Are You Overwhelming Your Followers? How Much Social Media is Enough

By now, you know that social media is popular. You may use it for personal reasons, for business or for both. Some people have social media accounts but they don’t use it very often, and others are constantly posting, liking or sharing content throughout all of their channels. Those who fall into the latter category may be going about social media all wrong. Yes, social media is intended for you to be social, and yes, you should use it to engage your followers, but too much activity and too many posts can be overwhelming your followers.

Think about it. Do you follow someone on Twitter who has a new tweet every 20 seconds? It’s annoying, right? Well if you’re guilty of tweeting every 20 seconds too, your followers feel the same way about you. Social media sites are meant to communicate with your friends and followers, but it’s not meant to overwhelm them. For that reason, here are a few tips to help you learn how to cut back on your social media activity.

Limit your posts to three a day.

This is being generous, but you should try and limit yourself to only posting a status update three times per day. Research has shown that the average lifespan of a tweet is two hours, so every tweet that you post will last for two hours. If you tweet more than once every two hours, you are easily bombarding your social followers.

Only share something of value.

Nobody cares about what you ate for dinner, or that you grabbed Starbucks before work, or that you spent the day doing laundry. In order to use social media properly, you should only share information that other people will find useful, or in some cases, funny. Nobody wants to waste three seconds of their life reading a dumb tweet or status update, so don’t force them to.

Don’t automate your re-tweets.

Some people set up their Twitter account to automatically retweet items from certain individuals. This is not a smart idea. First of all, it’s possible that the tweets you’re retweeting are not sharing anything important. Second, what happens if that person sends out an inappropriate tweet and you automatically retweet it without having any idea of what it says? This could put you in some very hot water. Instead, only retweet items that you actually read and that actually have an impact on you. Your followers will appreciate it.

Limit the amount of comments you leave.

Commenting on a friend’s status update or photo is perfectly acceptable, but there is absolutely no need to comment on every single thing that every single one of your friend’s posts or photos. Not only does it make you look like a creep, but when this information shows up in everyone’s news feeds, it becomes extremely irritating.

Social media is a great way to keep in contact with friends and family members, but it can be extremely overwhelming to your friends and followers if you are constantly posting, commenting or liking items. In order to ensure that you keep all of your friends and followers, make sure that you’re using these tips to use social media more effectively.

Provided by Marketing Resources creators of the GO Apps for Facebook.

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