I recently had dinner and a chat about social media with my friend Sebi, social media guru. I told him I was working hard on growing SentoGuide and that just moving the site to WordPress doubled the traffic within a few days. Any promotional efforts on my part immediately sent daily visits through the roof. Sebi mentioned connecting the site to my Facebook profile would be the next step. The next day I went and did exactly that.

Most of the content of SentoGuide consists of posts with information on individual public baths in Japan, and with the total of baths being well over 6,000 that’s a lot of posts. I realised that pushing all that in front of the faces of my Facebook friends would probably help nobody, least of all the site, since my Facebook friends would probably see it as spam and switch off quickly.

I figured if my friends feel that way, perhaps my audience does too. Many people publish all they have to everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, etc., without regarding whether anybody actually wants to read it. It might yield some short-term results, but in the long-term this strategy is not a winner.

So when using social media to promote your site, blog or product, stop and think for a minute whether you would want to do to your friends what you are about to do to your audience. If they answer is yes, you probably have a well thought-out strategy, but if the answer is no, think about it carefully.

For example, don’t submit everything you stick on your blog to all social networks with any sort of automatic submitter, but take the time to handwrite your Twitter or Facebook pitch. I think that in the long run that will have the greatest benefits.