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Poor Writing Is No Laughing Matter

The title of Lynne Truss’ runaway bestseller Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Gotham Books, 2003) illustrates the impact of a wayward comma:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Although Truss’ anecdote is humorous, poor writing by employees is no laughing matter, and in fact can cost your company millions—or billions—of dollars in rework and misunderstanding. A 2008 white paper by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom were losing an estimated $37 billion as a result of “employee misunderstanding.” The term is defined as “actions or errors of omission by employees who have misunderstood or misinterpreted (or were misinformed about) company policies, business processes, job function or a combination of the three.” The authors wrote,

Employee misunderstanding is a very different proposition to a deliberate disregard for the rules or a plain mistake, whereby an employee simply does something that they didn’t mean to (like forgetting to back up computer storage or putting a decimal point in the wrong place)…. The financial cost of employee misunderstanding is immense…. Of the industries we researched, banks suffer the greatest losses and transportation the least. Loss of business due to unplanned downtime was the largest area of loss attributed to employee misunderstanding.

What causes employee misunderstanding? Poor, unclear, or no communication, leaving employees without the knowledge they need to do their jobs correctly.

There is more evidence. An SIS International Research study prepared for Siemens Enterprise Communications in 2009 explored and quantified communication difficulties experienced by small to medium-sized businesses, up to 400 employees. The researchers concluded that waiting for information, unwanted communications, inefficient coordination, barriers to collaboration, and customer complaints caused productivity losses estimated to be $26,041 per knowledge worker per year.

Unfortunately, even college graduates are not getting the preparation they need to communicate effectively in writing. In Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded that 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” after two years of college; and that 36 percent “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” after four years!

In an article about the book, Scott Jaschik of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote,

[The authors] review data from student surveys to show, for example, that 32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half don’t take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester.

What are employers to do?

Clearly, there is a case for businesses hiring for potential and training for skill in writing. But do you know what you are getting? Does your company administer a writing test to job applicants? You should, says Kyle Wiens, chief executive officer (CEO) of iFixit, the world’s largest collection of online repair manuals. In a July blog post entitled, “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why,” Wiens wrote,

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between ‘to’ and ‘too,’ their applications go into the bin.

Admittedly, he says, he and his colleagues “write for a living.”

But grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language is constantly changing, but that doesn’t make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can’t tell the difference between their, there, and they’re.*

Writing skills are important now more than ever in this age of digital communication, says consultant David Silverman, contributing editor to the Guide to Better Business Writing, 2nd Edition (Harvard Business Press, 2011). “With text messages and emails, most business communication nowadays is written,” he says. “Unfortunately, our reliance on written communication, which is increasing, is inversely proportional to our abilities and our willingness to learn.” Yet written communication, he emphasizes, makes up the private and public faces of your company.

Silverman helps employees in government agencies and corporations of all sizes develop better written communication skills. The worst mistake we all make? Writing too much. “Being succinct requires time and effort, whereas including everything under the sun seems safer,” he says.

Many companies see good writing skills as an indicator of leadership potential, Silverman says. So what should knowledge workers be able to do?

“Tell a story that people will remember,” Silverman says. “Tell a story with pictures, and remove extraneous information.” In other words, think about what will be in your reader’s mind as you write. Is it cluttered, or is the path to the crucial information straight and clear?

Naturally, the rules for good writing depend on your goal, Silverman notes. Are you striving to instruct, or just to entertain? “The only viable reason to send a business email is to request action,” he says. To write emails that people will read—and act upon—use clear subject lines and include your call to action at the top. “Your messages must answer the reader’s questions, ‘What do you want me to do?’ and ‘How will I know I’ve done it?’” Silverman emphasizes.

We all make mistakes. So for critically important email messages and other documents, Silverman recommends these three steps:

Proofread carefully.
Have someone else read your work.
Wait an hour and read it again before pressing Send.
As you prepare your training budgets for 2013, consider devoting some of your expenditures to developing your employees’ writing skills. After all, even if you only cut that lost productivity of $26,000-plus in half, that is a pretty significant return on investment (ROI).

*Although the word “grammar” may seem yawn-inducing to some, it is a hot topic: Wiens’ post has generated more than 3,200 comments since it was published.

Source: http://www.clarityconsultants.com/learning-resources/poor-writing-is-no-laughing-matter/?bms.tk=BzAEqwsEk20Fk21Vr30Wp33Rr26Js17Ek20BvfrFtg

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I know it's the heart of football season and the beginning of basketball season, but baseball is the sport that truly helps to illustrate this particular post. On social media, not all times are created equal. It's important to know where and when to place your pitches to let your fans and followers hit home runs for you.

 

There have been much more scientific studies that detail this. I have to disagree with most of these because they ones I've seen have missed an important aspect or two. For the most part, they're basing their research on when people are most active on social media and the volume of posts happening at that time. Unfortunately, this is an incomplete data set. I've based my research strictly on business engagement - when are people willing to interact with the companies they like and follow.

 

Also, I've taken into consideration the science behind the Facebook feed itself. For example, one of the "sweet spots" that nearly every study I've seen skips the dead zone of 5:00am-5:30am. Fewer people are up and about checking their social media at this time, so it's not on the list. This is a huge mistake. Getting in line to appear on Facebook and Twitter feeds means posting at the moment or right before people pick up their smartphones, flip open their tablets, or switch on their computers to hit social media. Posts in the dead zone performed exceptionally well for businesses as they weren't shoved down on the feeds by the ever-important friend posts.

 

In other words, people saw and engaged with these posts first thing in the morning, setting up a nice day with quick likes, comments, and shares. This helps with posts throughout the day.

 

It's important to understand where this data originated. Since May, 2012, I've been researching with actual business pages about times, content, tools, etc. This has been a real-world study based on trial and error as well as result tracking. I've read the studies. I've guided my research around them and improved on them with months of testing. These aren't theories. I've seen it all working in action.

 

With that out of the way, let's go straight into the sweet spots:

  • 7:30pm-8:00pm - While most studies considered 5am as too early to post, most of them also considered 8pm as too late. Data shows differently. This wasn't the case in the beginning of my research; the times when people are engaging with businesses on social media has elongated. On 37 of 42 pages posting at this time, we received the highest number of likes and comments as well as retweets and reblogs for posts that happened between 7:30pm and 8:00pm starting in August. Prior to that, the numbers were better from 7:00pm to 7:30pm. This is contrary to daylight trends and did not see a change after the most recent clock change, so I can say with a near certainty that the change is based upon people either staying on social media longer or starting later in the evening. Either way, this sweet spot is a must-time to post, particularly with messages that are either not time-sensitive or relevant for the following day.
  • 5:00am-5:30am - Again, this time is contrary to other studies, but as I mentioned above it's shown to be an amazing time for businesses to post. Strangely, this was not the case for my personal posts; things that I personally post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and my other individual social networks do not perform as well as the business posts.
  • 5:30pm-6:00pm - Depending on the study, this is either too late or right at the end of the best times to post. Engagement was high for these posts and helped to set up the engagement on the later post.
  • 10:00am-10:30am - This falls well within the recommended posting times on most studies I've read and performed better than posts done earlier or later in the morning. Videos did better at this time than other times, something that makes one wonder what people are doing a couple of hours after they get to the office.

One glaring omission is early afternoon. Nearly every study I've seen proclaims this time as social media gold. It is if you're posting pictures of little Timmy sliding into 3rd base. It's not if you're a business. Your posts get lost, particularly with recent changes to the Facebook news feed algorithm. We ran afternoon testing on over 120 business profiles and found that they simply didn't reach the audience the way that morning and evening posts did.

 

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This post has been coming for a long time. For the sake of transparency, I should note that I've been "sitting on it" for a while and relishing in the poor data and bad studies that are guiding many others in the industry, but guilt won out and it became time to come clean.

 

At the end of the day, the best thing to do is to find your sweet spot. Just like in baseball, not every batter likes it right down the middle. Some like it high and inside. Others go yard to the opposite field when they get pitches low and away. Your business, your demographic, your fan base - those are the things that should determine when you post. This is only a guide.

 

In the next part of this series, we'll discuss ideas surrounding the types of things to post at different times as well as the importance of understanding the days. The weekend can be a flurry of activity for your business profiles, while Wednesday in general is awful - surprising facts when you consider that businesses generally post more on Wednesday than Saturday and Sunday combined. Stay tuned.

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Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

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The Truth About Blog Post Tags

Let there be absolutely, positively no mistake here. "Tags" have completely different uses depending on the platform on which they're used. We're going to take a look at three of the most popular platforms and how tags affect them: Wordpress, Ning, and Tumblr.

 

Before we dive into each, let's get one thing out of the way. Those who say that tags are old and no longer useful are simply being lazy and encouraging the same. It takes less than 30 seconds to come up with a handful of appropriate tags to go along with any blog post and therefore it falls under the category of "why not?" Nobody outside of Mountain View, CA, knows for certain how tags benefit search engine optimization. They do, however, definitely have an opportunity to benefit the reader. It's a best practice that is getting pushed aside by many. Don't fall into the laziness trap. Tag away!

 

Tags for Wordpress

Depending on how you have your site indexing set up in the back end, tags allow search engines to find similar articles. The two major types of taxonomy, tags and categories, are intended to help people navigate a blog. As a result, Google and Bing will follow tags and categories in order to see what level of understanding a blog has on each individual topic.

 

The tag pages themselves, once visited, will give the search engines a depth-of-content picture. For example, if you have a blog for a Nissan dealership that often uses the tag "Altima", the search engines will be able to see that you have written a good amount of content on the topic. Many would argue that they know this already and that semantic indexing is designed in part to replace tagging as a method of establishing authority, but again, "why not?" It definitely doesn't hurt to tag. It probably helps on Wordpress, even if only a little. There's not reason to skip the few seconds it takes to add them.

 

Tags for Ning

On the Ning social platform, tags work in ways similar to Wordpress, but with an added bonus. Blog posts on Ning do not have categories the way that discussions do. As a result, tags become the primary taxonomy that search engines and readers use to navigate a site when they want to see similar articles.

 

Some have also speculated that there is a direct SEO value to the individual post, that the search engines look at tags very similar to how they look at highlighted content and will give a post a lift in the rankings as a result. This is unconfirmed and I've never tested it myself, but I would speculate that it is true.

 

Tags for Tumblr

This is an entirely different ballgame. On Tumblr, tags are everything. The community lives off of tags in a way that is similar to hashtags on Twitter, but there are certain ones that are eternally "trending", so to speak.

 

Tags are Tumblr users' primary method of discovery. Tumblr has devalued them a bit in recent months and focused on "Spotlight" that highlights individually influential tumblogs rather than the community-rich "Explore" page that lets people surf tags, but they're still extremely important and can help a new tumblog get found by the community. Getting found on Tumblr is the key to both social exposure and search; reblogs by other Tumblr users are extremely important and can mean the difference between having an invisible tumblog and having an extremely popular one.

 

Tags for Humans

At the end of the day, the real benefit of tags should be for the readers. Google and Bing may or may not pay attention to them, but allowing your blog visitors to latch onto a particular topic and follow it all the way through is a way to make your blog stickier.

Again, it takes second. Why not?

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For the past several years, content has been a component of search engine and social media marketing that fell far below the tricks and techniques that helped achieve business goals. It was possible to be successful with limited or low-quality content. In fact, there are those who were able to succeed with no content at all, fooling the search engines and social media sites with methods that proved to be more fruitful than actually creating content that the audience wanted.

 

Those days are finally behind us. It has been a long time coming, but now that search engines, social media sites, and people themselves have seen through the tricks, it's a whole new world in marketing. Today, content rests at the top of the marketing funnel with search engine optimization and social media marketing reduced to components of an overall content marketing strategy. Here's what it all means:

Why Content is Finally King

Despite the proclamations of many marketers over the years, content has not been "king" until very recently. It was always useful, but great content without supporting inbound links would not rank and great content without strong social media promotions would not go viral. Things have changed.

 

Amazing content that is useful, entertaining, or both now has a better opportunity to be seen through both search and social. Google is finding the content more easily, making it possible for it to be found without having to artificially inflate the inbound link count. Today, link-building is still an extremely important component of a proper search strategy, but it must center around quality content rather than boost up poor content.

 

Good links are still powerful and high-quality content can help to generate these links. With a little seeding, the links can come in more easily than in the past when most of the links that marketers created were bulk rather than quality.

 

From a social perspective, there's still a distinct need for some promotions. Unlike Google, Facebook and the other social media sites will not actively find your content. However, by getting it a little promotional exposure by sharing it and focusing on it from the website homepage or landing pages, the content can be found. From there, it's a matter of allowing the content to be easily shared.

 

Rising social sites like Pinterest and Tumblr are ideal for seeding the promotions of content. It can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ as well, of course, but the tighter communities on Pinterest and Tumblr actually create an easier path to take content viral on social media than the larger sites. There's a need for a strong account or two to promote them, but it's not as involved as building power accounts on Facebook or Twitter. One can be exceptional at Tumblr and Pinterest very quickly.

 

Content is at the top of the marketing food chain. It's the spark that generates search marketing links and social signals. It's also the source of social media sharing. Rather than use content for SEO or social media marketing, smart marketers will switch it up and use the content as the central point through which search and social marketing can flow.

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I've learned that coincidences don't really happen. There's always a reason. As I worked on my story today regarding content, I stopped to check Facebook and found exactly what I needed, courtesy of Jeff Glackin.

What you say in all of the media types - television, radio, print, social media, search marketing, billboards, etc. - has an opportunity to reach people. Often I'm asked questions about spends and ROI.

  • Will $10,000 spent on social media give the same or better yield than $10,000 spent on television?

  • Should I sink everything into online marketing or keep my offline marketing going strong?

  • Should I minimize my internet spend to just a website and classified ads and move the rest of my budget offline again?

The answer to all of these questions is the same. It depends on your message. That's it. The real question isn't whether or not a social media spend is better than a radio spend. The real question surrounds the way that you're putting your message out there. The words are often much more important than the medium.

This topic deserves much more research and examples than I can put together today, but it's important to get in the right frame of mind before exploring this topic more fully. To do this, I'll rely on a pretty good video on the topic. It's not a superb video but it evokes emotion and gets the basic point across.

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Content Wasn't Always King, But Now It Finally Is

For years, marketers and search engine optimization gurus have been preaching something. They've been telling the world that "content is king" and that if you put the right content on your website, that it will rank well. After all, who would deny the king, right?

 

The reality was different. Up until April 24th, 2012, content was not king. It was a queen, maybe even a jack - a face card to be sure. However, it wasn't king. Inbound links were king. Other factors such as exact-match domains, site age, and offsite attribution were aces.

 

Things have changed all the way around. Thanks to the Penguin update, links are now more challenging to come by. Don't misunderstand this - links have not been devalued. If anything, they are more powerful now than they were before the update. Low-quality, automated, spammy links have been completely devalued to the point that they can actually do harm to your domain. For this reason, inbound linking strategies have been forced to clean up their act. Only the highest level of pure links work the magic now. More on that in a moment, but first, let's talk social...

 

One of the "hidden" changes that happened on or around the same time as the Penguin update was the increased value given to social signals. Google has been considering social signals in the ranking algorithm since December, 2010 (publicly, at least), but they really started pumping up their significance this year. It's very likely that the timing of the change was intended to coincide with Penguin; making two major changes at the same time - one public, one behind the scenes - is the perfect way to keep people like me on my toes.

 

This brings us to the content. As I mentioned, links of the highest caliber are still powerful, possibly more powerful than ever before. Social signals are equally powerful. The inaccurate but easy math behind it is that links, social, and onsite content account for 30% of the ranking algorithm with the other 10% going to outside or uncontrollable forces such as domain age. If all three major components are equal, how can content now be king?

 

Today and going forward, there are three types of content for dealer websites. There's the "money content" - the pages that are there to generate leads such as inventory pages. There's the SEO content - the pages designed to target specific keywords and drive traffic to your site from various search terms. Lastly, there's "sharable content" - the pages that are of general interest to visitors that come to your website for reasons other than to do business with the dealership.

 

Many will avoid the third type as "cool content pages" such as a picture gallery of modified Honda Civics or a video of your dealership's participation in the March of Dimes walkathon do not directly generate leads. This is their biggest mistake and an opportunity for you to shine.

 

You see, these are the pages that can generate organic links. These are the pages that can be shared on social media to generate the social signals. These are the pages that will allow people to interact with your site even if they're not buying a car. The effects of links and social signals do not just hit the page itself. They help the domain. If you're posting content on your site that is bringing in links and social signals, the other pages (including the "money content" pages) will rank better in search and gain more exposure through social.

 

It's not an easy process without the appropriate understanding, but once you get the hang of it, there are few things that come more naturally to us. We're all "car people". We got into this business to make money and be around vehicles (at least that's the hope). If you generate the type of content that should come naturally to you and expose that content through the proper channels, you'll have an advantage over your competitors. Despite the ease in which this can be accomplished, few will attempt it. Even fewer will do it right. You have an opportunity to get way ahead of the competition in internet marketing with a little knowledge, a little practice, and a little help.

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For a while now we've been discussing the concept of posting "sharable" content on your website to support your "money pages" and "SEO pages". Here's a quick breakdown of the three to act as a refresher:

  • Money Pages - These are the pages that are designed to generate leads. Inventory details pages, specials, landing pages, contact pages - the places where leads are formed.
  • SEO Pages - An SEO page is one that is designed specifically to target specific keywords. You may make a page called "Chevy Camaro Milwaukee", for example. They usually have content of some sort to help them rank but are rarely sharable.
  • Sharable Pages - These are the "fun" pages that very few dealers or vendors ever build. They are designed to draw traffic from sources other than search such as social media. The goal is to create content that people will enjoy and that they're willing to share.

We've discussed why these sharable pages are important, but in a nutshell the goal of a sharable page is to support money pages and SEO pages by driving social signals and organic links to your domain. The sharable pages help by linking internally to important pages but they also increase the domain's overall rankings through these social signals and links.

It's all well and good, but people have asked me for an example of the content that a sharable page might have, so here it is. Below is content that was posted on a Dodge dealer's website. It is about classic Dodge Chargers. Most dealers would think that it's useless since they don't have a lineup of 1969 Chargers on their front line, but because of the potential popularity and sharability of such a post, it could help to drive inbound links and social signals in ways that standard dealer website content cannot.

As you look at the content notice a few things:

  1. Big images. People love to share large images.
  2. Universal appeal. Even non-Dodge people can admire the beauty of this beast.
  3. Unique, relevant, but not-too-much content. It doesn't have to be a novel. This is the bare-minimum text content that you would want to post, but it works.
  4. Social buttons at the bottom. You want to use the native buttons. Share tools are often ineffective and are not read as easily by the search engines as the native buttons.
  5. Embed code. This allows people to quickly and easily share the content on their own site.

Please feel free to ask questions about this content example.

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Balanced Diet

Businesses and organizations have made strides in the last year to improve their overall understanding and strategy in social media. Many who once played in the social media realm using traditional internet marketing techniques such as posting only self-serving links have changed gears and focused on higher-visibility content such as images. Unfortunately, many are still lacking the understanding of how the networks work and how to post properly. It’s like eating. Social media in general likes balance. Facebook and Google+ in particular are most effective when the right balance is created.

They like a balanced diet of content. Both are very similar in the way their algorithms work. Google uses a formula similar to Facebook’s EdgeRank to determine where content appears on the feed. While the strategies surrounding content on each is different, it is better (for now) to post mirrored content on the two networks simultaneously. The main reason for this is human nature; since Facebook has so much more engagement than Google+ right now, splitting the strategies might lead to shortcuts and eventually Google+ will not get the same level of attention. By posting to each together, it simplifies the process and reduces the chance of getting “Google+ fatigue”.

By feeding the networks with the appropriate levels of each type of content, your overall social media strategy can improve. Here’s how:

Understanding the Four Content Food Groups

Just like the food groups comprising a good diet, social media content types have different strengths and weaknesses.

  1. Links are like vegetables. Many people don’t like their veggies and wouldn’t eat them if they didn’t have to. They’re healthy, just as links are healthy for your marketing efforts, but they aren’t as desirable as other food types. On Facebook, links are given the lowest “weight” when it comes to EdgeRank. People like them less. The news feed displays them lower (if at all) when your fans surf the stream. Still, they are a necessary component of a strong social media strategy just as they are an important part of a balanced diet.
  2. Videos are the starches, the potatoes and grains. They can be very desirable at times but are often merely a side dish to balance out the rest of the food. Videos are treated by Facebook much the way that direct links are, just a bit higher on the news feed.
  3. Text posts are the meat of the meal. Many people (other than vegetarians and vegans, of course) love meat. Likewise, both users and EdgeRank put text posts high on the scale. A well-received message posted in the form of text can go almost as viral as the final social media food group…
  4. Pictures are the sweets, the dessert that many crave. Just like sweets, pictures are craved by social media users as well as the news feed. They are by far the most popular, but just like with desserts, a diet that consists of only sweet pictures will not be a productive page. There simply aren’t many strong marketing messages that can be conveyed with images alone. Still, they have their place.

Now that we know what the food groups look like, let’s examine how to apply them to your social media strategy.

The Balanced Diet

EdgeRank is a complex algorithm that would require a blog post or two in order to convey the basics. The short version is this: EdgeRank determines how high your content appears on the news feeds of your fans. Not all content is created equal. Not all fans are created equal (or rather, different fans’ news feeds will display your content differently). If you play the EdgeRank “game” by mixing up your content, you can develop the appropriate strategy for your business.

The first thing to understand is thatyour strategy is different from everyone the strategy of other pages. Your goals are different, as are your assets. This is only a guide to help you develop your own strategy. Anyone who has the right “formula” for everyone doesn’t really understand how it all works.

With the understanding that Facebook and its users love pictures and text, you can start to improve your EdgeRank by getting interaction from your fans using them. Videos are not required; they are not liked by the algorithm as much as images or text and are usually not as effective from a marketing perspective as links. That’s not true for some, but most get more bang for their buck from links. Links, the veggies, are least loved and most useful, so they have their place in the diet as well.

Your strategy should be one that builds up “EdgeRank love” through images and text. Once enough of this love is accumulated, you slide in your links or videos. One common schedule is to post 2-4 images or text for every link or video you posts. If your page is very popular and your content is highly-valued, you can increase the frequency of the links, but keep in mind that even the active and engaging pages have to use links sparingly (if at all).

One trap that pages often fall into is the addiction to likes, comments, and shares. Some would argue that posting only images is the best way to go because even though they aren’t necessarily getting specific messages across, they’re able to keep the brand at the top of the news feeds and therefore get more overall exposure. This is true to some extent, but just as a diet of chocolates and candies tastes good and keeps everyone happy in the short term, long term it can be unhealthy. Too many images makes it to where the links themselves get very little visibility. In essence, they are overpowered by the sweet sugary image mess of your Facebook page.

If you’re Audi, for example, you can get away with an image-only strategy. If you’re an Audi dealer, it just won’t work. Your brand isn’t strong enough as an Audi dealership to be able to get the benefit from a dessert-only strategy.

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