Maybe you’re new to managing a Gaggle or perhaps you’re a seasoned pro looking for a gut check on best practices. Knowing how many activities to add to the Gaggle is an important question regardless of how long you've been with us. If you add too little, you’ll get few results. Add too much and there’s a point of diminishing return.
While it is a bit of an experiment and there is no ‘one size fits all’ Activity count, we can advise on how many activities you need to add to your Gaggle based on what we have seen in years of advisement on Gaggle programs.
What is the General Recommended Best Practice?
As a benchmark, aim for a minimum of a share or re-share on LinkedIn three times per week, but at best, daily.
This best practice assumes all Members are performing the same activities, regardless of the company size and stature, and that there are no other activities being executed. Of course, we know that Members are likely to receive different activity types, but as a general rule of thumb, follow these guidelines.
How Many Activities Should I Have In My Gaggle Each Week?
Like in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there is such a thing as too little, too much, and just right. If you have too many Activities to complete, your Members have analysis paralysis and get lost trying to decide what to share and when often times choosing to not do it at all. This impacts your employee execution of Activities.
Likewise, with too few Activities, Members start to lose the motivation to check the Gaggle for new Activities. With any new program, you need to flex a consistent muscle and that means not having too many Activities but also not too few, settling in on what’s just right for your company.
So, How Do I Know if I Have Too Many or Too Few Activities?
As a good rule of thumb, there should be around 15 to 20 ‘Things to Do’ per week. This includes liking a post, sharing or re-sharing, commenting on posts, and more. Many of these may be one-click actions and do not take much lift.
With this in mind, we also pulled some benchmarks against our own programs. Across the board, our best-performing programs with good active membership, generally executed 17 activities per week. So, if you aim for 3-4 activities per day every week, you should see pretty good results.
Is This Recommendation for 15-20 Activities Per Platform?
Consider this a recommendation for your primary platform and anything else as icing on the cake.
For example, most GaggleAMP clients work in B2B and target content on LinkedIn. However, they do want to have the occasional retweet or tweet. We would not consider that as part of the factor of “too much” unless, of course, you are generating 15-20 Activities each on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for example. You’ll very quickly hit a point of no return as your Gaggle Members will simply be unwilling to engage that much on some of your networks.
What if I Am Building My Presence on a Network?
Keep on, keepin’ on. Is your team aware of your strategy? If so, they might be surprised if they didn’t see Activities to complete in the Gaggle alongside your core initiatives.
Say you’re trying to build a Twitter presence. You might have five Activities over the course of the week to follow a certain influencer, retweet a tweet, like a tweet, and more. Five activities are not all that much and those few Activities can really help with your brand presence.
Sure, it exceeds our recommendation of 15 Activities per week but gives you the grace to test out what the sweet spot is when building your presence on a network. You need to strike the right balance between the networks.
What if I Segment Content Into Groups or Channels?
Well, you’ll need to account for that as well. Usually, the larger the program, the greater the likelihood that Activities have been segmented into different groups. You’ll need to be cognizant of how you distribute content too so that any one person doesn’t get overwhelmed with Activities.
As a Gaggle Manager, you might have 100 different Activities but as a Member, you may only receive 10 of these Activities. If you segment well, everyone is receiving Activities but the Members are only receiving relevant ones to the groups or channels they are associated with it.
I Noticed My Results This Quarter Are Not as Good as They Were Last Quarter. What Gives?
Don’t panic, this is likely very quickly explainable. First, take a look at the number of Activities you created this quarter versus last quarter. Is the number the same, or at least in the same ballpark? No? That might be part of the problem: fewer Activities created usually means fewer results. Likewise, more Activities created (and executed) usually mean stronger results. The exception is the point of diminishing return—having too many Activities to complete and nothing is being done productively. Both can be easily resolved.
Assuming there is the same number of Activities created, also consider what has changed from one quarter to another. Is there:
- Seasonality: Fall (July to September) to Winter (October to December) usually sees a decrease. It’s not you, it’s the holidays. Not everyone is in office and when they are, they very likely have fewer Activities to execute.
- Events: Did you have a huge event with a lot of activities you’re comparing present results against?
- Big News: The bigger the news, the more fanfare…which eventually dies down.
- Change in an executive or influencer: Now you might be thinking, why does this matter? Well, think about your active Membership and their available reach and engagement. Do you have certain executives or influencers on your team that always get great results? If they were to leave the Gaggle, those results go with them, right? It may seem like a small detail but it can be a very impactful one (and one that can also have a positive swing when they join the Gaggle).
We hope that these Best Practices help you and we’ve better been able to answer the question “How Many Activities Do I Add to the Gaggle?”If you have any additional questions, be sure to reach out to your Customer Success Manager for advice.