When Do I Dial Back on a Social Network?

Social media has become at least 60 percent of my work day, monitoring sites, making posts, gathering data. Social media has even become a big part of sending press releases out as we’re directing traffic to where the stories place.

We think of the big names as the only social media, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes a smaller network has more of who we’re selling to, like Tumblr has more fandom oriented profiles. Given that social media is also about the next big thing, we have to keep looking for where to jump next.

The Dungeon Store is spread across many social networks you may have never heard of, like PinXsters, and Lips.social, making them early adopters with varying degrees of success.

Is there a reason to pull back on such campaigns? Yes, and this goes back a long way. While it’s handy to have dominant branding for free across a social network, one has to consider how many people are watching and who are left.

When I go to post, I’m looking at how many others have posted? When was the last time I posted? How much of this feed is from my client?

When anyone goes to a social network and find posts from only one or two members, that’s bad. It makes the web site look bad. Guests feel they’re going to be drown out by spam. While I can give some engagement, if a client or two are the only ones left, there’s a liminal creepiness as if our brand is haunting the site, not participating in it.

So if I go onto a site, and I’ve been the only one posting recently, I’ll hold off so someone else can get a word in edgewise. This becomes a very good gauge as if it’s worth the energy too. If even the admin isn’t contributing, it may simply be time to move on.