Last week I had the opportunity to guest speak at a couple of classes of Comms students at my alma mater, Radford University- it was SO much fun! We chatted about social media (always a good time), how it’s affecting large and small businesses as well as the individual, and how we as communicators can harness the power of social media to make our (or our company’s) voices heard. It was such a blast to be able to share what I’ve learned during my time as a small business owner, and to offer my input as to what I feel works and doesn’t work. One thing I specifically touched on is something I’ve dubbed “the White Noise Effect.” No idea what that is? That’s ok, I made up the term myself. 🙂

As a sole-member small business, it’s my responsibility to create buzz for myself; in other words, I don’t have an entire team of social media experts working to broaden awareness of my brand (I DO rely on word of mouth, but that’s another subject for another time). Knowing this, I think I’ve at points crossed the line from “hey! check out this blog post!” to “SPAM SPAM SPAM!” How do we know where to draw the line? Well, this is how I’ve defined the White Noise Effect:

“Occurs when a company/business/individual attempts to reach their audience too often or overuses the same message too many times over.”

Pretty self-explanatory, right? But it’s hard to see you’re doing it until you notice audience interaction is beginning to suffer. The rule of “how many times you can post something without annoying your audience” is going to differ from company to company, and will also vary according to which social media outlet you’re using (Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Instragram, etc). A good rule of thumb that I’ve come up with, though, is to post the same message no more than once ever three hours on Facebook, and I cap the number of times I’ll post a single link at THREE. I try to post morning, afternoon and evening so that I can reach different segments of my audience that frequent Facebook at different times of the day. When it comes to Twitter, there’s a bit more leniency- I can post once every two- two and a half hours, and I cap the number of times I’ll post one link at FOUR.

Now here’s a caveat- there are ways to post information without directly linking out within a status. On Facebook, if I post images to an album, it’ll show up in someone’s newsfeed without me having to blast them with direct links. It’s a more passive way of getting people interested. Perhaps they’d seen the link I posted earlier and didn’t click on it, but after seeing 3-4 images highlighted on their newsfeed, I’ve now piqued their interest enough to click over to my blog.

In my experience, posting more often than the times I noted above teaches my audience to tune me out- I’m teaching them not to trust that the “new” blog post isn’t the same one they’ve already clicked on three times, the same one that’s popped up on their newsfeed EVERY time they check Facebook on their phone. I’m teaching them to ignore me, and I’ve become white noise among the cesspool of information they’re assaulted with every time they log on to whichever social media outlet they prefer. Teaching my audience NOT to pay attention to me is quite the opposite of what I’m after, so even if I’m really excited about a particular blog post, I limit myself to my morning, afternoon and evening postings. At the core of my marketing strategy is a desire to create a loyal and genuinely interested following, and one of the best ways I can do that is to post in a consistent manner, in a way that won’t overwhelm my audience with the same message time and time again.

The important thing to remember is that with the ever-changing and ever-evolving world of social media, you have to be on your toes at all times if you wish to stay relevant. This past September Facebook introduced “promoted posts” where business pages can pay to promote a certain link, photo, status, etc. for a certain amount of money. It was at this exact same time that business page owners noted a significant decrease in their page interactions, leading most of us to believe that Facebook changed the algorithm to corner us into having to pay to promote. Whether or not that’s true, I’m not sure, but it forced business page owners to change the way we do things in order to keep up our blog traffic and page interactions.

I’m definitely not a social media expert, but this is just what I’ve learned and observed from my own experiences! Have any input or a method you’ve found works especially well for you? Feel free to sound off in the comments section! (PS- ^doesn’t Anna look like a Disney princess ^?)

Happy Friday!