I had a pretty awesome conversation over Twitter today with some wicked smart people about the topic of social media spam.
I saw a post by Leo, the CEO of Buffer.
How to Easily Double Your Traffic from Social Media: http://t.co/LovAVFDOwp via @KISSmetricspic.twitter.com/emxpkyN8Q9
— Leo Widrich (@LeoWid) May 12, 2014
Then Adam Singer who works at Google replied that he felt this was a spam posting. I started a conversation with Adam and my friend and superstar marketer Nick Cicero jumped in. It was a spirited back and forth conversation that dived into what is spam on social media, what is the value and benefit of content marketing in general and more. Adam felt the tweet was spam because this was the second time it was posted.
@Brewbom it’s spam to me if I see the same link from same brand/person 2x. Spam is subjective. Go ahead & do whatever you want of course. — Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) May 12, 2014
Then Nick jumped in. Since the original post was at least loosely content marketing.
@Brewbom @AdamSinger in general most content marketing is regurgitation of the same thing over and over til eventually you give in.
— Nick Cicero (@nickcicero) May 12, 2014
We had quite a long conversation over twitter back and forth. This got me thinking about the commonly accepted idea that it is GOOD to repost your content across social media. Leo’s original post was in essence the idea that if you REPOST your content on social media on a set schedule you will double your traffic from social media. This idea is very pervasive across the marketing spectrum. But is it correct?
Is it spam to post the same content several times on social media EVEN if the content is valuable?
My premise on Leo’s post is that he was reposting KissMetric’s article and graphic not his own. And it validated his companies business model and their value prop and was valuable to their target customers. So it was the essence of content marketing:
- content (in this case an article and a graphic)
- that was valuable to their customers and built a case for those customers buying their product
To be fair the content was NOT useful to me but I am not at the level where I am trying to figure out how or when to use social media at a base level. I can always learn more and by no means an expert nor a ninja. But the idea of posting on a schedule is pretty basic. So what do you think marketing professionals:
Is it spam to YOU if someone reposts the same content on the same social media channel several times.
The key takeaway is that
[Tweet “Spam is in the eye of the receiver, not the sender.”]
and BTW we ended it in style…
@Brewbom @AdamSinger also we started with Buffer and ended with marky mark. I think we’re done here.
— Nick Cicero (@nickcicero) May 12, 2014
Q #1: “Is it spam to post the same content several times on social media EVEN if the content is valuable?”
A: YES, because what’s “valuable” to one person may be “worthless” to another.
Q #2: “Is it spam to YOU if someone reposts the same content on the same social media channel several times.”
A: I’m afraid so. In Leo’s graphic, the Twitter sharing schedule seems quite excessive. I don’t agree with Adam Singer’s “two strikes” rule, but any more than that and things start smellin’ a little spammy.
Nikolas Allen interesting. so the idea is that regardless of how many times YOU see it, the fact that someone posts a link to an article more than once is spam to you.
Hmm. I know that I did not see the first post by leo on this so to ME this post ws the first and NOT spam. So it can be both spam and not spam