I’m pretty well known for making mistakes. It’s kind of a known trait of mine. Just this weekend I walked into a door because I didn’t open it properly first.

When it comes to social media, though, I try hard to learn from mistakes since they’re all saved for me to reflect on. Plus, I research and write about social media enough to have access to stats that make it easier to pick up and rectify these kind of mistakes.

The funny thing about some of the mistakes I looked at for this post is that the advice to avoid them is counterintuitive—sometimes even controversial. As we’ve seen before, though, counterintuitive advice is sometimes the best kind.

1. Losing out on traffic – Post the same thing multiple times

This is something that can be pretty controversial – a lot of people discourage re-posting links to the same content more than once. A good example of the controversy and why some tweeters continue to do it is Guy Kawasaki’s experience.

Guy is a big proponent of repeating your tweets, and has faced a lot of flack for it. After all, it doesn’t really make sense to send out the same thing multiple times… or does it?

Guy makes a good point that his followers probably aren’t reading his tweets at every moment of the day.

I repeat my tweets because I don’t assume that all my followers are reading me 24 x 7 x 365.

For Guy’s tweets that link to posts on his site, Holy Kaw, he repeats these four times, eight hours apart:

I picked eight hours because this means that even if the first tweet goes out at the worst times for traffic, one of the repeats will hit the best times… For example, a first tweet at 3:00 am Pacific then hits 11:00 am Pacific and 7:00 pm Pacific.

Guy also notes that he would lose out on traffic if he didn’t repeat his tweets, which is something we’ve examined before when looking at the best time to tweet:

I’ve examined the click-through patterns on repeat tweets, and each one gets about the same amount of traffic. If I tweeted stories only once, I would lose 75% of the traffic that I could get.

Here’s a typical example of the traffic from one of Guy’s tweets:

First post: 739 clicks

Second post: 718 clicks

Third post: 565 clicks

If I follow common wisdom, I would have tweeted it once and lost 1,200 clicks—that’s the bottom line.

This is something we do at Buffer as well. We use different headlines to test which one gets the best clicks for a particular post, and then we repeat the best one using Buffer to reach different timezones with the same content.

 

 

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/10/05/7-biggest-counterintuitive-social-media-mistakes-you-may-be-making/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily