You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, ‘less is more’ at some stage, somewhere throughout your life thus far. The concept is a simple one and suggests that, in certain circumstances, a short and concise output is far more beneficial that putting forward a large quantity of substance/content/opinions that are of lower quality.
The more I think about how businesses and, to a lesser extent celebrities, utilise social media in the modern era, the more I feel they could all benefit from hearing that age-old phrase and taking it to heart a little more than they currently seem to be.
Most of you will understand where I’m coming from; you log into your Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Google+ account and you see that at least one person in your list of contacts has gone on an absolute spree and has started sharing their thoughts – and more often than not, links – at the speed of light. The result is a flooded news feed that looks like a SPAM attack has exploded all over your monitor. This leaves you feeling frustrated and, nine times out of ten, you’ll either block/delete the offender or at the very least you’ll ignore most of their updates in the future, without even taking the time to read the content because you assume what they’re pushing is the same old garbage.
Despite this example being more-or-less the way we all think when we’re confronted with an overwhelming amount of tweets and Facebook updates, a lot of businesses and freelancers still continue to churn out links like it is going out of fashion.
Remember: Less IS More
Bearing all of that in mind, wouldn’t you be much more inclined as a user to appreciate, take in and possibly even click through to one of your contacts’ links if they only pop up once or twice a day?
Wouldn’t you, after a few quality links had been shared, begin to look forward to their updates/tweets and begin to associate them with high-quality content that you actually want to read about and watch?
Perhaps you’d even start looking forward to their tweets and begin to get excited when they pop up.
That’s the type of relationship that all businesses using social media today should be striving to achieve. By implementing a ‘less is more’ policy you actually leave your followers WANTING more and that, in a nutshell, is the perfect result.
Consider This As An Opportunity for Change!
If you’re one of the offenders whom I mentioned earlier; the type of person who smacks links out at an incredible speed, consider this a great time to change your ways. You can see that ‘less is more’ is certainly an appealing method and you now know why it works so well.
Let’s spread the word people (in a responsible and controlled way of course) and hopefully our feeds will be a lot trimmer and contain on lean, mean quality content in the upcoming weeks and months.