Intermittent Social Media Management

Social media management is one of the services we offer here at Haden Interactive. With decades of experience, we post three times a day, five days a week, providing a consistent background of social media content that lets clients add their own personal notes, backstage insights, or promotions when they feel like it. We know the results we see when we do this over the long term: growing social media traffic to the website and social media engagement.

We also know what we see when clients decide not to continue using social media: a predictable drop in traffic and engagement. Sometimes their social media activity didn’t drive sales, sometimes it did but they didn’t realize it until they stopped making the investment. Sometimes they’re okay with the traffic loss and sometimes they start up their social media again once they see it.

But recently a client asked us about what you might call intermittent social media. What if a client pays for social media management, but only occasionally? Like, for a spring campaign and then again for a month or two in the fall? What happens then?

We’ve never tried it. Or at least not intentionally — and more on that later. I had to admit that we just didn’t have data for that situation. Usually, people continue their social media management or they end it or maybe take it in-house. We’ve never done temporary seasonal social media management.

Observing it in the wild

After finishing the conversation, I continued to think about the question, and I realized that we certainly do have access to data on intermittent social media management. After all, this is what most small businesses do. They start off their social media with enthusiasm, then get too busy and forget all about it. As things change in their business, they decide that they will start it up again and  then life interferes and they stop.

Intermittent social media is in fact the norm for small businesses.

And we’ve done just that with our lab site. We have a website that we use for experiments. Most of the time, when we’re not doing experiments, we ignore it. This allows us to see on a regular basis exactly what happens when you ignore your website. And it does provide data for us when we need it.

In fact, we were able to see that we were quite diligent with our lab site’s social media last October. We sent 70 messages on Facebook and X last October. We managed a little activity in November, it seems, and then gave up.

So we had a look at our website traffic around the same time. Sure enough, the web traffic got a nice boost in October , fell a bit in November, and then slid on down once we stopped using social media.

This is exactly what we would have predicted. And in fact we can see that occasional bursts of social media drive traffic, just as occasional bursts of blogging do, but that they just provide little peaks in a general slide. Some things don’t provide lasting results unless they’re done consistently. Occasional social media is a lot like occasional exercise — it’s not bad for you, but it doesn’t really do much for you either.

Add intention?

But what if you plan social media campaigns at intentional intervals? If you have an effective social media campaign for flu vaccine season and another for back to school vaccines, you could get a good boost at just the times you want it without the investment of ongoing social media. That could be more manageable for in-house social media teams and more economical if you hire people to take care of it for you.

Here’s what you’ll miss out on:

• You won’t be able to develop the community engagement that comes from actual ongoing social connections.
• People who get interested in your campaign will come to your social media platforms to see more and won’t see regular involvement. Instead, they’ll see occasional bursts of promotion.
• You won’t have the momentum seen in regular social media interactions.
• You may be penalized by the algorithms at some platforms for occasional use.

Here’s how you can get the most out of intermittent social media:

• Plan to track results and ROI. That means that your campaign needs to have a call to action with measurable indicators. It’s obvious in the examples above that social media brought traffic to our lab site, but we didn’t measure conversions, so we can’t really gauge ROI.
• Be as predictable as possible. If you have a seasonal sale, your customers may look forward to it. Make sure you do a social media campaign at the right time to alert  your regulars as well as catching the eye of new people. If you observe holidays or health observance months, don’t skip them.
• Visit your platforms occasionally or at least watch for alerts in case people leave comments or questions. Responding to visitors encourages that sense of community even if you aren’t producing new content regularly.

The best plan

Frankly, the best plan is to go ahead and have regular social media management. That way, your seasonal campaigns will have the audience you’ve built over time, and will be far more effective. If you put in the investment and effort to create excellent social media campaigns for special events or occasions but don’t keep up in between, you are wasting some of your investment.

But if your time and budget just won’t stretch to ongoing engagement, intermittent social media is likely to be better than nothing. Our tips can help you get the most possible from occasional social media involvement. Track your results and maybe you will see the value of social media and plan to keep it up…or maybe you’ll be happy with the results you get.