” — Talking Heads
Do you repeat your postings on social media? According to Julie Gauthier of Scoop.it (a publisher of content marketing software), only a third of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) do this as a standard practice, and a third never do.
Repost for better reach
According to Gauthier’s recent blog article, “when you share it once on social media, you reach no more than 6% of your followers on Facebook, and your Tweet’s lifetime is about 18 minutes.”
Repetition, she claims, can double your traffic and increase your reach. Though she doesn’t cite research to quantify (or even qualify) the claim of expanded reach, it makes sense.
So why don’t we repeat ourselves? Gauthier suggests two reasons:
- We’re afraid to fatigue or offend the audience
- We lack tools that schedule repeats
I find my clients pretty readily repeat postings on Twitter but we should probably do it on all media. My thought is that social media is ephemeral and no one (possible exception: my Mom) attempts to read it all. It’s like listening to the radio — you hear what you hear and miss the rest. Consequently, a repeated posting is not likely to be seen and if it is, not likely to gather much notice.
How much can you repeat? That’s harder to gauge. We want to test everything we can, but most SMBs lack the traffic or the mechanism to know when prospects are becoming annoyed, so begin reposting according to a rigid procedure (automated if possible) and watch response rates. Look at where returns begin to diminish and call that your benchmark.