“If you don’t have an iPhone…then you don’t have an iPhone”

As a marketing enthusiast I love the message. It’s smart, it’s catchy and makes you question…why don’t I have an iPhone? As a television viewer, I can’t stand this line anymore because I’m compelled to watch it every five minutes over and over again while catching my favorite shows on TV. Today it’s the iPhone advertisement but a week from now it will be some other advertisement, message or brand that will fight for attention and eventually haunt me to the point I would actually have a negative attitude towards the brand.

Similarly in the social web space, there is such a thing as overdoing it…..only perhaps you will have to change shoes to perceive this fact.

Let me explain with a common example of a regular day on Facebook….

Put on your marketing shoes as someone who is promoting their brand online :-

- 10:30 am You discover a really great blog post related to your business or industry

- 10:32 am You post it as an update on your company’s Facebook page and share it with everyone within the group

- 10:38 am You share another find on Facebook using your company’s page

- 10:40 am You add a status update to your company page about a new product that will be on offer soon

- 10:50 am You upload some photos from yesterday’s event to the page’s photo album

Put on your regular everyday Facebook user shoes who’s logged in to connect with friends and family. Rewind to 10:30 am:-

- 10:30 am You log in to Facebook and look at your news feed. A friend of yours has a birthday today. There are some new photos your sister uploaded of their recent vacation.  So you wish your friend, check out the new photos.

- 10:32 am You go back to your feed and see this blog post shared by a company whose page you “liked”. So you check out the blog post, click the line button and maybe even leave a comment.

- 10: 38 am There is another share from this company in your feed less than 5 minutes after the first one. You ignore it.

-10:40 am Now there is a third item from the same company saying they have a new product.

-10:50 am There is another item in your feed from the same company with some photos but your feed page is starting to look like their company page and their posts are dominating all the space in your Facebook feed pushing your friends and family out.

-10:55 am This is getting annoying…so you blog their updates or leave the page.

There is something like too much! Perhaps not as a business, but definitely as a consumer or user of the social web. It’s the same annoying feeling you get when someone on Twitter posts every 20 seconds especially when they are just links and not personal messages. It’s the same for automated social accounts which keep posting like bots, when you get an automated comment on your blog every single day from the same company trying to promote their link but don’t really have anything real to say about your post. It’s the same when someone keeps posting the very same link to your Linked twice a day in group drowning out all the good discussions and shares.

From a business perspective it’s understandable why so many will insist more is better when it comes to frequency of posting, updating and getting their brand and message in front of people as often as they can through any site. We need a return on investment right?

Is overdoing it really going to give you that return? Or will it turn people away from your brand?

Consistency, frequency and being ever present in front of your consumers is undoubtedly important. So how much is too much?

Content plays an important role in social marketing and is often to keeping the conversation and buzz going around your business.  You need to have content that you can share with the online community. The real challenge is how you generate that daily content and keep it interesting for your customers.  One great way to tackle this is starting with a very active blog. By very active, we mean one that has engaging posts, insights, reviews, articles or observations as often as possible. Useful articles and posts around your business can be very versatile and need not be restricted to the blog. Once posted, the same post or article can be Tweeted, shared on groups like Linkedin, MySpace and Facebook, posted to discussion forums or communities, converted to a down-loadable document for the website and even sent out in an email newsletter. Discussions naturally follow around these posts whether in the form of comments people leave on the blog or social sites like Mixx & Reddit, re-tweets and replies on Twitter, passed around on social networking sites and really fuel the wider online conversation around your business and help it gather momentum.

We recently developed an niche vertical based online magazine for a customer of ours to provide not just their customers but virtually the industry with fresh articles published daily with interesting content within the space. Other than the stand alone community of readers within the industry which quickly developed around the online publication the company saw this as a great opportunity to tie the blog / online magazine content to jump start their other online marketing initiatives. This included posting regularly on a large community site for the industry, posting articles and starting conversations around them on their Facebook community, Myspace and drawing more followers on Twitter. On all these groups and communities they have people who enjoy reading through, sharing and commenting on the articles which are interesting or offer some valuable insights to them. As a result, the members on all these communities have increased activity and helps the business build stronger communities and better relationships with their customers.

The common ground for all social media marketing channels and social marketing is your content. Invest in regular content and the process of having a constant conversation with your customers online will just become a whole lot easier.

Every business is working towards a strong online marketing plan to help drive customers towards their websites rather than going after customers. Different strategies work for different businesses and whether it’s paid online advertising, search engine optimization, inbound lead generation programs or social media marketing, the main goal is the same: To get in front of customers with a message. Experimenting with all these various online marketing techniques over some time will help determine the winning mix of just how much of each one needs to get their customers coming in however among all these variables is one fact that can’t easily be disputed: Content plays an important role in the online marketing process.

The rules for the race to get the top spot in search engine results for the best target keywords has changed. The game has become more competitive. A lot more competitive. How many businesses would rest once their website shows up in the number one spot or the among the first page results of a Google search? Few. The race is no longer to get to the first page or claim that top spot. The aim is to dominate the results on the first page or even the first few pages of search results. After all, how long can your website hold that podium position before someone else comes along and pushes you down? This is why SEO or one aspect alone can’t drive online success. Once you’re at the top, you need to fight to stay there and you need to fight daily.

This is where content comes in. Fresh content is generally given priority over older content so need to produce fresh content as often as possible is key to staying among the results for a targeted set of keywords. Little wonder how blogging has turned into such a powerful marketing tool in any social media marketing plan. Depending on how often the blog is updated, the process helps update the content consistently and search engines pick up on this, marking it as a valuable source of information. Turning out daily content around a strategic topic area while including certain keywords (without going out of context just for the sake of keywords) will gradually work towards a website ranking higher for those keywords. More importantly, the more useful content you can get out there and promote through sharing and social media, the wider a net you can cast so more visitors are likely to be directed towards your site.

1. Develop content around your business whether its blog posts, videos, presentations, pdf documents, white papers, articles etc
2. Do it daily if possible or as often as you can. The more frequent you can publish new content, the better.
3. Promote each piece of content as much as possible. Share it, bookmark it, list it on directories and sites, tweet it and get it out there
4. Dominate the search results for that topic

Consistency is the key. If you can generate content consistently, you can become more visible.