Marketers make great loud-mouths.
We flood your social media pages with listicles and blog posts. We grab our phones in the middle of the night to write down the perfect email subject line. We have a hundred and one reasons why our brand understands you, and will also end world hunger, stop global warming, and bring balance to the universe—oh, and here’s an infographic that shows you exactly how we’ll do all of that.
For years, this has been the name of the game for social media marketing. At first, this resulted in hastiness, with brands rushing to post every five minutes and marketing blogs raving about the destructive power of “decay” to Facebook EdgeRank. Given some time and moderation however, today we arrive at a sort of elitist split. Some pages continue hectic posting schedules and get labeled as focusing on quantity over quality, while other more “reserved” pages prefer to post infrequently, citing their focus on quality.
This is a common encouragement for marketers today—make better content, not more of it. Certainly true. But what if the disconnect between quality and quantity isn’t just about the frequency with which you post, but rather about how much your brand is trying to say?
Social Media Marketing Appetite: Eyes Too Big For Stomachs
The first key factor affecting this conversation is a general acceleration that has been happening to content marketers. The more audiences become plugged in, turned on, live-updated-about things happening on the Internet, the more marketers feel the need to keep pace with their own material. It seems a natural progression that as the world goes online people’s appetites for digital content should likewise become hungrier, right?
Well, according to a couple of studies by TrackMaven and Nielson, this perceived hunger for content may actually be an assumption on the part of marketers—and an incorrect assumption. In essence, marketers are trying to measure their audience’s desire for content based on how much content is produced in the brand’s space. But saturation isn’t tied to audience interest, it’s tied to market competitiveness—whether two brands or fifteen are trying to compete with you for the attention of a similar audience has nothing to do with audience desire.
So what does this mean for us busy content marketers?
For many brands, it means churning out ever-growing amounts of material for ever-diminishing returns. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and one that Trackmaven notes we’ve historically seen happen to television. It’s a nasty, self-perpetuating cycle that brands encourage in one another. So how do you break it?
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