When compared to conventional marketing media (e.g., TV and print), social media offers added advantages to businesses, such as a wider audience, the ability to get real-time feedback, and the ability to change marketing content quickly based on the feedback received. However, social media also gives the audience more control over what they see. The audience can easily unfollow your page if they don’t like what you’re doing, and when they do that, you lose potential customers, isn’t it? Thus, unless you want your follower-base to stay limited to close family, friends, and a bunch of inactive (or dead) social media users, it is crucial to have a well-planned strategy when you use social media for business. You must thoroughly consider what, when, how much, and how often to post on social media in order to build a healthy following. This article will tell you the ideal frequency you should maintain while posting on different social media platforms to achieve your marketing goals.
The ideal frequency of posts on Facebook should be one or two per day, or at the most three. Statistically, every post after the first gets a progressively lower engagement, and after the third post, the views and engagement see a steep drop, which means regardless of how good your content might be, an increasingly smaller number of people will be interested in watching and reacting to them. On the other hand, if you’re too busy, you should at least post two to three times a week to keep people from unfollowing your page. As to when and what you should post on Facebook, it completely depends on your target demographic.
People don’t seem to get tired of watching pictures as much as they do reading text. So naturally, you can afford to be a little more active on Instagram than on Facebook. In fact, it is advisable to post anywhere from three to, all the way up, ten pictures per day on Instagram. However, keeping your picture-posting low can also be an effective strategy, as most major brands usually post just around twice or thrice a day, with notable success.
Tweeting 3-20 times per day has been found to be a good practice from different studies. If your aim is to increase brand awareness, you can post at a frequency closer to the upper limit and if it’s engagement you’re seeking, keeping it to a handful will help. Since people scroll through Twitter faster than other forms of social media, a low number of tweets may get lost among others in a follower’s feed. More than the frequency, the type and quality of content is what you should focus on more (which can be said for any social media platform, not just twitter) to maximize engagement.
When it comes to using social media for business, quality should always be a bigger priority than quantity. This rule should be adhered to even more strictly when posting on LinkedIn, which people use for professional purposes, and very rarely for leisure. The ideal number of times to post on LinkedIn is one per day. Just one quality post a day that tries to inform more and sell less should ensure you keep audiences engaged on this platform.
(Image source:pinterest.com)
Pinterest is a social media platform (if we can call it that) that’s a little different from most others. People use this more as a repository of interesting links, and less as a platform to share their views and life experiences. For instance, people usually use Pinterest to save items from online stores that they would like to purchase from later. Popularity isn’t a factor in determining how many people your pins reach, relevance is. Thus, if what you post belongs to a category a user likes, they will see your pin on their feed. You can get away with posting as many as 15-30 pins a day on Pinterest, unlike other platforms where a high frequency of posts is undesirable.
Regardless of how frequently you decide to post on social media for business, you should pay more attention to the quality of content and the timing of your posts. You should maintain consistency in the timing and frequency of your posts to ensure continued, long-term social media success. All this might seem like too much work, especially if you are short on time and resources. If that’s the case, you can get help from a professional content marketing agency that can not only determine the ideal type of content, timing, and frequency for your social media posts but also execute your marketing strategy with consistency.