Are you worried you’re annoying? Dan Zarrella tells.
In Boston I caught up with Dan Zarrella – the Social Media Scientist at HubSpot. I like Dan’s work because, like a true scientist, he analyses loads of data to reach his conclusions!
I wanted to know at what point you become annoying on social media and how often was too much or not enough.
Here’s a transcript of what we spoke about.
Adam Franklin: Hi, there. It’s Adam Franklin, and I’m here with Dan Zarrella, the Social Media Scientist from HubSpot. Thanks for a great presentation today, Dan.
Dan Zarrella: Thank you.
Adam Franklin: I’ve actually got a question. A lot of people say to me they’re worried about annoying people too much, and by that I mean emailing too much, tweeting too much, putting too many form fields on a sign-up form. What have you discovered in your research that might be counterintuitive to what these people assume?
Dan Zarrella: I think for most channels, when you’re talking about Twitter and email, there is a too much, but it’s way, way more than you’re doing right now. Right? So my data has shown it would peak at about 23, 24 tweets a day, when you’re still gaining followers on to it, when you’re still getting value out to that number a day. Most people aren’t tweeting anywhere near that number.
With email, you can get out to once a day. That’s probably not going to do too much to your unsubscribe rate and your click-through rate. You want to obviously keep an eye on these things.
Facebook, on the other hand, you can over Facebook. Like you can definitely over post on Facebook and freak people out and get either hidden or your page unliked. So be careful with Facebook frequency, but for Twitter frequency and email frequency, I don’t think there is such a big deal.
And then for form fields, clearly experimentation is the key for any of these things, but don’t be afraid to experiment with much longer form fields. I mean, at HubSpot we have like 11 parts or something. It’s a large form, and you have to fill it out every single time you get a webinar or e-book. It’s funny.
People will be like, “Why do I have to fill this out every time?” Our conversion rates are well over 50% for most of our landing pages and have thousands and thousands of views. Long form fields, you might be able to squeeze a few more percentage points out if you shorten them, but then you’re giving your sales guys less stuff to work with. So I wouldn’t be too afraid of long form fields.
Adam Franklin: Okay. And what about email subscription popup forms? I know I’ve read a few sort of arguments or debates. What are your thoughts there?
Dan Zarrella: Yeah. I don’t have any great data about it, but I’m a fan, sort of personally. If it’s an email squeeze page, just grab the email. So that’s what I do at DanZarella.com. I have a popup that comes up over my site when you first go to it the first couple of times, and just an email, no first name, no company name, any of that kind of stuff.
But, if you do most of your email collection through landing pages, like we actually do that at HubSpot, we have very few just email squeeze pages, it’s all through the landing pages, then you get a lot more of this firsthand information, company name information, all these other company size, type of company, that you can segment your list and you can deliver personalised information based on it. I can see arguments both ways. If at all possible, though, you probably want to gather more information rather than less.
Adam Franklin: Okay, great. And, Dan, where can people go to find out more about you?
Dan Zarrella: DanZarrella.com. There are two Rs in my last name, so it’s like mozzarella but with a second R. Or Dan Zarrella on Twitter @danzarrella.
Adam Franklin: Awesome. Thanks very much, man. I really appreciate it.
And you can also check out Dan Zarrella’s books!
The Facebook Marketing Book
The Social Media Marketing Book
Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness