How Often to Post to Social Media
There is no perfect answer for the question, “how often should I post to social media?” Each social media platform has its own set of do’s and don’ts when it comes to when to post and how often to post. Examining the trends of each platform and your relative industry will help to determine what the best frequency is for your business. Let’s take a deeper look into what the data suggests.
In our search, we’ve found that there is a fine line between being informative and being annoying in your posts. Post too often, and you will surely vex your followers. Post too little, and you may not be reaching your followers enough. This is all relative to the industry and the social media platforms you are using. Providing valuable information and posting engaging content should be the key focus of your posts.
In order to find the optimal balance, you must predict and measure. Predict the frequency of posts you think will garner the greatest amount of leads, and measure the effectiveness of those posts. If you find that your posting schedule has not been effective, then do some research and change it up. Let’s take a closer look at the optimal posting frequency of different social media platforms.
How often to post to FaceBook:
There is a plethora of data on the optimal frequency for posting on FaceBook. Most of the data agrees that posting an average of 5-10 times per week, or 1-2 times per day, on FaceBook will generate a greater response from followers. Responses can be in the form of “likes,” “comments,” and “shares.”
One thing to consider is the half-life of a FaceBook post. According the Wisemetrics, one FaceBook post reaches its half-life after about 90 minutes, and it will have reached 75% of its potential within the first 5 hours. Basically, after 90 minutes, the FaceBook post has reached its greatest potential for engagement and response.
How often to post on Twitter:
Data gathered from Social Balker and Track Social found that posting five times per day on Twitter will get you the most value per tweet. However, if you want to optimize your Twitter presence, then tweeting up to 30 times per day would be ideal. Yes, 30 times per day! According to Track Social, the more you tweet, the more engagement you will have with your followers.
Here’s another interesting piece of data to consider. According to Peter Bray at Moz, a tweet’s half-life, in terms of receiving engagement and retweets, is just 18 minutes. That means, after 18 minutes, your tweet is now old news; it’s already reached its “peak of engagement” at this point. So, the more you tweet, the shorter the lifespan of your tweets.
How often to post to LinkedIn and Google+:
According to LinkedIn’s own research, 20 posts per month will reach 60% of your audience. This is substantially less than the recommended frequency of posts for Twitter and FaceBook. What this means is that the information you share on LinkedIn should be of high quality. You should aim to have one post per weekday, as weekends are typically not a popular time for LinkedIn. Google+ posts should be more closely related to FaceBook, in terms of frequency of post. So, the ideal posting frequency would be about 5-10 posts per week.
Again, these values are not meant to reflect the optimal posting frequency for every business. Each business is unique and so are their strategies. Research your market. See what the trends are among your competitors, the trends of your target demographic, and build a social media plan based off your findings. Find what works best, and continuously fine tune your strategy to have a powerful social media presence.
