time to quit your blog?

We’ve all read that having a blog is a key component of a corporate social media strategy - we even weighed in on the subject here.  The biggest commitment to this extended communication strategy is your time: social media is about getting out what you put in.  If you don’t communicate regularly then how can you expect your community to regularly check in with you?

At first, a lot of my clients jump in whole hog to their social media strategy: they’re tweeting regularly, posting atleast once a week to the company blog, providing regular updates through their LinkedIn groups, etc.  They anxiously check their analytics and stats to see how their ideas are going down with the web universe.  But then slowly they tweet less, that LinkedIn/Facebook page gets a bit stale and the blog, well, not being updated so regularly.  Discouraged, I get the following comment a lot:

how do you know when it is time to quit?

Of course my first response is: “patience grasshopper”.  Then I suggest reviewing the content to make sure it aligns with your audience - I solicit a lot of feedback from people for our site, constantly checking in with the ‘little guy’, to make sure they find the information useful.  I do tell them to monitor their analytics (traffic, comments, etc.) and decide what would be considered a success.  But always, fundamentally, there is so much emotional time and effort put into your strategy I know it is hard to walk away.

Then I stumbled upon this great article: It’s Time to Shoot Your Blog.  In addition to the fact the cowboy analogy is spot on, Jonathan Morrow really sums up some tell-tale signs as to why you should entertain the idea of walking away: low confirmation traffic (e.g. comments, tweets or emails from your community); next to no blogs that link back to you; and lack of motivation to write.  It was such a great article I started to think of it in the context of the Business Ready site!

I don’t mind sharing a few stats about this site for context:  currently we get over 150 unique hits a day, we average 1-2 comments per month, but the average time spent is about a minute (it takes more than a minute to read some of our posts!) and not a lot of sites link back to us.  However, I won’t be stopping any time soon because I definitely fall into the motivation category as described by Morrow:

I’ve never met a successful blogger who didn’t love their topic. Yes, they get burned out once in a while, and yes, they might struggle for new ideas, but they’re still addicted to studying their subject, talking to other leaders, and spreading the most captivating ideas. Even if they had to do it for free, they would continue writing for their blog forever.

Yup, I’m still very passionate about this topic and have been for, oh, say, ten years.  Hah!  So I guess we’ll keep going …