Do you know how often to post to Social Media Channels?
Recent stats showed that the typical user has an account on almost 9 different social media platforms, spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes using social media each day.
So it’s not surprising that feeding content to the various platforms can seem endless. Just like a steam train, if you’re not shoveling fuel into them, engagement will slow down and growth will stop.
Not every business has a marketing budget for a full-time social media manager (or team). You may even be managing your channels yourself while running your business at the same time. You’re not sure how often to post to social media channels and it soon becomes overwhelming. Burn-out is a top reason why they become dormant. Not a good idea if you want to grow your business.
Don’t despair. With some disciplined organisation, time management and help from scheduling tools, you can avoid becoming a slave to your social media channels. Here’s our quick guide to
How Often to Post on Social Media Channels
Ideally: once a day. Maximum twice a day. Any more than that and engagement is actually likely to drop.
Minimum: three times a week
Best times to post: research has shown that 9am, 1pm and 3pm are good times to post. We’ve had a lot of success with 8am and 8pm.
Ideally: post on grid once to twice a day. Stories last for 24 hours. Make sure you show up daily, around 3 to 4 Stories is good (too many and your audience will get fatigued).
Minimum: post on grid three times per week. Try to post at least one Story per day.
Bare minimum: 1 post per week
The best days of the week to post are reportedly Monday to Thursday and best times are meant to be 2am (!) 8-9 am and 5pm, but remember that this is an aggregate observation. We always recommend that you test with your own followers to see when you get the best engagement.
The twitter feed is vast, with around 6000 tweets EVERY SECOND. The average lifespan of a tweet is only around 18 minutes. So you can get away with a hundred tweets a day if you want to. But that’s probably a pretty tall task for most people, so we’d recommend that you tweet enough to get noticed.
Ideally: ten tweets per day (you can repeat some posts, with some small tweaks, perhaps with image or copy)
Minimum: three to five tweets per day
Bare minimum: one tweet per day (some people automatically unfollow accounts who don’t tweet every day)
Good times to tweet are during morning and evening commutes and during lunch breaks. Wednesday is a high usage day.
B2B: tweets perform 16% better during business hours
B2C: tweets perform 17% better on weekends
LinkedIn recommend that you post every day. It can be a challenge to consistently post every day, so we suggest
Ideally: two to three times a week
Minimum: once a week
Weekdays work best (when most people are at their desks) in particular Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Good times to post are around lunchtime, breaks and commutes, although there are some exceptions for different sectors:
B2C: 11am to 2pm
Media: 8am to 10am
Higher Education and Health: 11am to 1pm
Software: outside of typical works hours, (so excluding 9am to 5pm)
Pinterest:
Ideally: three pins per day.
Pinterest gives preference to new pins, so avoid re-posting existing pins too frequently.
Weekends are good days to post, around 2pm and 4pm. Engagement on Pinterest isn’t typically high during work hours. Some users recommend that you schedule content by day of the week, e.g.:
Sunday: Food
Monday: Fitness
Tuesday: Gadgets
Wednesday: Quotes
Thursday: Fashion/Clothing
Friday: GIFs
Saturday: Travel
Blogs:
Not strictly social, but don’t forget about them! They provide content for your social channels to link to and they’ll also help your SEO.
Ideally: once every two weeks
Minimum: once a month
Things to remember:
- Don’t post too much, or too little
- Don’t post for the sake of it – only share content that is engaging
- Don’t make all your posts too “sales-y” – it will turn your audience off. Mix it up.
- If your audience becomes irritated by too much content, they may unfollow or hide posts. This kind of negative feedback can impact your profile (e.g. your quality score on Facebook).
- Do try to be consistent. If realistically you can only post two Facebook posts per week, then make sure you that. Four posts a week and then a month of zero posts is more damaging.
- Do test posting on different days and different times
- Do analyse your data to see how many people you are reaching (and how many of those weren’t already following you) and what the engagement rate is.
- Do test different types of content: text, image, videos. Long copy, short copy.
- Do use auto-scheduling. Many of the platforms now have scheduling built-in, so you can prep the content in one go and your posts will publish automatically when you want them to. There are also some helpful tools, such as Iconosquare, Hubspot, Buffer and Tailwind, that not only post for you, but provide analytics too.
- Do engage with any comments you get! Keep on top of them – it could be your next sale or your chance to dampen any negative feedback.
Are you spending too much time on your content and not enough on your business? Want to hand over the reins? Contact us to talk more about our outsourced social media management options.
Interested in trying scheduling tools? Here are some that you can test out for free