AP 0126: How Often Should I Reshare My Content on Social Media?

AskPat Episode 126 Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 126 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me. As always, I am here to help you answer your online business questions five days a week. Today we have a great question from Matthias.

But before we get to that, I want to thank today's show sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com/AskPat. FreshBooks.com, the easy cloud accounting solution helping millions of small business owners save time invoicing and get paid faster. You can try FreshBooks right now for free. Just go to FreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section for a free trial. It's seriously the best thing you can do for your business. If you haven't or never explored any sort of accounting or financial organization options . . . I only wish I started sooner, because before I was using Excel, completely disorganized, and seriously, once I got hooked up with FreshBooks, it changed everything. So again, go to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section for a free trial.

Okay, now let's get to today's question from Matthias.

Matthias: Hi, Pat. I'm Matthias Holmwell, a professional music photographer and the founder of HowtoBecomeaRockstarPhotographer.com. I have written an ebook where I give a step-by-step manual how to start out as music photographer until you get to the point where you can join your favorite rock band and tour to shoot exclusive material. And I'm also selling this on my new homepage that launched last week. Since I also have a blog integrated into my site, I would like to know your opinion about how to promote your blog posts. So once you are done with a blog post, do you send it through all your social media channels like Facebook or Twitter? How often do you do this to reach an international audience? Is it okay to post the blog post twice per day? How many days in a row would be a good option to post, or are there special days like Tuesdays or Thursdays to do this? Or are you using Facebook ads for this particular purpose? I would appreciate your help on this topic, because I want to get my blog posts out as efficient as possible. So thanks so much Pat for your help, and keep up the awesome work. You have really changed my life with your podcast. Rock on!

Pat Flynn: Matthias, thank you so much for your question, and first of all, I just got to say and commend you on the awesome niche that you're in. I think that's super cool that you're doing professional photography for musicians. You're helping people capture those wonderful moments on stage, and I just love the domain name that you have.

Now, to answer your question, I'm going to talk and just mention this thing. If you only tweet, or only Facebook status updates or only share on LinkedIn or wherever you are primarily on social media, if you only share your new content whether it's a blog post, a podcast episode, or video, if you only share that once to your audience, you're not going to hit all of your audience. It's going to . . . You're doing your audience a disservice by only sharing it once. Now, I understand people are worried about overwhelming their audience. I understand people are worried about oversharing with their audience. I get that. However, you have to also understand that due to the way social media works, and the fact that it's moving so fast, the fact that there's a lot of noise out there in social media, people are going to miss, or not even see those shares if you only share one time. So it's a great idea to share a post, or share a podcast episode, or share a video, whatever else that you post online multiple times. You want to do that.

Yes, it is okay to post two times a day, and I think even more. Now, it depends on which platform as well. Different platforms call for different amount of frequencies. For example, Twitter. Twitter, I've seen people . . . And it seems to be okay that if you update your audience three or four times a day, spread throughout the entire day, obviously not within an hour, because then people are seeing those messages, especially if they don't have many people that they're following, they see the same message over and over and over again, four times a day, within an hour. That's quite often. But if you spread it throughout the whole day, not only do you remind people who even may have seen it earlier to go and check out the post, to remind them that it's something important that they should check out, but not everybody's on Twitter at the same time of the day.

So there's a few tools I want to mention in regards to Twitter specifically that will help you understand when you should be posting, and even how often. First of all, you just want to consciously keep track of the clicks, and the click-through rate for the times that you're posting, and how often. So there's a couple tools in regards to that. First one is Tweriod. It's like “period” but with “T-W” at the beginning. So Tweriod.com, that will help you understand what time of day is best, or that you will reach most of your audience. What it does is it sort of analyzes your audience really quickly. You put in your Twitter handle, and it analyzes your audience and tells you times of day most of them are on, based on when they are also tweeting. So you can understand what times of day are best for you to post, and then you can use a tool like BufferApp.com, or there's a new one actually, MeetEdgar.com, to schedule posts in advance during the day for those particular times. So that's like a one-two perfect combo right there. So that's Tweriod.com and also BufferApp.com, and then there's this new one by Laura Roeder which is great, which you can check out at MeetEdgar.com. It's sort of like BufferApp, except it does categories specific . . . You have to read the description . . . It's hard to explain . . . You're right here on the air, but those things are important.

And also just testing. Testing, trying different things, and keeping track. And you can just, also, for those links, you can use a tool called Bit.ly to help you keep track of the number of times people click-through. Now another strategy, especially on Twitter, especially if you're going to follow my advice and post the same post three to four times throughout the day, which I would do that day that you post that. I think three or four times a day for new content is okay. And maybe posting once for something older is okay as well, once or twice throughout the day. And again, you can schedule those posts in BufferApp as well. But going back to what I was going to say, if you're posting multiple times during the day, you want to mix up your messages. You can post the same link to that content that you're promoting, but I would mix up the message just to not make it as repetitive for those who are seeing it over and over again. So for instance, if I'm posting a blog post, you can say, “Hey, brand new blog post. Check it out here.” You want to elaborate a little bit, the second one can be “Wow, 45 comments in three hours! Amazing!” Now, obviously you can't schedule that ahead of time, but using social proof is another way to add another flair or piece of, you know, something interesting to that particular tweet in order to get people to click-through whether they'd seen that first time that you'd promoted it or not. You could also talk . . . You know, just phrase it in different ways. That's what I'd recommend. So how many days in a row was your next question, and I sort of talked about that already. I think for brand-new posts you can do it more often, and for older posts you could bring those back into the spotlight, every once in a while.

I know a lot of people who recycle old content on social media every once in a while, and it's great. I mean, especially you want to understand what your most popular posts are, your most helpful, value-adding posts are, and you want to share those, especially because new people are following you every day on Twitter, and you want them to see your best content as well, and it's always a good reminder for people who have seen your stuff before because even if they've read it, if they know it's good, they're going to share it, and you'll get retweets and those sorts of things. So it can help take it off, or help it take off even further by utilizing the sharing options if you mix up your messages and the content's good, whether the post is new or old.

Now, on Facebook however, I believe it is a little more . . . As far as etiquette is concerned, it's a little more frowned upon to post the same thing multiple times during the day, and even during the week. You want to be a little more conscious about how often you're posting and the response you get from your audience. And also understand that Facebook has, you know, especially more than Twitter, I mean, with Twitter people are going to miss your messages because they're not on Twitter at the time that you post it, which is why I recommended to post it several times during the day. Just, people aren't on all the time. So when people aren't on, they're not going to see those messages from hours ago because other messages have come in between the time that you posted and the time that they've come on. But with Facebook, people aren't going to see it because of the edge-rank algorithm that Facebook has. On average, and this is quite sad, on average I believe the number is 6%. If you have a Facebook page, 6% of your audience will actually see your post. And that's quite depressing. Of course, that can go much higher. I believe mine on average is 33% because I've just worked on engaging with my community. The more you can get your community on Facebook, on your Facebook page, to respond, to leave comments, to share, to like, the higher your edge-rank score will be, the more often your posts are going to show up in people's newsfeeds.

There's also the idea of using link-share posts, as opposed to just posting . . . You know, just look up link-share posts on Facebook, that's the one where you just paste in a link to your content, or somebody else's content. It automatically places a larger image, the title becomes clickable, and then the little description that is from the metadata on that post shows up underneath that. Those tend to be seen more on Facebook than just regular links, and just other pieces of content. But you don't want to always want to be posting links on Facebook, either. You want to ask questions, you want to engage, you want to get people involved, and those are great ways to improve that edge-rank score. And I think for Facebook . . . This is how I approach it, when I come out with a new post, I post it on Facebook once and I hope that the popularity of it, the edge-rank . . . I guess you could say score that I have now has give it the ability for many people to see it and share it. And I try to craft it in a way that it is shareable, and I even ask people to share it for me, I think that's okay. I don't do it more than two or three times that week because people will likely, if they've seen it once at the top of their news feed, they're going to see it again. So I really rely on sharing and engagement on Facebook specifically.

And there's Facebook ads, of course, which I think you could do, and I think Facebook ads are a great idea if you have a budget for that. And also, you have to be conscious about the posts that you're promoting, or the content that you're promoting, and which ones you feel really deserve to get in front of more of your audience. Because you could do a couple things. You could boost your posts, so it goes from that 6%, or whatever the percent might be, as far as your edge-rank score is concerned, and show it to more people. And you can show it to friends of people who are liking your page. You can even target people who like other specific pages, or other specific interests related to that particular post. A good example for you is, when I promoted . . . What was it, episode 96 of the Smart Passive Income podcast? Which you can check out at smartpassiveincome.com/session96, this was an interview with Cory Huff who was talking about how artists can make a living online. So what I did was actually boosted that post that I put on Facebook.

It was a link-share post, had a nice piece of artwork on there, really eye-catching. And I paid Facebook a couple hundred dollars to boost that post and show it and have it target people who are in artist communities. So people who liked different art companies, people who were students at particular art schools, things like that. And it did really, really well. It was shared hundreds of times, hundreds of thousands of people saw it, which meant of course hundreds of thousands of people came back to my blog. Which was amazing, really. It was really cool, and so . . . Just side note, that was a really interesting post because when recording that, I was like, “Wow, am I niche-ing myself too much? By just targeting this particular episode to artists?” But I remembered a post that Derek Halpern posted on SocialTriggers.com that was directed toward spas and massage parlors, and because he had talked about a story about how he went to a massage parlor and they just didn't give him a good reason to come back, that post of his went viral in the massage community, and as a result just exploded and gained him a whole mess of new people in his audience.

Same thing happened to me. By really niche-ing down and focusing specifically on the artists' community, even though that content was very useful for everybody else, just because I niched it down, it kind of took off in that community and it went really well. And finally, Matthias, to answer one of your final questions I think, are there special days when you could promote your content, Tuesday or Thursday ? Well, for podcasts specifically, you know from John Lee Dumas, and we've done a lot of testing, both of us, obviously because we've just had so many episodes come out, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Actually, funny that you mention that . . . are great days for posting podcasts, specifically. For me, on my blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com, I know personally that Monday's the best day to post a new blog post, a written blog post. And that's just something I've learned over time. So that's something that you're going to have to test out and measure over time. And it's going to take a little bit of time for you to understand, but you'll get that general feeling of when your audience will expect your written content, when your podcast episodes have the most juice, and so on and so forth.

So, Matthias, I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for it, I think it's going to help out a lot of people today. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way, and of course if you're listening to this episode, and you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask a question right there on that page.

I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. If you go to GetFreshBooks.com and enter show name “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us” section, you'll get a free trial. I seriously . . . You know if you're doing invoices, if you're doing anything related to keeping track of finances and you're not doing it on FreshBooks, you are doing yourself a disservice. You can create professional-looking invoices, you can capture and track expenses, plus get real-time business reports with just a couple of clicks. It's an award-winning  software, so it's good on any sort of device that you have, and you can do it from anywhere. Again, if you go to GetFreshBooks.com, enter “AskPat,” and you get a free trial there.

And of course, I want to end with a quote as I always do. I know you guys are liking these quotes because I see tweets of . . . Tweets with these every day, which is awesome. This quote is from somebody unknown. There's a lot of these come in lately, but these are great quotes. I only wish I knew who I could give credit to. But this is a short, sweet one, but it's totally relatable to today's episode. And that is: “That which is measured, improves.”

That which is measured improves. Love that quote. How can you improve something if you don't measure it? You have to measure, you have to track, you have to understand what's working and what's not, so you can improve on what's not and do more of what is working.

Cheers, thanks so much, and I'll see you next episode of AskPat.