How Often Should you Post on Social Media?

July 31, 2015FACEBOOK, LINKEDIN, SOCIAL MEDIA, TWITTER

Dear reader, we have reached quite the dilemma with one of our social media accounts.

 

Post frequency is an interesting variable when it comes to the success of a social media page. If you post too little, your followers, as well as potential followers, may not see you in the clutter of timelines and news feeds. But if you post too much, your followers may get annoyed and begin unliking or unfollowing your page because you are the clutter on timelines and news feeds.

 

The predicament we ran into with this account that we manage was the heavy flow of considerations we received. Because this company is popular, we receive inquiries from many sectors and divisions of the company, as well as those they partner and work with, there is a demand for posts to be put out as promotional tools.

 

Our strategy upon taking over the account was to only make two posts per day for each channel; one post would be product-centric, the other would be thought leadership, which were basically posts focused on the company itself and even testimonials about products. We believed going in that two posts per day would be the ideal middle-ground between too little and too many posts.

 

Even this blog, and extremely helpful infographic, by Buffer can attest to our belief:

 

You can post twice per day before likes and comments begin to drop off. When a brand posts twice a day, those posts only receive 57% of the likes and 78% of the comments per post. The drop-off continues as more posts are made in the day.”

 

And to further back up this point, here’s further support:

 

SocialBakers looked at several major brands’ posting habits on Facebook and found that on average they posted 1 time per day. It was also found that posting 3 or more posts per day negatively affected engagement and led to loss of page likes.”

 

Both studies say the same thing: 2 posts per day is ideal and anything over that is overkill that could cause you to lose fans.

 

So weren’t we surprised when we found out that posting up to 8 times per day actually had no negative effect? In fact, it may have been positive if anything!

 

Based off over three months of post uploading, we found that the day we posted an average of 6 times (Thursday) received a staggering engagement rate of 3.84% and a CTR of 1.78%. On Monday, when we were making 8 posts per day, our CTR was an unbelievable 2.88%!

 

Unfortunately, because we posted so much on each day, there is no control day where we only posted an average of one or two times. However, on Friday’s where the average amount of posts we made per day was 4, the CTR of 0.22% was the lowest throughout the week. Out of five weekdays, the three highest CTR’s belonged to the days with the most post uploads per day.

 

So, what’s the deal? How is it that we beat the odds and managed to receive such high ER’s and CTR’s, while steadily growing our page likes, despite posting a ridiculous amount per day? Even if there were people unliking our page daily, it never exceeded the amount of people that did like our page.

 

One idea is that although the company was well-known, it didn’t reflect that on their social media channels. Their Facebook page, in fact, only had 11,918 when we took over at the end of March, and has 17,461 now. Posting between 5-8 times per day improved our awareness to those that may not have realized the account existed, due to previous inconsistencies with the posting before our takeover.

 

Perhaps our audience was loyal to a fault. That no matter how many times we posted, they would continue to indulge and engage in our posts because the brand name is recognizable and users of it feel like they’re a part of a community. This is a theory because of how well our engagement posts performed when we asked our audience to tell us about the first product they ever bought from us, their greatest memory using one, etc.

 

Or, and I like this theory best, our copy and imagery was done so well that our audience was excited to see our multiple posts per day to like and view.

 

Or maybe we were just an outlier. Even though posting frequency wasn’t a detriment to us, we can’t say the same for any pages you wish to create because every brand’s audience is unique and is going to react differently. In fact, most of the best Facebook accounts, such as Samsung Mobile, post only once per day.

 

We advise anybody who is creating their social media strategy to follow our original plan: Two posts per day, both focused on the company but conveying different messages. It’s a proven method that has worked for social media’s top performers and it’s supported by research across thousands of pages that all employ similar, successful strategies.

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