Social media and marketing your business articles are widely available, and I tend to read a lot of them, however,  one thing that has always plagued me is how often should you post, tweet, email, etc.  How much marketing is enough and how much is too much?  After all no one wants to be considered an annoying spammer.

Market Unto Others As You Would Have Them Market Unto You… We are adopting this new marketing attitude here on the QuickBooks for Contractors blog; we’ll continue to provide a new daily blog post; however, we will be far more prudent in the manner in which we will be publishing the content.

You can find us on LinkedIn – QuickBooks for Contractors group, Twitter, and Facebook.  After today we will no longer be sharing our content on multiple LinkedIn groups.

OR subscribe to our blog via email or RSS Feeds.

We want to make sure that you are receiving our content because YOU WANT TO rather than because we are pushing it at you from multiple platforms.

Here’s Why

Sometimes I think that I’m on information overload  from all the updates that I receive on a daily basis – between LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and email.  I bet that many of you feel the same way.

There are times when I wonder if I’ll ever get any work done because there is so much “stuff” to read.  Monday is an especially bad day, for me anyway – Monday morning typically finds me downloading anywhere between 225 and 275 pieces of email!

As business owners we all need to market our business, therefore, we blog, tweet, and update.  But are we blogging, tweeting an updating the right things with the right frequency?  Or we coming off as spammers?

I guess I was in a researching mood over the weekend; either that or I was just at the point where I really felt that I needed to know this information and what I discovered I felt I should share with others.

Blogging:

Striving to publish a blog article on a daily basis is an awesome goal and is something that just about all of the articles that I’ve read have suggested.  If you don’t feel that you can come up with new content on a daily basis (and it is a lot of work) then come up with a schedule that you can stick to; once a week, twice a week, or even three times a week, and then be consistent.

BUT, you need to make sure that what you are blogging about is good content – something that is relevant to your audience.  Ultimately, your audience is vast and includes more than just your circle of friends and followers.  This happens when your blog is discovered by Search engines, which then send people outside of your circle to your blog.  This is known as “organic” traffic and “inbound marketing”, people finding us instead of just us pushing our content out to others.  We should ALL strive for organic traffic.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook

You can integrate your Twitter Tweets with your LinkedIn and Facebook status so that every tweet you make shows up in all three places.  We can also link our blog to our Facebook business page, which then flows over onto our personal page.

Does it make sense to push the same content everywhere?  We need to keep in mind that if we appear in each of these network updates  multiple times each day promoting the same content to the same people that it begins to look spammy and gives the appearance that we are trying to hard to promote ourselves.

Marketing articles suggest that you update these statuses at least 3-5 times a day and that each tweet contain something new and relevant in order to not appear like a spammer.  But if we have the same connections on each of these networks, aren’t we just overloading them with the same information via different methods?

Email Marketing

Our email Inboxes contain an unlimited amount of “stuff” – emails from clients, friends, ads, newsletters, RSS feeds and SPAM.  Keeping it cleaned out is a full-time job in itself.    If you are a business owner it seems that all the marketing articles say that email promotion is the way to go.  Just be careful on how frequently you send out promotional articles and ALWAYS provide a way for the recipients to “opt-out” of receiving future emails for your company – and be sure to honor the opt-out requests.  The last thing that you want to have happen is to have your emails frequently reported as spam.

Newsletters

Newsletters that contain relevant content should be sent out on a regular basis – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly – whatever schedule that works for you.  People tend to sign-up or “opt-in” to receive your newsletters because they feel that the information you offer will be relevant to them.

Closing

If every business owner were to use each of these methods as recommended I think that we will end up as being an annoyance instead of a valued and trusted source of information.

What are your thoughts about Social Media and Marketing?  How Much is TOO MUCH; and are you feeling like you are experiencing massive information overload like I am?  How are you handling it?