Don’t ‘overshare’ your business on social media
Content creation matters because we are living in an attention economy. Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. Put simply by Matthew Crawford, “Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it. As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information. Any company that wants to be noticed is not competing with its rivals but with the latest episode of Star Wars too. According to a white paper by Chart Beat, amid the vastness of the web, time is the sole measure of scarcity. It’s zero sum: a minute spent on one site is a minute not spent on another. If you are a publisher, enticing someone to spend time on your content means competing with the entire sum of human knowledge.
Engaged time is the amount of time that users spend actively interacting with a page – reading, writing, scrolling, watching. Recirculation is the percentage of your audience that has engaged with a particular piece of content (e.g., actually read it) and chooses to go on to engage with another.
According to Chart Beat’s data, about 40 percent of visitors leave having spent fewer than 15 seconds engaged on the page. For the bottom 25 percent of articles, fewer than 30 percent of visitors engaged for over 15 seconds, and for the top 25 percent of articles two-thirds of visitors engaged for that long. From the perspective of page views, two articles could be almost exactly the same. But Engaged Time allows you to draw very different conclusions about the success of each page’s content: Certainly traffic volume matters, but you also have to ask yourself if people actually read the article.
Whichever industry you are competing in, you have to realize that people are not looking to find your content; they are looking to find either something interesting and fun or something that adds value to themselves.
No one is dying to hear about your meeting with the major of a certain city. They want to hear about information that would serve their own purposes. So you have to ask yourself this: “What news or information do we have as a company that would make people stop searching for the next hero movie and read our content?” If you don’t have anything to say and if your agency doesn’t have anything to say, you don’t have to post something on Facebook every day. The billions of people who check their Facebook regularly would do just as well if you don’t post the fifteenth photo of your sales meeting. In fact, more people would engage with your brand if you knew what not to post as well as knew what to post.
Five tips from Forbes on how to manage social media is fantastic. Follow them and you will become successful. Tips include offering value, being strategic with images (Don’t post stand-alone photos of your products or services. Show them being used by happy, satisfied customers. Also, make it easy for fans to tag photos of their own, wherever they use your product or service, and share these as well), avoiding lengthy posts, focusing on engagement, connecting like a friend, rather than a business.
