How Often You Post May Not Be As Important as What You Post on Business Social Networks
Ideas for posting quality information on business social networking sites. Courtesy of Intersection Consulting.
I spent nearly 2 hours on LinkedIn today, which is much more than other business social networks I use. LinkedIn has changed with the times and I suppose the demand from its members. For example, when you visit a group, the first thing you see is not a listing of the latest discussions, but a rolling horizontal listing of the most popular discussions, job posts, events, etc. It’s like a movie review of your group. I’m not fond of flashing and rolling images on webpages, and I’m not so sure if I like this “feature” on LinkedIn either.
However, in the middle of posting to several groups, I did come across one discussion that was started 7 months ago (I think I contributed to the same discussion 2 months ago) about how many social networking sites people “actively engage in on a regular basis.” For business, I use three or four on a weekly basis, and you? Anyway, I was even more astounded with the amount of comments posted – 358 as of this afternoon. One comment especially caught my eye, which is the purpose of this blog post.
“Remember, it’s not just how much you post on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc), but the quality of information you provide on any social network” for business or personal use. Someone can post a tweet every hour; however, if the tweets aren’t providing any real value or are all sales messages then you’re not giving your audience any value. Invariably if you post to your business social networks less, but offer valuable information especially of interest to your audience and they can find it again if needed, then your business is truly offering quality information.
What are your competitors doing with social networking for business? Do it better and provide the types of posts, tweets, discussion starters and answers you would want to read whether you’re tweeting in 140 characters or less or you’re providing a product review. Your audience is listening and they want quality, not just large quantities of useless fan page posts. Show your audience you’re human too. I heard from another social media for business webinar that “social networks are about building relationships with people.”
Last thoughts: if your business wants to build and strengthen a relationship with people, then you need to be an attentive listener as well as pay attention to the needs of your audience. Remember those 358+ comments posted from just 1 question? A very good example of a quality question with mutually quality comments as well as quantity.
We’d like to hear your 2 cents on this topic about “Quality vs Quantity: Discussing the Value of Social Networks for Business.” Please post your comments below, we do moderate all comments and edit as necessary (see blog post on NoFollow links).
