The careful balance between slow trickle content and spamming

by Joe Kuzma ( joe_kuzma) on November 28, 2018

One of the toughest juggling acts when content marketing is producing enough content to fill your schedule. It can feel like feast or famine: sometimes you don’t have enough content, but other times you end up with too much!

The latter is a good problem to have, but it can also be a hindrance. You don’t want to overwhelm your intended audience with too much of the same thing. Thus, you must find a balance between meeting your posting obligations and not overdoing it by stretching the same content too thin.

What is a content trickle?

Ever see a leaky faucet? Notice how there’s a drip here, a drip there? Well, that’s what I refer to as a content trickle. Others have used the same term in various marketing aspects, such as email, where they drip content bit by bit.

When you have a large piece of content that you can break up into several pieces, it never hurts to do so. This will give you multiple ways to use your initial piece of information as separate, individual posts: filling out your editorial calendar.

Beware of breaking it up too much

Keep in mind, you might reshare this content later, so you’re already getting some “juice” out it more than once. However, if you go too far and are following my advice on resharing down the road, you may inundate your audience with the same thing, over and over, so much that they stop responding to you.

A good example is breaking a lengthy blog post into 2, 3, or even 4 iterations. A series is never a bad thing, but think if this is something you should logically trickle out or not. Is each part of the series worthwhile on its own merit?

If not, you may have broken it into too many pieces. Your followers may find no value in continuing to read the series, leaving your best parts and conclusion with less response than your initial post.

Spamming the masses

Another example, and sometimes the easiest to get carried away with, is event photos. Sharing a photo here or there to promote, or later brag about a successful event, is fine. It’s when you start to individually post those photos outside of an album or gallery where you must heed caution.

Posting ten photos individually isn’t as good as posting all ten at once, or five-and-five in two individual posts. There are exceptions to the rule, but generally, you may not want one specific series to dominate all of your website or social media posts. To the unknowing, they may see these photos, in the individual spammy way, and believe this is all you do.

Circus mentality

I always go back to the geniuses who ran circus tents in a bygone era. They knew that people may come to see elephants, clowns, or trapeze artists, but they may not buy a ticket to see them all.

You must appeal to a broad audience by casting your net far and wide. This is why a small trickle of breaking down your content to generate a few extra posts isn’t a bad idea. But like the circus, you don’t want to only showcase the clowns!

Spread the love and mix in some other posts if you do plan to be a bit more spammy with a specific topic than usual. My rule of thumb is to have a least two other pieces of content to put in rotation with the main point you’re trying to drive home. Doing so will mix up your posting schedule and may help bring others to your “Big Top” rather than only shouting into a megaphone (i.e. spamming content) that you have the “World’s Tallest Man”.