Social Media: Providing Valuable Content or Just Over-sharing?

It’s a really fine line sometimes, the balance between over-sharing company news and content on social platforms and making sure you’re providing value to your audience. It’s the difference, I think, between selling and telling your company story. It’s hard for a lot of individuals representing organizations to make this distinction. One way to keep this practice in check is to constantly ask yourself what value you’re providing your audience with the information you choose to share.

Your content may be leaning to the “too self-promotional” side if every link you share is to content of your own creation. Try to share others’ content at least a third of the time. Another self-check is to see how often your tweets are @ replies or RTs. Ask yourself a few questions:

1. Are you engaging in conversation with your readers by replying to comments or tweets?
2. Are you commenting on others’ blog posts?
3. Are you facilitating introductions within your network to help others build business or find opportunities?
4. Are you teaching a skill or sharing information to others’ benefit?

It’s easy to slip into the habit of traditional marketing tactics and resort to selling . . . focus on providing value, instead and watch relationship development grow and improve.

(Thanks to Rusty Speidel for the inspiration for today’s post. Read Rusty’s thoughts on social media fatigue, and what communications professionals should do about it.)