Having a blog and social networking profiles is an important part of promoting your site on the web. However, in order to truly benefit from these things you need to work to grow your readership by posting regular, high-quality updates. For a small business owner, though, finding the time to post updates to your website, Facebook and Twitter can be a real challenge.
Many social marketers teach us that using social networking to promote your business means that you are competing for space in your followers’ news feeds. Posting too seldom could make it difficult for your fans to be exposed to your message. Posting too often could dilute your message and possible cost you fans and followers as they may grow tired of redundant and excessive updates.
So, as a small business owner, how do you know what to post, how often to post and the easiest ways to post these updates?
First off, there is a very easy answer to how often a local business should be posting updates: You should post as often as you have something valuable to say. If you have two or three very important things to say in a day, it’s okay to post them. If you only post a quality update once a week, there is nothing wrong with that.
For both Facebook and Twitter, you should post a link to any new blog post or article added to your website. Here is an example of a quick tweet we did for a new blog post:
Choosing a domain name for a local business can be tough. Here are a list of a few guidelines to help you: http://tinyurl.com/49y49po
For Facebook alone, posting once a day or once every other day is probably the most you will want to do without overexposing your fans to your message. In fact, our own analytics have shown that many Facebook pages lose fans when they post too frequently. For others, their fans may just hide your updates from their news feed which means they won’t be exposed to your message at all, even though they still show up as a fan of your business.
As a local business, you should make an effort to update Facebook at least once a week. If you are open on the weekends, you could an update Friday afternoon with an event or special deal taking place over the weekend.
Twitter, on the other hand, is a medium that allows you to get away with posting much more frequently. That still doesn’t mean you should be posting tweets for the sake of keeping your brand in your followers’ faces. Quality is still the key here, as you can lose followers if you exchange relevancy for quantity.
There are lots of small businesses that use Twitter for posting time-sensitive deals to help drive business during traditionally low volume days. For instance, if you were a small restaurant owner and were experiencing a slow Thursday, you could post a quick tweet notifying your followers that you were having a buy one get one free entree special for that night only. With enough local followers, you could turn a low revenue day into a profitable one without the need for paying a newspaper to print a coupon for that day. These types of deals and offers are instant, far reaching and easy to manage for a small business owner.
These are just a few ideas on how often to update your social networking profiles, but the biggest thing you should take from this is the knowledge that posting frequency should be tied directly to the value of what you have to say and the ROI you can expect to receive in return for the effort put into it.
