Social Media: Knowing When to Say When

Not getting that dogpile of likes and shares? Here’ a few things to try before calling it quits.

“Your team’s been sinking hours a week into Pinterest (or LinkedIn, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Vine). You’ve gotten three comments: one generic ‘Nice photo’ from a bikini-clad person in Miami who comments on thousands of posts a day, one from your cousin (a social media early adopter), and one from someone you’ve been doing business with for years.

“When do you start seeing a return on your time? Do you keep going in hopes of getting 121,000 followers from a viral post, almost overnight? You might have the next 50,000-retweet post right around the corner… or you might be wasting your time, but how can you tell the difference?” asks Conrad Lumm in Publishing Executive.

Lumm offers some good ideas, like analyzing the channel to be sure it’s a match for your content; or taking a careful look at what your audience wants and the type of content you’re posting. All relatively straightforward advice for any marketing channel.

Deciding where you’ll spend your precious resources is a tricky business. As Lamm notes, Google Analytics can help you determine where your traffic is coming from, and that can help you understand where to focus.

Another way to economize is to consolidate accounts.

“Do you really need separate Instagram and Pinterest accounts? If visual assets drive your publication, you’ll need one, but if you’re short on time, you can probably skip one. Services like the aforementioned Sprout Social make managing numerous accounts easier, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick your battles,” Lamm recommends.

But really, when do you know when to call it a day on a social platform?

For us, it was just over a year ago that we quit Facebook after the platform began to seriously restrict organic reach for brands. It just wasn’t worth our time anymore, and many other brands felt the same. We’re not anti-social by any means; we continue to be huge fans of LinkedIn and Twitter and get great exposure there in front of our B2B crowd.

We just realized that Facebook was a waste of time and money for us. While Lamm notes that deleting an account on FB should be your last resort, we felt removing our presence was far better than letting it lie dormant.

Remember; it’s about knowing your customers and being where they are in a meaningful way. Will they miss you when you’re gone?