5 tips to avoid social fatigue with your social media followers

Social Fatigue occurs when a person is overwhelmed by being put into far too many social situations for their comfort, often resulting in boredom or annoyance of those around them.

Applied to the web, « Social Fatigue » expresses the over-use of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… where an overwhelming amount of informations can wear out a person’s tolerance faster. A large amount of spam in your mailbox or too many popup ads on a website can provoke social fatigue too.

We have talked recently about the benefits of reposting your content, the main one being to increase traffic on your blog. With the short lifespan of tweets, you can be tempted to share the same content over and over again, but this method can feel like spamming to your users and provoke social fatigue. So don’t tarnish your brand’s image and get more exposure by using these tips on social media.

 

Don’t post too often

This is a huge red flag and maybe an obvious one, but there are still people spamming their audience’s feed with the same posts over and over again in short periods of time. This is a very bad strategy : it is so annoying to your users, they will probably unfollow your account really quickly. Instead, set a limit to how many times you will repost your content every week/month.

Always keep consistency in mind when trying to reach to an audience : you want your fans to be reminded of your brand everyday. You can’t post once a month then four times a day and then go back : an irregular posting schedule won’t keep your followers engaged.

To do so, you can start slow by posting once a day and gradually increase your goal. A great way to keep up with your goal is to set up a posting schedule : plan in advance the content you want to share and use an automation tool to take care of your content distribution.

An irregular posting schedule won't keep your followers engaged Click To Tweet

Respect your audience and give them some time between posts. Stick to your schedule, post regularly through the day, not in bursts.

Check this list of Social Media Tools to automate Content Distribution.

Share quality content

Quality trumps quantity. Sharing low-quality content to your audience will not be well perceived and it may result in them unfollowing your account. The same goes for the statuses you post with your content on social media. Don’t just write generic tweets, each social media update you post should be important, it should convey a real message. Through your message, make them want to read your content, discover your product, subscribe to your newsletter…

 

Your content needs to be ridiculously good for the audience you are trying to reach: It needs to be empathetic, useful, and inspired.

@MarketingProfs

 

Get creative with your statuses

 

You can repost your content on social media without it being annoying to your audience. For example, post different statuses each time you share an article : find a new way to reach your audience, even maybe a way to reach new readers. You have a lot of possibilities :

  • introduce your article through a different perspective,
  • use different keywords,
  • ask a question,
  • insert a quote

By analyzing the different statuses you post online, you might even find that a type of status attracts more readers.

Just like the status, the image accompanying your online post can be changed. If your article happens to include a lot of illustrations, you can use those in your social media posts.

For example, in one of our last blog posts, we gave our audience 6 reasons to illustrate « Tips to grow your business through Facebook ». We illustrated each point with an image that we now use on social media, sharing one tip at a time with the associated illustration.

 

How I set up several statuses for my last blog post on Repost

 

Surprise your audience

 

Don’t fall into a social media routine. You might have picked up on strategies that work well for you over time, but don’t hesitate to change your habits from time to time. It may surprise your audience to see something different on their feed and it can increase engagement.

With that in mind, regularly add new interesting content to your blog. Also, keep up with the trends and try to implement those to your social media strategy. For example, if you are used to share your tweets with static images, try to add a video or a GIF instead.

Check out the Ultimate GIF Guide for Social Media Marketers published by Hootsuite.

 

Update your content regularly

 

Too often than not you click on a freshly shared link on Twitter, only to be redirected to a 404 page or to discover an article listing out-of-date tips. These situations are frustrating to your audience : your teaser message was convincing, the topic interested them but the link is dead. Even more frustrating is if they can’t find this article when they type keywords in your blog search bar.

To avoid this, regularly update your content, keep it fresh and accurate to increase engagement. If you ever change a blog post URL, don’t forget to update your content marketing/social media tools. Finally, prefer evergreen topics to short-lived content to write on. Those topics will bring you traffic all year long and don’t require to be updated too often.