Here’s How Frequently the Social Media Pros Are Posting On Each Platform
- Updated on: 2018-11-08
- Read original article here
Mastering this one skill has been pivotal in growing my social and blog followings into the hundreds of thousands.
Unfortunately, this is not an easy skill to master for one reason.
Why? Optimal posting frequency is not uniform for all audiences or businesses.
Once again, that annoying answer, “It just depends” rears its familiar head.
The number of times that you should post on each platform varies. Your audience demographics, social media following, and business goals should all factor into your social media schedule.
Because of the complexity, many entrepreneurs decide that there’s no point in even attempting to find “optimal” frequency.
Regardless of your personal situation, the data clearly shows that there are posting frequencies for each platform that work regardless of your target market or business size.
I guarantee that if you start using these posting frequencies, you will increase your conversions, boost audience engagement, and grow your social following quicker than ever before.
If you have been involved in the online marketing world for any appreciable amount of time, then you are probably familiar with the unanimously agreed upon “2 posts a day” frequency for Facebook.
And while I am not going to argue with the top social media experts and leading online marketers, there is a side of this coin that most entrepreneurs do not know about.
In a recent study compiled by HubSpot.com, they pulled data from nearly 14,000 customers to determine how the posting frequency on Facebook affected CPP (click per post).
What they found was actually pretty interesting.
The chart below details the findings of their study.
The horizontal axis shows the number of posts that businesses shared on Facebook each month, and the vertical axis shows the indexed clicks per post.
Notice anything interesting about this chart?
Posting more frequently did not affect clicks for companies with less than 10,000 followers!
Companies with less than 10k subscribers posting twice a day (like everyone recommends) actually generated over 50% fewer clicks per post than companies posting only 1-5 times a month!
Now, it is important to realize something.
This chart does not indicate the total clicks it just shows the clicks for each post.
If you do the math, 61 posts a month with 50 clicks comes into just over 3,000 clicks a month.
If you limit yourself to 5 posts at 100 clicks, then you are going to generate about 500 clicks per month.
And it is important to understand the takeaways from that difference.
In the end, if you are under 10,000 followers, your first goal should be to grow your Facebook reach.
But how you do that depends on your goals and your business model.
Do you want more clicks each month or more audience engagement per post?
If you have been marketing on Twitter for a while, you have probably come across brands tweeting 20 times a day and brands tweeting 20 times a month.
At face value, it probably would seem that neither extreme works.
On the one hand, you overwhelm your audience, flooding their feed with tweets so quickly that you basically guarantee an ‘unfollow’.
Yet on the other, you are tweeting out so infrequently that your audience will likely forget you even exist and you will quickly fade from their minds.
So what is the “ideal” number of TPD (tweets per day)?
There were recently two studies completed.
One by Socialbaker.com and one by tracksocial.com, were created to determine the optimal number of TPD and this is what they found.
The study run by Social Baker compiled data from over 11,000 tweets from different global brands to discover the optimal number of tweets per day.
The results from Track Social were very similar.
Very much like the HubSpot study on Facebook frequency, how you interpret the results of these charts depend on your goals.
What Social Baker and Track Social found is that, if you are looking to optimize your engagement and responses per tweet then the magic number is between 3 and 5.
If you are simply looking to increase the total number of responses, then you could be tweeting more than 50 times a day!
Like with the Facebook study, however, it is important to note the importance of your Twitter following and business size.
And unless you are a multinational internet conglomerate, you probably should not be investing your time and resources into 30+ tweets a day.
So, what are the key takeaways from these studies?
Instagram is a bit of an anomaly in the social media world.
Most people would assume that posting frequency on Instagram is just like posting frequency on any other platform.
They would assume that you have to balance posting frequency so that you can keep your audience interested without “spamming” them with too many posts.
But it’s an inaccurate assumption.
In fact, according to Union Metrics, a social analytics firm, you have literally nothing to lose by publishing a large volume of Instagram posts per day!
However, the interesting statistic that Union Metrics discovered is that content consistency is more important than content frequency.
What this means is that if you are posting 5-10 pictures or videos per day and then all of the sudden, you drop down to 1 or 2, your following and engagement will drop significantly.
The number that most highly followed brands shoot for is around 1.5 per day or 11 posts a week.
In a recent study completed by ahalogy.com, they found that the ideal posting frequency for Pinterest is muchhigher than one might expect.
While many previous companies have compiled interviews and done low sample size studies of Pinterest, Ahology has used its track record with thousands of clients to determine the ideal posting frequency.
What they found is quite surprising.
Bob Gilbreath, the founder of the company said that his clients saw the most consistent increase in their Pinterest success whenever they posted 15-30 times a day!
Depending on your business, however, this may be entirely unnecessary.
Unless you already run a large company and are looking to maximize your content marketing, you should try and aim for the minimum effective dose.
According to a large survey compiled by Piquora, a visual marketing brand, most companies will see the most consistent growth and biggest bang for their buck at around five pins a day.
So, yet again, the ideal frequency largely depends on your goals and the size of your business and budget.
If you are a bigger fish in the online pond, then investing in 30 pins a day may be a wise choice.
If you are just getting yourself established in your niche, however, there are a number of more important tasks to focus on and 5 pins a day should be all you need.
And now the part I have been dreading.
I wasn’t dreading this because I dislike either of these platforms.
I was dreading it because there is almost zero data available for the ideal posting frequencies for either of these two platforms.
While there is not a significant amount of data to back up the number, several high profile entrepreneurs and I have found that posting on each platform only once a day is ideal.
Anecdotal, I know, but what am I supposed to do?
Since these platforms do not yet have the traction or reach of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, posting more than once a day will rarely generate any real results.
However, they are still important platforms and you need to maintain your social presence.
In the end, your ideal posting frequency depends more on your business, your goals, and your following than the platforms themselves.
Keep that in mind when thinking of how to apply the above advice.
You need to know what your end goal is with each platform before you decide on your frequency.
Do you want to increase user engagement?
Do you want more traffic and more clicks?
Or do you simply want to maintain a healthy presence while you are investing your time into another aspect of your business?
It’s up to you.
What is the best posting frequency on each platform that you have found in your business?
