Don’t Annoy Your Audience With Bad Content Scheduling

Content scheduling is an easy way to keep your brand vocal and influential around the clock, without actually having to be on social media around the clock.

What’s not to like?

Turns out, if you’ve got bad content scheduling habits, there’s quite a bit not to like.

Developing bad habits will undo all the goodwill your social media has, driving customers away from you instead of connecting them to you.

So how do you avoid bad content scheduling habits? The first step to solving a problem is knowing you’ve got a problem in the first place.

Here are 5 of the most common bad content scheduling habits for you to look out for!

Posting Too Often

Why does your brand have a social media presence? If you’re like most successful brands, you’re looking to build an audience and have a voice.

This is a great plan, but there’s a problem: You’re not the only voice out there.

If you schedule your content to post too often, you risk being read by your audience as nothing more than noise.

When that happens, they’ll start ignoring your content–and eventually they’ll stop following your brand.

So how often is too often? It greatly depends on the site you’re posting to and the demographics of your audience.

For example, on Twitter, it’s a good idea to aim for about 5 tweets a day, but on Tumblr, a good brand can get away with up to 15 posts a day.

On facebook, success for a brand can come anywhere between one post a month and 2–3 posts a day!

Posting The Same Content Over And Over

Posting the same content more than once is a highly-effective way to make sure everyone sees what you’ve got to say.

Since social media moves quickly, it’s easy for people to miss a great article or blog post if you only post it once.

Post it multiple times through the day, however, and more people will have a chance to see it.

However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Posting the same content over and over may give more people access to the article, but it will quickly sound monotonous and repetitive to people who‘ve already seen it.

Does this mean you should avoid posting the same content multiple times? Not at all! It’s still a valuable strategy for sharing your message with the world.

But to avoid being repetitive, you’ll want to develop a daily schedule that isn’t repetitive and makes sure your audience gets value.

Posting Content That’s Totally Irrelevant To Your Audience

Ever wonder why your audience is following your social media feeds?

Usually, they’re looking for several things: added value, special deals, interesting articles, and anything else that your brand can provide them.

If that’s what your audience wants, why would you give them something completely unrelated?

Posting content that has nothing to do with your brand or field will only frustrate people who came to you looking for something specific.

Instead, stay on topic and focus on giving your audience the relevant content they came for.

Remember: Your audience can get unrelated content anywhere else on the internet.

You’re the only one responsible for representing your brand.

Worst Content Scheduling Habit: Posting Rapidly and Then Disappearing For Days

Do you want your brand to seem current and up-to-date? Do you want to make sure people know you’re there when you need them?

If you said yes to either of those questions, you’ll need to post consistently. That means daily content, with few to no breaks.

Why is it so bad for your feed to post rapidly and then go silent? One of the biggest benefits of social media is the relationship you form with your audience.

You’ll learn more about the people who use your brand, and in return, people will have access to your brand.

When you post in chunks and then disappear, the audience no longer feels as if they’ve got access to you. Instead, they may feel like you only show up when you’ve got something to sell them.

Additionally, if someone looks at your social media profile and they see that you haven’t posted in days, they’ll get the impression that your brand is inactive.

Posting Content from the Same Sources Indefinitely

Don’t want to appear inactive when you’ve got no new content? Sharing relevant content from other sources is a great way to make sure your feeds stay fresh and moving.

Be careful, though: If you do nothing but post from a single source, you’ll slowly be eliminating your audience’s need to follow you.

Think about it: If you followed someone who did little else but post stories from one news source, why wouldn’t you just follow that news source?

Additionally, this practice makes it look like your source is the authority, not you. This makes it incredibly hard to be a thought leader in your industry.

Since thought leadership is incredibly beneficial to any brand, you can’t afford to miss it.

Your audience is already following you. That means they like your product, and they want to know more about what you’ve got to offer.

Use good content scheduling to give them a great social media experience, and they’ll return the favor with valuable loyalty and sales.

Annoy them, and you may just find that audience shrinking rapidly!

Originally published at blog.startafire.com on May 13, 2016.