“How often should I be posting on social media?”
It’s a simple question, but the answer can be a little complicated.
If your business don’t maintain an active presence on social media profiles, customers are likely to question if you're still around. They'll question your credibility and be more likely to choose another provider when searching for local products and services.
But, posting too often will leave your followers feeling overwhelmed and give you a negative reputation. Do this for too long and they’ll unfollow you.
Neither scenario is good for your business.
So, how often should you post? Plenty of companies have conducted studies to figure out what works best on various social platforms.
We took a look at the data in those studies to give you an idea of how often to post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
How Often to Post on Facebook
A lot of marketers will say that your business should be posting on Facebook twice per day. However, the data tells us another story.
In 2018, Hubspot analyzed Facebook data from their 20,000+ customers to see if posting more frequently would help businesses reach more people.
They found that businesses with more than 10,000 followers were the only ones that saw an increased number of clicks when posting more than once per day.
Businesses with less than 10,000 followers received 50 percent fewer clicks per post when they published twice per day.
Brands that posted just 5-10 times per month, though, saw their engagement nearly double!
How does Facebook's algorithm affect your Facebook strategy?
Facebook prioritizes content from friends and family in users’ news feeds. That makes it challenging for brands to get their content in front of their audience, and cranking up your posting volume won’t help you.
KJB Digital recommends: Sticking to 3-7 posts per week.
How Often to Post on Twitter
You can post as often as you want on Twitter. Here's why.
The average lifetime of a tweet is between 15-20 minutes. After this time span, your followers’ feeds have received enough new posts that yours gets pushed to the bottom.
So how do you fight the high turnover rate and get your name out there? Tweet periodically throughout the day, but don't overload your followers with tweets.
Most retweets happen within an hour after they publish, so a higher daily frequency like this can pay off. Still, not everyone has the time to churn out 10 or more tweets every day.
That's why your Twitter posting strategy should depend on your goals.
If you want to see higher engagement on each individual tweet, research says to send between 1 and 5 tweets per day. A study by Social Bakers found that engagement starts to drop off after the third tweet, and also determined that response per tweet peaks at around five tweets per day before taking a dive.
Our advice: Go for the happy medium of 3-5 tweets each day.
How Often to Post on Instagram
Because it's so dependent on visuals, Instagram can feel a little intimidating for small businesses. In reality, though, even the top brands on Instagram in 2020 only post an average of 1.5 times per day.
This is another social channel where your audience size factors into your ideal posting frequency. For example, businesses with smaller audiences are better off sharing 1-2 photos a day.
However, frequency is likely not as important for your Instagram marketing strategy as consistency. If your audience has come to expect three posts a day and all of a sudden they're only getting one, you're going to see a drop in engagement. You'll probably lose followers, too.
The KJB skinny: Posting once every other day is a great place to start.
How Often to Post on LinkedIn
LinkedIn recommends sharing 20 posts per month, which averages to about once per business day. The rationale is that users typically visit LinkedIn each day during the standard work week.
The KJB Digital team has experimented with sharing one post each day (including weekends), sharing two posts per day and the LinkedIn-recommended one post per business day. In all three scenarios, we saw good engagement, although our team did notice a significant drop on the posts that ran on Saturday and Sunday.
The most important thing to remember with LinkedIn isn't how often you're posting, but the type of content you're sharing. LinkedIn is a professional networking site.
That means that the content you share on LinkedIn should be restricted to industry news, business announcements, job opportunities, etc. The goal here is to educate your audience on the latest happenings in the industry and help make their work lives more productive.
KJB Digital recommends: Sharing a post 3-5 times per week. Hubspot data clearly indicates that posting more than once per day will result in engagement significantly dropping.
Final Thought
It really doesn’t matter how often you post if your content isn’t valuable.
Your content needs to stand out in the news feed and add value in order to be noticed by your audience. Think about how you scroll through your own social media pages. Do you stop and look at everything? Probably not. Most likely, you focus in on compelling images and relevant, interesting topics. The rest is just background noise, right?
The bottom line is that it's better to have fewer posts that are memorable than a lot of posts that are less impactful.