One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is assuming that because they’ve said something once, people know it.
They don’t!
Say you’re a business owner reluctant to post about an award you’ve won because you’d already mentioned it on LinkedIn. You’re concerned that people would be bored of hearing about it.
Realistically, people probably didn’t see it the first time.
That’s the reality of the media today. Whether it’s social media, PR, email marketing or networking, we’re all competing for attention. People are busy. They’re scrolling quickly, juggling multiple priorities and consuming huge amounts (too much in fact) of information every day.
If your audience misses one message, it doesn’t mean they’re not interested. It usually means they’re just busy.
We’re too close to our own content
We can’t see things clearly when it comes to repetition like this because we’re exposed to our own messages constantly. We see every social media post before it goes out. We know every service we offer. We know every event date, every business milestone and every piece of press coverage because we’re involved in it.
But that creates a false sense of repetition.
Something you’ve seen ten times may only have been seen once, or not at all, by your audience.
Why repetition works
The brands and businesses we remember aren’t necessarily always the best but just the ones we’ve heard from consistently. Trust is built through familiarity, after all.
If someone sees your business name regularly, reads your comments on industry issues, notices your media coverage and hears about your services from time to time, you’re much more likely to spring to mind when they need what you offer.
One post is never going to achieve that. But consistent messaging might.
Repetition doesn’t mean literally copy pasting
Repeating a message doesn’t mean sharing exactly the same content over and over again, of course. It just means reinforcing your key points in different ways.
Take Carnsight as an example. We want people to understand that PR isn’t just about getting a mention in a national paper. It’s about raising credibility, building relationships and helping businesses become more visible.
We could post that sentence every week, but it wouldn’t be particularly interesting, would it?
Instead, we might share our client’s media coverage, talk about successful events we’ve supported, comment on a communications trends, publish blogs like this one or share the results of a PR campaign. They’re all different pieces of content, but they point back to the same message about the value of clever comms.
The content changes but the message doesn’t.
The bottom line
If you’re worried you’re repeating yourself, I promise you’re thinking about your business far more than your audience is.
The goal of PR and social media isn’t to say something new every day. It’s about making sure the right people remember what you do when they need it.
And that’s always going to need sharing more than once.
