How Often Should Brands Be Posting To Social Media?

How often should Brands be posting to social media?

Introduction

We are frequently asked “how many times a week or a day should we be tweeting and posting to SOCIAL MEDIA?” to produce the best possible results.
We set out on a mission to more accurately answer this question, so we ran several tests ourselves as well as doing some in depth research into the subject of frequency for social media in general.
There seems to be no definitive answer on the internet so we have put together our own frequency guide to answer this question with a combination of our own research and the internet average.
we eventually come up with a general rule that we feel is accurate bearing in mind you will need to make a few tweaks to match it to the type of content you actually produce…………..
By this we mean?
Not all content is created equal, i.e. if you are a news blog “say ITV” your users may appreciate being updated every hour but more generally for most business a good number is 10 posts per week, it is also a good idea to know your audience and maybe ask the question “what do your visitors need” and/or what did they sign up for?
This is a general guide and starting point to keep in mind when preparing your social media strategies.

Twitter

When looking at twitter if you want to get the most engagement per tweet then post three times a day giving each tweet plenty of time to be liked and shared.
If you want the most overall engagement from twitter and to increase your twitter presence post thirty times a day to really get your brand out there but with so many posts there will be less of a focus on the content of each tweet.
We suggest posting fifteen times a day. But we also understand that fifteen tweets a day might seem daunting, even too much in this case we suggest starting at five posts per day mainly when tweet responses peak, and work your way up to fifteen as you feel more confident using your social media remember to record your engagement rate so you can see what works for you.
Alternately you can hire us to run your social media.
Our recommendation is to post fifteen times a day because that will get you the best combination of per tweet value and overall engagement.

FaceBook

When we looked into FaceBook we found something very strange indeed, one post a day didn’t retain enough engagement from visitors whereas two posts every day seemed to annoy people seemingly being too frequent!
So we took a different approach we also started to think about the bigger picture, in weeks instead of days. We found that FaceBook optimum frequency is ten posts per week, since likes after the second post drops 57% and comments drop a massive 78% according to our figures.
So in our case and as a general rule we recommend ten posts per week but if you want to experiment with your frequency posting and content we would suggest you stay between three posts per week and two posts per day because after two posts customer engagement significantly drops.
Three per week will increase the value and likely hood of each individual posts as they will be seen for longer before being buried on your page, so keep in mind the content you will be producing when planning out your frequency.
We finally think that ten posts a week is optimum for FaceBook because it has a high frequency of engagement while still getting the best value from each post, it’s the best of both worlds.

Instagram

Instagram even though owned by FaceBook dramatically varies in content, so your posting frequencies must also be unique to Instagram.
With Instagram we found that much like FaceBook one post a day isn’t engaging enough, as people don’t like to scroll generally and are following lots of people all posting content, so for example if you post in the morning it will be lost in their feed by the afternoon.
Three posts scheduled throughout the day will ensure that your content will be seen, increasing your overall engagement, Instagram is very content specific as it needs to be visually engaging so it becomes harder to vary the content.
If you’re just posting the same thing three times a day then you could lose the followers who frequently check the social media platform for updates. This is why we suggest posting only two times a day, in varied styles to keep things interesting and engaging.

As LinkedIn is business focused and very professional, you should be keeping your posting to business days only because unlike some of the other social media apps we found it’s not beneficial to be posting on weekends or holidays dependant on your business of course.
we found that you ideally should be posting to LinkedIn once per week day, this can help you to increase your customer engagement and will show other business that your brand is frequently active.
We would advise against posting more than once per weekday because the user base and tone of LinkedIn is different compared to other Social Media profiles and other business professionals might not appreciate any constant marketing spam.

When you post to Pinterest people can “pin” your post to their “pin boards” increasing your reach with every new board your post is pinned to.
Because every pin links back to your website it’s highly beneficial to produce multiple pins and let them circulate, so the more pins you produce the higher the increase in your website traffic.
We would suggest producing 11 pins a day to get new content and products circulating, increasing your reach and engagement.

Google +

In General we found that you should be posting to Google + at least three times per week to make your brand more engaging. Posting more than three times a day is where engagement drops off and can be seen as annoying.
We would suggest posting twice every week day, for the perfect amount of value and engagement.

Summary

For a summary of all our recommended post frequency, check out our “how often should brands be posting to social media” infographics.
After researching this question thoroughly we even adjusted our own social media strategy doubling the amount of small posts and quotes we produce per week, and we are seeing a great increase in enjoyment and traffic after implementing this new strategy.
When testing your social media frequency, if you find that you have any different results or disagree with any of our results listed above please let us know we would be interested in seeing what worked for you and what didn’t. Even if you find the same results as us and agree with our general guide feel free to let us know. We would love to hear from you.

Written by Kieran Abbott (c) Dreamsight TM