One of the social media marketing tactics that I’d always been opposed to in the past is high frequency repetition of an offer on social media. I made the assumption in years past that your audience was relatively static, and peppering them with offer after offer would eventually make them flee.
Then the era of social media churn began, wherein your audience comes and goes. On top of that, algorithms changed, and you could no longer count on your social content being seen simply because you posted it. Suddenly, it was no longer guaranteed that even a majority of your audience knew about a one-time offer post.
I began a test on March 11, 2015 to do a daily social promotion. My usual schedule of 5 items of note remained the same; the social offer was simply tacked on later in the day.
Because I have 3 books for sale, I was able to present a new offer every day, repeating only every 4th day.
Other important things to note were that I wasn’t running any other promotions concurrently. My cadence of other posts and my weekly newsletter did not change. As best as possible, testing conditions were held stable and normal for the duration of the period.
What have the results been? Here are my sales numbers:
To say the least, worthwhile. In the chart above, the blue bars represent daily sales of all books. The red line is a 14 day moving average of book sales. By incorporating a daily social media ask, it’s brought my 14 day sales average as high as it was during the initial launch.
Does this mean you should adopt a daily ask? As with all things, you have to test for yourself. Try it out, see if you generate similar, better, or worse results. Keep what works, leave behind what doesn’t work.
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Hi Christopher,
Great post! Thank you for the insights. I’m curious, though, was there an impact on the number of followers you had, or more importantly, your acquisition or attrition rate of followers based on this activity?
It’s really hard to tell. Unfortunately, there was a fair amount of unrelated interference at the same time.
Great insight, Christopher. Can I ask where you made the offer (ex. LinkedIn? Twitter?) I thought Facebook was penalizing promotional posts these days.
It was on all four major networks. Facebook penalizes organic brand content, to be sure. It performs the least well. Twitter performs the strongest.