Social media is a numbers game. Everything from the time you post, to the types of content you share, is all an educated guess on what your followers would like to see and when they would like to see it. This is especially true when considering how often to post each day.
Posting frequency is probably the easiest thing to get wrong when executing your social media strategy. Post too often and you risk annoying your followers with an overabundance of content. On the other hand, if you post too rarely, your followers might forget all about you.
Many studies have looked into this question, trying to find the universal, definitive answer for posting frequency. Unfortunately, the only all-encompassing answer is: it depends. Finding the perfect balance means taking into account the social platform in question as well as your own audience.
Why Posting Frequency Matters
If you schedule only one social post per day, you’ll likely see some returns in the form of follower engagement: schedule two posts per day, and you should see a bit more.
You could go on and on adding one more post per day, but at a certain point, you will start to notice that your engagement starts to drop off. You’ll see fewer likes, shares, and clicks. You may even notice that you start losing followers. This is because engagement will plateau and then actively decrease once you go beyond the number of posts your audience wants to see each day.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
This concept of diminishing returns is why you should care about your posting frequency. You put a lot of time and effort into the social media posts that you share. The ideal posting frequency makes sure that your time and effort is rewarded in the form of engagement: likes, shares, clicks and traffic. If you’re putting in the work, you deserve to see the reward.
Source: CoSchedule
What Does the Research Say About Posting Frequency?
Research has shown that posting on Facebook should be limited to 1-2 posts per day. Once a day is ideal since any more than that will start to feel like spam. In your weekly and monthly content calendars, aim for a mix of 20% promotional content, with a curated or re-shared post every other day.
Since Twitter operates at a higher pace than any other social network, you can get away with many more posts per day before annoying your followers. It’s worth noting that this can vary geographically, so take country and region into account when setting your frequency. The ideal posting frequency on Twitter usually hovers around 3-5 posts per day for most profiles. However, other sources have offered anything from 15 to 51 tweets per day to be acceptable. Of these, you should aim for a 30% ratio of retweets, but make sure you have a large enough content library to support your chosen frequency. If you recycle content too quickly, you could get labelled as spam.
Major brands who post on Instagram do so at an average rate of 1.5x per day. So, you can safely post to Instagram 1-3 times a day while still retaining your audience’s attention. Among your allotted posts per day, curate posts from other accounts (as long as these are beneficial to your audience).
As the most ‘professional’ of the social networks, it is also easiest to overdo it on LinkedIn. The absolute maximum you post on LinkedIn should be once per day. Aim to curate a post every other day; again, providing the content is educational, interesting and from a reliable and credible source.
Use SmarterQueue to Refine Your Posting Frequency
As ever, it’s important to remember that every account is different. The key to a great social media strategy is to start with these recommendations and then use SmarterQueue analytics and your own data to refine your strategy.
Analyse a Twitter Account
In the top navigation menu, under Analytics, you can access the Analyse A Social Profile tool. Simply enter in any social media profile (or your own!) to see engagement, posting frequency and the best-performing hashtags used over its lifespan.
Reports
Again in the top navigation menu under Analytics, you can access detailed reports about your own profiles’ performance. When looking to refine your posting frequency, look at the fans vs. posts per day graph. If your followers are increasing, then you’re doing something right!
Also, look at the graph by toggling posts vs. clicks using the dropdown menu at the top. Here, you’ll be able to see your engagement levels plotted against the number of times you post per day. This will really help you to understand if you need to be posting less, or more, to maximise audience engagement.
Wrap Up
No matter the reason you use social media, spending the time to find your ideal posting frequency will pay off in the long run. Don’t hesitate to use research-backed recommendations as a starting point. Then, refine your strategy with real-time data and reporting from SmarterQueue to determine how often your audience would like to see your posts.
With robust reporting and analysis in SmarterQueue, you’re one step closer to finding the posting frequency for your social strategy. It’s the smartest way to do social media. Properly.
