SmallBusinessNewz

This began as a reply to a comment that I got on my article "Don't Let Social Media Marketing Work Against You".

The commenter asks how often one should update their social media pages.

As I was writing my response, it started to feel like it would lend itself to another article, so here we are.

There is really no concrete answer as to how often your social media pages should be "updated". I think a better strategy is to simply keep them up to date.

Keep the pages up to date based on what your business is currently trying to promote. Are you offering a new product? How about any special offers?

What are you trying to push?

Now I did mention previously that you don't want to come off as an advertisement. But let's not kid ourselves. The whole purpose of your social media marketing campaign is to sell.

I don't think it hurts to show off your product a bit on your own page. You just don't want to push it on everyone you interact with within the community.

You need to be out there participating in discussions and interacting with people without being a salesman. But that's not to say you can't for example talk about your new product in a blog post on your MySpace page. It's not to say you can't have a video on your page showing off a new product. Just don't make the social media experience as a whole into one big sales pitch.

That said...

You do want to periodically keep up with your pages.

If you have employees that can take responsibility for this, I would suggest that they at least check on the pages on a daily basis, if not for anything else, just to keep up with comments.  If you are a one-person business, you really just need to do so when you have time. I wouldn't want to go more than a week without at least checking in on the pages.

Just remember, don't take on more social media sites than you are prepared to handle.