Consistency in Social Media is Queen

This week’s social media tip… be consistent.

If content is king, consistency is queen. Consistently posting to your social media accounts is incredibly important for several reasons.

1.  It trains your audience that you always have something to say, so they come back for more.
2. It helps keep your engagement steady during those times that you’re not heavily promoting something.
3. It gets you in the habit of publishing content, which may be the best reason of all.

But what does consistency look like? It’s not just about posting a certain number of times a day. Though this is important.  Consistent content is also about what you post. Remember that your brand voice is important. If you’re going to post something make sure it aligns with what people expect you to say.

Here’s 3 Rules for Posting Consistency

1. Pay Attention to Voice

Your voice matters. I can’t say that enough. Your audience doesn’t just recognize you from your profile photo online, they recognize you from your voice. If you suddenly switch up your voice, your followers may not recognize that it’s you. In extreme cases, they may even take offense to something you say or get confused. Remember the goal of social media is to get followers and keep them engaged. Voice is particularly important to this goal. Without it, people won’t have something to identify with. That connection with your followers is one of the real powers of social media. It’s part of what gets businesses the results they do on this marketing medium.

2. Post roughly the same number of times per day.

There’s a rule that most of us in the industry follow. That’s to pick the number of times you’re going to post each day and stick with it. Again the reason this is important is largely based on what your followers have come to expect from you. If you start posting more often or less often, you might see unfavorable results. The one place you can see this rule in action is on Facebook. It is here that you might see people unlike you or (even worse) hide your posts if you suddenly start spamming them. It is also here that you will start to see less engagement than you did before if you are posting less. The same is true for other platforms, but Facebook is the biggest offender when it comes to violating this rule.

That’s not to say that you can’t experiment with the number of times you post. Experimenting can actually be very important to figuring out what gives you the most engagement. If you’re going to experiment, though, do it slowly. Increase or decrease your posting by 1 post at a time and keep at that for a while. This will give you the best data on whether something works or not.

 

This is another industry rule that works for a lot of different businesses. Posting at about the same time every day is another way that people can expect to read your content. It’s also important when you’re first starting out to establish a “baseline” that you can experiment against later. If you’ve been posting at the same time for the last couple of months, but feel you could get better results by changing it up, then you already have some data to compare it to. Just remember to keep any experimenting to a minimum.

Remember also, the time you post depends on your audience. For some businesses, posting just after people get off work gives them the best results. For others, it could be later in the evening. Again, posting at the same time each day will help you determine whether it’s the right time for you to be posting.

If you remember and practice these three keys to consistency, your results should also become more consistent. Which, is a good thing. 🙂