When you are busy there is no easier and faster task you want to drop than to stop updating your social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but is that wise? Before you drop updating social media sites, make sure you are not hurting your web presence first.
How can you tell if social media is not driving traffic and activity on your site? It all starts with analysis. If you don’t routinely watch your website statistics on Google Analytics, you should. For my site, I watch the Social Sources in the Traffic Sources button to check my referrals. If you don’t see referrals from Twitter or Facebook there, don’t stop updating those services yet until you look a bit further.
I use HootSuite for my social updates and I can run link click and follower share reports in the control panel. This gives me a more clear view of what is happening specifically with Twitter. To check what is happening with Facebook, I login as an administrator and review my Insights report.
Based on what you see, you may decide to cut back activity to a lower level if the numbers are not measurable, but I would not stop either service altogether. Google and Bing do look for social updates and sharing activity as part of their organic rankings. If social media is taking up too much time, I would ramp back first to a comfortable level. Specifically, I might recommend one update a day for Facebook and three updates a day for Twitter.
Should you stop social media updates all together? I would only recommend doing so if you really cannot support the activity level, you see zero link shares, and no referrals when you review a six month period. I would be very slow to stop updating your networks all together. I have found that once you lose readership, after you have actively worked to build it for quite a while, that to get back in the game again is almost like starting from scratch. It is better to slow your activity than to stop totally.