It’s great to take pride in our work. That feeling of satisfaction and desire to share it with everyone is an important part of overall job satisfaction. But sometimes the places we share our work just doesn’t make sense. It seems many agencies have started sharing client work on social and that simply doesn’t make sense. Here’s why it’s a stupid move.
Sharing Client Work On Social Is Silly
The reason agencies are sharing blog posts, ebooks, and other client work they’ve helped create is to help drive traffic to their content. Someone at the agency thinks that increased viewership of their work will mean they can show the client even bigger traffic numbers and that’ll make their work look even better! Oh how silly they really look.
Social media is about audience. Each account has a certain audience aligned with them and certain topics that are relevant to that audience. What type of audience does the typical agency or agency employee have? Most likely marketing-focused folks. They follow agencies to share insights on marketing and learn from each other.
How interested are those followers going to be in a blog post about plumbing equipment, medical imaging software, youth sports, or any of the other off-topic client work you’re sharing?
You’re trading a couple crappy clicks for alienating most of your social audience. That’s stupid but it’s not even the biggest problem.
The Negative Impact Of Sharing Client Work On Social
When sharing client work on social, the content is being seen by a misaligned audience. At best they’ll ignore it and keep following you. But if they click, it can get even worse.
What happens when you click on something, only to find it’s uninteresting and not relevant to you? You bounce. So each of those new views you’ve brought to your client work from sharing on your agency social media account has created yet another bounce. This further drives down your conversion rate, time on page, and many other important metrics of success. On Facebook, it hurts all other posts going forward and garners you less reach in the future.
By sharing, you’re hurting, rather than helping.
Some may argue that they’re trying to highlight the great work they do and in turn bring about more new customers for the agency. Sorry, but that’s what case studies and other agency profile pieces are for. We know you’re just trying to inflate pageviews. Quit trying to justify your behavior with excuses.
Please Stop
For some, this hurtful behavior may be an honest mistake, but for many, it’s an intentional move to make their crummy work look more successful.
Now that we’ve made it clear that this behavior only hurts client results, it’s time to stop. No matter why it was being done in the first place.
