Fritz Jergitsch, cofounder of Die Tagespresse; Photo credit: Fritz Jergitsch
It is no secret, yet no surprise either, that social media arekey to driving online traffic. For Fritz Jergitsch, founder of the Austrian satire website Die Tagespresse – also known as “Austria’s most serious online newspaper” – social media has played a crucial role. With more than 80% of its traffic coming through Facebook, Die Tagespresse now enjoys about 800,000 unique visitors and a total of 1.3 million visits per month. Not bad, right?
Put yourself out there
Social media has been a natural extension to Jergitsch’s work on Die Tagespresse. Since its launch in May 2013, Die Tagespresse has attracted more than 160,000 Facebook fans and over 6,500 Twitter followers. “The entire page growth has been completely organic,” Jergitsch said. The rules he follows are, thus, rather intuitive – like not posting all too often or not losing “the ‘serious’ tone of [the publication] when communicating with fans”.
For a satirical page, one of the main challenges is to stay relevant as well as to be able to constantly come up with new,creative and funny content, says Jergitsch. “With every article, you reach new people. […] After only a month or two after going online, I had amassed a significant number of followers. It can go pretty fast on social media once you present your fans with content they like,” he explained. Interestingly enough, Jergitsch didn’t follow a specific formula for Social Media “I simply created a Facebook and Twitter account and started posting my articles on there,” he told inventures.eu. “There is no strategy behind it.”
While Jergitsch has taken on a rather intuitive approach – and quite successfully, too – other experts focus on the process of social media planning.
Social media planning as a roadtrip
Part-Austrian startup Buffer (see our profile of co-founder Leo Widrich), which helps you automate the scheduling of social media posts, understands the importance of a well thought-out, well-planned social media strategy. In fact, Kevan Lee, content crafter at Buffer, likes to think of it as a roadtrip: “Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track, and have some fun along the way,” he wrote in a blog post last summer.
By developing a plan, you create a critical foundation for which the rest of your social media efforts are based on.
Online marketing expert Neil Patel
Lee lists several important steps as part of the planning process: choosing your social networks, finding your tone and voice, deciding on a suitable posting strategy – including the type of content and the time frame within it would be posted, as well as measuring and analysing your social media activity, to name a few. And he’s not the only one to stress the importance of planning.
Online marketing expert Neil Patel wrote in an article that “by developing a plan, you create a critical foundation for which the rest of your social media efforts are based on.”
How often should I post a day?
Although following a rather intuitive approach – when it comes to the frequency of posting, also Jergitsch has found his own pace when it comes to Die Tagespresse: “On Facebook, I post no more than twice per day,” he said. “Generally, it’s better to post less and better-quality content because people start to become annoyed if you show up in their feed too often. It’s different for Twitter, where I sometimes post three times a day.”
While this specific posting frequency may be working well for Jergitsch, it may not be for other startups. Buffer, for instance, posts twice a day on Facebook and 14 times per weekday on Twitter. As there are multiple factors that influence the way users consume and engage with online content, it is important to “keep testing and ensure that you’re seeing consistency with your results”, knows Dan Wilkerson of LunaMetric – as according to him there is only one answer to our question above: “The correct answer is that there is no correct answer”.
Read more about Social Media strategiesand how to chose the right platforms next week in part2 of “How to pace your on Social Media”.
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