While I am a big advocate of people using social media in small and frequent chunks, I also think that it is a good social media strategy to take a break sometimes.
Both you and your audience need a breather.
Part of it is to prevent burn-out and part of it is to occasionally leave your audience wanting more.
There’s nothing like creating a bit of suspense or crafting a bit of a cliffhanger.
Are you waiting to hear on a big job? You might want to leave your audience waiting as well. Create some suspense before you share your good news.
Sometimes we overstay our welcome.
We can beaver away at our marketing campaigns trying to raise awareness of ourselves and our projects, and occasionally we might incorrectly judge our audience’s appetite.
That’s fine, it happens to everyone.
What you don’t want is your network to be sitting there thinking ‘how can I miss you if you don’t leave?’
So take a break.
Don’t post anything for a week.
Use the time to either take a holiday or work on a longer piece (a video, a longer blog post etc) that you can share when you come back refreshed, enthused and with new things to say.
You’ll be a breath of fresh air.
That said, I don’t advocate taking too long off (more than say two weeks or a month tops) as you will lose the momentum you were building.
If you are taking an extended holiday, it’s possible to create blog posts on WordPress that you can set to be released at certain periods of time.
Tweetdeck, with its message scheduling service, allows you to create tweets in advance to be released on a certain timeline. With your mobile handset you can always pop in the odd update or photo.
There’s taking a break and then disappearing completely – know the difference.
So as you are mapping out your month (you do map your month, right?) think ‘social media strategy’ and plan a break in there every now and again.
Both you and your audience will be refreshed by it.
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