Want Me To Follow You?
There's a guy following me on Google Buzz. I don't know him personally, so he's one of those random strangers I connected with after Buzz opened the floodgates. His name is Jay T. Deragon, and he's one of the authors of this book. Like me, he has a blog about marketing that he updates pretty frequently, and I find his posts very interesting.
But I'm not following him back. The reason is because every day, when Jay releases a new blog post, he insists on feeding it into Google Buzz and Twitter at least half a dozen different ways. Different posts, with different text and hashtags. He's hoping that by putting the links to his content out there several different ways, it will increase the chances that new readers will discover his blog.
Jay's not alone in doing this. On Twitter, the New Yorker does this too. Every new article is posted several times, with different keywords and hashtags. The company that I work for does this with their Twitter account, too.
The logic behind the strategy makes sense. Cast a wide net and hope you manage to rope in more readers. But I think this is completely the wrong way to go about trying to build an audience. The reason? If I followed any of these people, my own personal feed of people I follow would be needlessly cluttered up with posts from these people. So while people might be more likely to stumble upon you, you destroy some of the incentive to turn those stumblers into followers, who will continue to see what you produce in the future and may eventually become customers. (I think marketers call this "building brand".)
Hearing about your post once is enough. And if you ask me, once or twice a day is often enough for me to hear from you, unless you have something really interesting to say.
But I'm not following him back. The reason is because every day, when Jay releases a new blog post, he insists on feeding it into Google Buzz and Twitter at least half a dozen different ways. Different posts, with different text and hashtags. He's hoping that by putting the links to his content out there several different ways, it will increase the chances that new readers will discover his blog.
Jay's not alone in doing this. On Twitter, the New Yorker does this too. Every new article is posted several times, with different keywords and hashtags. The company that I work for does this with their Twitter account, too.
The logic behind the strategy makes sense. Cast a wide net and hope you manage to rope in more readers. But I think this is completely the wrong way to go about trying to build an audience. The reason? If I followed any of these people, my own personal feed of people I follow would be needlessly cluttered up with posts from these people. So while people might be more likely to stumble upon you, you destroy some of the incentive to turn those stumblers into followers, who will continue to see what you produce in the future and may eventually become customers. (I think marketers call this "building brand".)
Hearing about your post once is enough. And if you ask me, once or twice a day is often enough for me to hear from you, unless you have something really interesting to say.