Can you publish too much content to your social media channels? Will people unfollow you for being a prolific content creator? I have some thoughts.
Prefer to read instead of watch? Here’s a rough script I used for this video.
Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to discuss whether or not you can create too much content or get too much exposure in your personal branding efforts. I’m a big believer in developing a personal brand because I think you can only be successful as the business relationships that you have. If you know a lot of other successful business people, especially in your industry, you’ll be exposed to opportunities and deals you would never otherwise be able to have access to. I’ve worked pretty hard to develop a personal brand locally here in Sioux Falls. I’ve done this by taking leadership positions in business and entrepreneurship organizations like Zeal, 1 Million Cups and Startup Sioux Falls. I’ve worked to become a thought leader by publishing books, articles, videos and other content. I’ve also worked to develop personal and business relationships with other key business leaders in Sioux Falls. These efforts have opened up some great business and service opportunities that otherwise I wouldn’t have been aware of or wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pursue.
I think I’ve been somewhat successful in my personal branding efforts, but someone asked me an interesting and perhaps challenging question on LinkedIn the other day. This came from an acquaintance in the business community that I’ve met before, so I took it seriously. He asked whether or not I might be over-exposing myself by producing so much content and suggested that I might think about spacing them out more. Now, over-exposure is a concept in marketing that if people hear from you or your brand too much, they’ll lose interest and stop paying attention to you. The idea of over-exposure comes up a lot with celebrities that will intentionally turn down interviews because they think they’ve done too much media recently and don’t want people to lose interest in them. I think it’s possible that over-exposure was a real risk when there were far fewer choices in the type of media that people consume. When there were only three channels on television, over-exposure probably was a risk because if you were on television 3 nights in a row, there’s a pretty good chance viewers would have seen you on TV three nights in a row.
In the modern era of digital communication, we far exponentially more choices about the types of media to consume. The days of broadcast TV, radio and print newspapers have come and gone. It’s not uncommon for someone to have a cable package on their television, a satellite radio subscription, digital newspaper subscriptions, A Netflix account, a Hulu account, a well-used YouTube account and a podcast app filled with several different podcasts. People just have a lot more choices than they used to, so the likelihood of someone consuming any one type of media at any given time is lower. You wouldn’t need to worry about being on the same TV station three nights in a row today, because the likelihood of any one person watching the same television station three nights in a row is pretty low. People also just follow a lot of different things at once on various traditional media and social media platforms, so if you are 1 of 100 twitter accounts that someone follows, the likelihood of your tweets clogging up someone’s account is pretty low. The algorithms on these social networks also do a good job of showing diversified content to users, so I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about over-exposure on social media accounts or email for that matter
What I do think can be a real problem is quality control. If you are producing a large volume of content, but the quality’s not there, people will see you as a spammer or just as someone that doesn’t provide valuable content and will un-follow you for that reason. So, if the quality of content that you are creating is suffering because of the sheer volume of content you’re trying to produce, I think that can be a real problem. My recommendation would be to produce as many good quality posts as you realistically can. For me, this is one or two blog posts or videos per week. Beyond that, I’ll post some of my old content in a rotation to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis, but I know that I can only create so much new content per week and keep the quality up. Once the quality of your content starts to decline, you should stop posting because you really need to be able to produce interesting, useful and entertaining content if you want to capture the attention of a media consumer in the modern age. People have a ton of choices on the content they consume, so if you’re not any good, they’ll just forget about you and move onto the next thing.
I also think that you do need to keep up the quantity of content that you post to capture attention in an increasingly competitive world. This doesn’t mean you need to become a content machine and produce dozens of videos of blog posts each week, but maybe you can re-share your old content from six months ago that everyone’s forgotten about and most people never saw in the first place anyway. You can also post content from other people’s websites and podcasts that you think your followers might find useful. Of course, each social network has different norms about how much content is okay to post. I think one post per day on Facebook and LinkedIn is the norm, but you probably can’t Tweet too much, post too many Instagram photos or post too many YouTube videos. So, try to make a good mix of the content of your own stuff and other people’s stuff that match the norm of the social media platform that you’re on.
Those are a few simple thoughts on over-exposure. People tend to follow a lot of different accounts and your content won’t dominate anyone else’s Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook feeds because the feed algorithms on these platforms just won’t over-expose any one account’s content. I would, however, make sure that the content you are posting is high quality though and I would also make sure you’re not over-stepping the norms of the social media channel you’re working with. What do you think? How do you maintain a good balance of quality and quantity on social media posting? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for watching.