I am going to vent today in our blog about one of my social media pet peeves. Those who know me know that I have pet peeves at times and, well, get a little passionate about them. So… if this is you, well, don’t ever admit to me that you do this, ok?
One of my pet peeves in social media is a twitter no-no in my book – tweeting too many times at once.
Too often I see in my twitter feed about eight posts in a row from the same Twitter handle… and then they disappear for about six hours. Then that user comes back with about six more in about a 10-minute span… then they go away again. Thus, the person managing it goes into the account, fires off a bunch of stuff at the beginning of the day and then fires off a bunch of stuff at the end of the day.
We all talk about managing social media and not allowing it to consume all of our time and that is completely true. (Earlier this week, there was a humorous blog post about the 60 signs of how to know when you are addicted to social media.) We shouldn’t spend hours in our Twitter or Facebook sending witty messages to promote the brand… well, at least most of our bosses wouldn’t like that. But we can appear to do it.
Schedule your tweets. There is nothing wrong with it. Programs like TweetDeck make it easy. When we re-tweet something, it isn’t breaking news. If it is breaking news, then tweet it right away – of course. But otherwise, I don’t think it is good practice to tweet too many things in a row. Flooding someone’s feed will only get you an unfollow. And if they don’t hit you at the right time, they might not get to see your tweets anyway in a crowded follower feed.
The other thing that scheduling can sometimes do is get you into someone’s feed at a key time for your brand. Let’s say you are a restaurant establishment that has become an after-work Happy Hour spot. Does it do you any good to send something at 10 a.m. when you are coming in to set up for the day? Or would it be better to tweet something a little before lunch and again around 4 p.m. – at times that people might be discussing their after work plans?
In a previous blog, I mentioned that when I was at UNCG in the athletic department, I tweeted our day’s schedule of events first thing in the morning. Why would I do that? Because when someone got into their account early in the morning, they would see we had a game that night. Maybe it got them to make plans and bring their kids out that night. Or maybe they came back later to watch the game on the videostreaming platform. Or maybe it just made them think about doing one of those sometime in the future.
At the end of the day, we all want a good social network presence. Know when to say when… and tweet responsibly.
