How often should you post fresh content your social marketing pages? To find the answer, one must ask another important question – how quickly does your content age on social media?
Evergreen content is a quaint concept but it’s time to own up to the fact that there is no such thing as ageless social marketing content. People change, their likes and dislikes change, societies change, the idea of humour changes, and all these changes mean that every piece of content uploaded online is bound to lose relevance amongst its audience.
Let us take a look at some important social platforms and try to understand how content ages so that we can come up with more effective social marketing strategies.
Unsurprisingly, 140-character tweets don’t remain relevant for more than 18-20 minutes. Let’s take the most popular/controversial user of Twitter – President Trump. Can you recall the topic of the third tweet prior to his latest tweet?
If President Trump’s tweets cannot stay relevant for that long, it’s safe to say that tweets aimed at promoting your product or service on social media age out a lot faster.
FB’s algorithms combined with its News Feed strategy means that you don’t have a very big window to catch the attention of your audience. The general timeframe for which a FB post remains relevant is less than six hours.
If you wish to verify this, then just track the number of likes and shares your post gets within the first six hours and compare it with data for longer durations.
Insta posts have a longer shelf life, although not very long considering the time and effort involved in creating Insta content—around 20 hours. Some may feel the actual ageing time may be shorter considering it can be very tough to rediscover an unliked/unsaved post that you saw on your Insta feed.
However, the audio/video format of Insta posts give you a slightly longer period of time to convey your marketing message.
Slightly longer than Insta—24 hours. Again, the fact that user-shared content is often mixed up with recommendations and sponsored content means that your content may remain the limelight for a much shorter duration.
YouTube
A well-made, interesting, and funny video can have a significantly longer life on YouTube, of more than 20 days.
Before you become too happy, keep in mind that creating a YouTube worthy video can be a time-consuming and expensive affair. The era of poor-quality home-made marketing videos making it big on YouTube has long passed.
Pinterest is unique because it combines the serious vibe of LinkedIn, the image-only feel of Instagram, and its homegrown emphasis on knowledge and information. This is probably why your content can stay relevant for up to four months on this site.
Your Blog
The only social marketing platform where content can stay relevant for a really long time is your blog. A post you write today can be relevant and useful for your audience even two years after it was first written.
The blog works the longest because it gives you complete freedom to combine text, images, infographics, and even video content into a single post. This multi-channel approach works better than other platforms that restrict your options.
So, How Exactly is This Useful?
You now know the average timeframe for ageing of content on different sites. So, how exactly does this help you in finetuning your marketing strategy? Well, here are some actionable steps you can derive out of the information shared above.
How Often Should You Post?
With a tweet ageing out in just 18-20 minutes, a Twitter strategy of one tweet a day is obviously not going to work.
On the other hand, trying to add one new blog post every day may be a waste of your time and effort. It may make more sense for you to spend more time on research so that you can come with a blog post that stays relevant for 6-12 months, if not longer.
Quality Matters
Posting an update every four hours on FB will not automatically guarantee greater visibility. Remember, social marketing is not just about the numbers alone. In fact, going overboard about the numbers may be the fastest shortcut to failure.
While you may post more often or less often depending on the ageing timeframe, there is no doubt that quality content remains relevant and popular for a longer period.
Coming to Numbers
Going overboard about the number of likes and saves and followers is not a good idea. However, completely ignoring them is not a smart move either. This is where knowing how quickly content ages can be very helpful.
If one tweet stays live for around 20 minutes and you don’t have the time to create 36 tweets to cover 12 hours, then you can consider buying retweets or likes and adding them to your profile.
What these numbers will do is create the perception of your tweet being liked by a larger audience, which will cater to the natural psychology of social media users to like something that has already been liked by many. This simple tactic will help you increase the lifespan of your social content.
Further, knowing when and how quickly content ages can help you boost the visibility of posts and updates that must remain live for a longer period of time. A FB post with an important message or update about your brand can gain from your decision to buy likes and buy shares. This tool will give you greater control over your content’s age.
Finally, this information can help you mix and match with a lot more confidence. Mixing Twitter with FB is not such a good idea because you won’t get more than six hours combined. FB + Pinterest or LinkedIn + Blog seem like much better combinations.
From knowing when to step in to boost an update’s visibility and popularity to knowing how much time and effort posts on different social platforms deserve – this info about ageing of content can help you become a better and smart social marketer.
