Do you write too much or too often?
Do you write and design for the search engines or for people?
This is a topic I have been thinking about a lot, as we go into our own site redesign. Our user testing results showed people wanted a lot less text … but what about the Googlebot? There are ways around that one, but I wish I didn’t have to make that tradeoff. Certainly, we learned from our Google Analytics that we did great with the search engines, but with people, not so much.
Similarly, why do people blog all the time? Who has something to say every day of the week (and has time to get their work done too)? Recently, I subscribed to a bunch of blogs that I hadn’t been following, and one of them is religious about updating their blog every day. So, I am finally going to delete it. Why, you ask? They probably blog for the search engines, but it just makes me feel like there is yet one more thing that I am not achieving. If subscribing to a blog is a conversion for them, they lost this one.
And while I am on a rant about those who communicate too much/too little, what about all those people who have nothing better to do than tweet all day long? When their tweets drown out (in terms of screen real estate) what everyone else is saying, I stop following them. Ditto on the conversion loss here. One of my friends almost won the prize for Twitter abuse for telling me that he was going to his sister’s graduation, telling me that he was sitting at his sister’s graduation, and telling me that he had gone to his sister’s graduation.
Robbin
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Hi Robbin,
YES!
Thank goodness someone finally spoke up about this. Thank you.
As a web analytics (Google Analytics is my favorite) and SEO person, I frequently marinate on what you describe.
Tracy, so sorry that it took so long for your comment to appear!
Over-twittering is something that we’ve been discussing a lot. Our site provides an advertising service to small and large businesses, so Twitter and Facebook are great tools for us to interact with our current and potential clients. Some of the people we follow, though, easily post dozens and dozens of things a day, which seems to water down the value of the things they say. Not to mention, it’s really annoying.
On the blog post front, we only post when we have site updates, new features or specials. We use it as a brand voice, which I think is a good lesson to learn for anyone interested in business blogging.
People who twitter five times a day confuse me. There should be a limit. Can there be a limit? Let’s ask for a limit.
Oh Laura. Let’s *definitely* ask for a limit.
Robbin