How Often Should You Post on Social Media?
When we train clients on best practices for social media we usually get one of two reactions, "You want me to post that much?" or "I should only be posting that much?".
Knowing how often to post to social media is one of the ABC's of digital marketing. In this blog post we have broken down the post rate for the three most popular social media outlets; Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
Forever the infamous rule for posting on Facebook was "Two posts a day, keeps the customers at bay". While two posts a day is not a terrible practice to follow, Hubspot - a leading influencer in the market, has recently suggested we rethink this traditional verbiage.
Hubspot has recently made a link between the size of your following on Facebook in relation to how often you should post. After running the numbers on their 13,500+ registered customers they found, companies with 10,000+ followers are the only users that benefit from posting more than once per day.
This research tends to back up the thought that you do not want to overwhelm your target audience. Companies with less than 10,000+ followers should live in the 15 to 30 posts per month range according to Hubspot's Digital Research.
Facebook Recap: As a general rule we advise our clients to post once per day! The most effective time to schedule your post on Facebook is 7 AM, 12 PM and 5 PM.
Twitter is a device that has a very fast turnover rate on content. You post, people who are using the service at that particular time see it, and anyone who is late to the party has it pushed down their newsfeed. While recent changes have been made to Twitter's filtration feed, for the most part this is a service where you want to continually post content throughout the day.
As a general rule, we suggest scheduling 4 posts per day and retweeting 2 posts per day. IMPORTANT NOTE: Your posts you should not be self-promotion all the time. In fact, very little of what you post should be promotional material. The idea behind Twitter is to build a community or following behind your brand, and you don't achieve that by overwhelming people with promotional material.
Within your 4 scheduled tweets per day, only 1 should be of a self-promoting nature. The other 3 tweets should be general interest posts. With our clients, we usually tweet out beautiful photos of the Pemberton and Whistler area or link to an upcoming community event. The other 2 retweets per day allow us to support other local businesses or highlight a person visiting the area. The goal of these retweets is to establish a relationship with local businesses or create a personal relationship with a particular Twitter user. By creating these personal relationships users become more inclined to click on our posts when we do send out a promotional tweet.
Twitter recap: 6 Tweets per day, 4 scheduled tweets with 1 promotional tweet and 2 retweets.
Just like Facebook posting to Instagram generally, depends on the size of your following. If you are just getting started on Instagram we suggest posting once per day. More established Instagram users (1000+ followers) can generally post 1 to 2 posts per day.
The entire idea behind Instagram is posting engaging photographs. For every 4 Instagram posts we suggest only 1 of these photos be self-promotional. Hashtags are your friends on Instagram. Did you know that posts with 11 hashtags receive nearly 80% more interaction, compared to just 22% when using 10 and 41% when using two?
Engaging on Instagram is the quickest way to building your following. Simply liking and commenting on people's post increases the likelihood of receiving followers back!
Instagram Recap: 1 post per day for following under 1,000 and 1 to 2 posts per day for following over 1000.
By Roy McClean