Tediousness 2.0: Saying less by saying way too much on social media

Many companies think they need to send out a press release every day.  Pump the brakes!  A high volume of press releases rarely makes sense.  It can even be counterproductive.  People, especially journalists, hate being bombarded by a mountain of boring, non-newsworthy press releases.  Send too many snoozers and they will simply tune out.

In fact, it is rarely possible to distribute more than one or two press releases a month without diluting your message or boring your audience to death.  Big companies can get away with a higher frequency of press releases because being big is inherently newsworthy.  Still, even large corporations should think about dialing back the frequency of their communications.

Apple is a great of example of a large company that practices restraint to great effect by posting infrequent press releases.  Aside from quarterly performance announcements, Apple rarely posts more than a few press releases each month.  Instead, Apple saves press releases for only the most significant product and service launches and company news.   Result: The entire world hangs on Apple’s every word and anticipates future announcements with bated breath.  

Does this less-is-more strategy change with Web 2.0?   Nope.  On the contrary, never has it been more important to say more by saying less.

The traditional press release has evolved in the age of the Internet and social media.  The trend is for companies to broadcast snippets of company news.  The tone is more conversational.  Everything has a comment box.  Everything can be shared instantaneously.  News can be published and consumed in real time, which is good and bad.

Think of social media as being like The Force: it has both light and dark sides.  On the Light Side, a company can broadcast news easily and inexpensively to unfathomable numbers of people.  On the Dark Side, companies now possess a Death Star-like weapon to destroy their audience’s patience and attention with a continuous e-blast of mundane and tedious announcements.

Everyday, I see more and more companies crumble against social media’s Dark Side by posting entire galaxies of uninteresting information in their e-newsletters, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter pages.  (Heck, I can’t say I’ve never written a post about what I had for dinner.  Fascinating!)

I call it Tediousness 2.0.

To illustrate, one company I follow on Twitter recently updated their status a whopping 84 times in “about one hour,” according to my Twitter feed page.  To date, I follow 222 individuals and businesses on Twitter.  If they all posted at a similar rate, I’d be facing a 18,648 tweets per hour, an unwieldy number to handle using even the most sophisticated Twitter management app. While there are no hard and fast rules to proper frequency, it’s safe to say 84 posts per hour lies squarely in the “annoyingly mind-numbing” department no matter how interesting the underlying news content actually is.  

Needless to say, I’ve tuned out this company.  Which leads me to my own riff on Yoda:  frequent posting leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to clicking “unfollow.”  And once your audience–a customer, a potential customer, a journalist–unsubscribes, they are gone.  

So, whether you are distributing traditional press releases or communicating using social media, focus on reporting your company’s most important news. Spend more time writing eye-catching headlines rather than carpet-bombing your readers with minutia.  Practice restraint, and you’ll keep your audience tuned in and waiting for more.