Aggressive Social Sharing, Quality AND Quantity Is Key

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

Recently I read Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatricks book – The Art Of Social Media – it is a fantastic read and well worth it for both beginners and power users of social media. One of the topics that they touch on in the book is the art of aggressive social sharing, how do you share content aggressively but not be a burden or spam other timelines.

It is something that comes up from time to time in discussions that I have with people about social media, people who are unsure if what they are sharing is of real value to the audience. Just the other day I saw someone on my timeline talking about quality not quantity. But there is a problem with quality not quantity on social media.

For the purposes of this article we are going to look exclusively at Twitter. Twitter is a fast paced environment, what you post gets buried under the rubble pretty quick so in order to get the maximum scope for your content you need to share multiple times. For instance, if you are a blogger and you only tweet a link to a post once I can assure you it will get buried and not reach the potential number of eyes that could see it if you promote it several times.

It is possible to promote and share aggressively without spamming timelines and feeds, what you don’t want to be seen as is the passive brand. The company or brand which is there but we never really see anything from them apart from the occasional promoted tweet that pops up from time to time.

‘The Art Of Social Media’ says that the key is to ‘be valuable‘ and to share good stuff. So how do we determine what is valuable and what is not? The great thing about this is that people see value where they want to see it, so an article that I determine to be of value to readers may not be valuable in other peoples minds. You need to share and re-share what YOU think is valuable, it is as simple as that. If you write or produce content in any form which you feel is good and has value to it then you need to make it your goal to push it and that goes from both personal levels to being part of a company account.

The next thing that The Art Of Social Media points to is ‘be interesting‘ and this is one that requires the likes of company accounts to step outside the box a bit more. Many companies make the assumption that followers only want to read about a narrow band of topics, so a phone company may think that readers only want to read about phones, an airline may think followers only want to see airline related content. Well that approach is sadly one dimensional and frankly pretty boring.

Boring does not get you anywhere on social media, the book actually gives some examples for various industries and the types of articles you could share from those accounts with great success.

• Motorola: The 100 best Android apps of 2014; six great Android tips
• Airlines: The last drive-in theaters in America; mindful travel photography.

‘Be visual‘ is something which I have touched on multiple times in the past, people gravitate to images and every post where you promote something from an article to a video or whatever it may be should have some form of eye candy attached which appears in the main timelines of users feeds.

This is why we stopped using Twitter cards on the 60 Second Social account (as great as Twitter cards are!) and opted for images in the main tweet with the link.

The final point from the book that I want to point towards is ‘be active‘ which is what this whole article is revolving around, how active is too active? Well despite my personal approach to an aggressive social sharing policy, there is such as thing as too much. The book cites a ‘hard core level of sharing’ at around 3-4 Facebook posts per day, 8-10 Google+ posts, 4 LinkedIn posts, 10-12 Pinterest posts and 25 Tweets per day.

You of course need to gauge what is right for you, people are concerned and afraid of losing followers if they do what may be considered ‘spam.’ The fact is, the more you re-share content, the more clicks you are going to get on that content as people will pick up on it a second or a third time where they may have missed it in the first place.

People who complain either get used to the increase in content or they will simply unfollow you and it is no big deal because the net effect over time will ultimately be a gain in followers and a higher number of re-shares.

Some people take an unfollow as a personal thing but it is not personal and it shouldn’t be seen this way. Forget the follower numbers and share what you think is good, the rest will fall into place over time. Of course the book lists many other things you can do regarding an aggressive social media sharing strategy but this is just my personal take on a few.

You can buy, ‘The Art Of Social Media‘ by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick from Amazon and get all of their power tips for power users in full. It may change your approach to sharing content in the future.

About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis, he is also a proud father of his bearded dragon, Lola. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here. Or you can drop Mark an email at, daltomark@me.com