Most of us marketers understand the importance of posting frequency for achieving success on social media, however most of my clients seem totally clueless about this issue. To be honest with you, most of my clients had never even thought about the optimal posting frequencies for their brands before starting to work with me. I decided to write this blog post in order to create more awareness about the importance of posting frequency.
Why Posting Frequency Is Important?
Posting frequency is one of the trickiest decisions that you will have to make for your social media strategy. There are many factors that you need to evaluate carefully when making this decision. Also, you need to understand the significance of each factor for your brand and your audience. If you make the wrong decision about your posting frequency you will end up posting too frequently or too infrequently, and both of those scenarios can have very negative consequences for your business.
Posting too much, or too frequently can have the following negative effects on your social media presence:
- People will get annoyed by you and unfollow you.
- Your followers will feel overwhelmed with the amount of content that you produce.
- Social media networks will show your posts to a lower number of your followers because social media networks like to maintain a variety in user’s feed.
- Your profile will look like a content dump and therefore it will not be attractive to new potential followers.
Posting to infrequently can also have several negative effects on your social media presence:
- Your followers will forget about you if you don’t see any posts from you in a while.
- You will get labeled as “inconsistent”, which is one of the biggest sins on social media.
- Social media networks will show your posts to fewer people because they will think that you are not serious about growing your brand.
- Your profile will look abandoned and therefore it will not attract new followers.
5 Factors To Consider When Selecting Posting Frequency
1.The amount of time you have available to create good content consistently.
When debating the posting frequency for your brand the first thing that you need to ask yourself is how frequently you can create good quality content for each social media network and have the bandwidth to do that consistently.
For example, I decided that I have the time to do one good quality long video for YouTube per week and seven good quality short videos for TikTok per week (so that means one videos for TikTop every day). I made this decision taking into consideration the fact that I have about 5 hours per week available for making videos. I spent the rest of my time on marketing activities for my brand (which is very important) and on client work (which I really enjoy).
To be more efficient with your content you can post the same content across multiple platforms. You can post the same picture on both Instagram and Facebook, or post the same short video on both TikTok and Instagram. However, you need to adjust the content appropriately for each platform because the content requirements such as size, aspect ratio, orientation (horizontal or vertical) are different for every platform. YouTube videos are horizontal while TikTok and Instagram stories videos are vertical. Also, please remove any links form the photo captions on Instagram because it is not possible to link out of Instagram. It is a common mistake for marketers to copy over exactly the same caption, with links, from Facebook over to Instagram.
2. The Average Shelf Life Of Posts On Each Social Media Network
Tweets have very short shelf life, a tweet is considered “old” after only an hour or so. Therefore, some brands, for whom Twitter is an important network post “only” 100 times per day. While posts on LinkedIn and YouTube have a very long shelf life of a few days. Some YouTube videos are even considered “evergreen” and they keep getting views months or years after they have been posted. Therefore, when selecting the posting frequency you should consider the shelf life of posts on every network.
3. The Number Of Followers You Have On Each Network
The more followers you have on a network the safer it is to post more frequently. For the networks where you have less than 1,000 followers you should be very careful not to overwhelm your audience by posting too frequently.
4. The Average Age Of Your Followers
Younger people generally tend to spend more time on social media than older people. Therefore, if your target audience is mid-career professionals or older you should air on the side of caution and post less frequently.
5. Whether Your Brand Is a B2B Or a B2C Brand
B2B stands for business-to-business, while B2C stands for business-to-consumer. An example of a B2B brand is a furniture company that makes office furniture. While McDonalds is probably one of the best known B2C brands and they sell fast food directly to customers. B2B brands tend to post less frequently than B2C brands.
Recommended Posting Frequency For Each Network
The recommended posting frequency for Facebook ranges from 3 posts per week to 1 post per day.
If you have less than 10,000 followers Facebook will split the daily reach of your posts between all posts that day. For example, if you normally get a daily reach of 400 and you post once per day that one posts will achieve a reach of 400. While, if you post two times per day each one of your two posts will achieve reach of 200. Therefore, it really does not make sense to post more than once per day on Facebook.
Hubspot performed research on this topic and analyzed 13,500 Facebook accounts of their customers. They found that pages with under 10,000 followers had 50% decrease in engagement when they posted more than once per day.
Even though Instagram is owned by Facebook they are not as strict as Facebook about punishing brands that post more than once per day. Posting frequency on Instagram ranges between 1 to 3 posts per day. Where 1 or 2 posts per day is the recommended posting frequency.
The posting frequency on LinkedIn ranges between 2 times per week to once per day. You should not post more than once per day on LinkedIn under any circumstances! Since LinkedIn is a professional network it is best to post during the workweek and avoid posting during the weekends. The recommended posting frequency for LinkedIn is between 2 and 3 times per week.
Pinterest & Twitter
If you create a lot of content for social media you should use Pinterest and Twitter as your outlet. The posting frequency for those two networks ranges from 3 to 30 posts per day. Yes, 30 posts per days! Where the recommended frequency for Pinterest is about 10 pins per day. While the recommended frequency fro Twitter is about 15 tweets per day. You should spread out the pins and tweets throughout the day.
I hope you found this blog post useful. I have also filmed a YouTube video on this topic, link to video.
Do you need help with social media marketing? We can help you! Get a quote here.
