How Often You Need to be Posting on Social Media and Why

Do you use social media in your marketing efforts? If you aren’t using it, then you should be. Social media has become an increasingly effective way to interact with customers. In fact, in 2014, 92% of marketers said that social media marketing was important for their business. 80% of that group also claimed that using social media increased website traffic. If you haven’t been posting on social media, you need to start now.

While the focus of this article is about how often you should be posting on social media; we also want to emphasize the benefits that using social media has on your business.

According to Forbes, some of the benefits are:

• Better Brand Recognition
• More Brand Loyalty
• More Conversion Opportunities
• Higher Conversion Rates
• Higher Brand Authority
• Increased Inbound Traffic
• Less Marketing Cost
• Better SEO
• Better Customer Experiences
• More Valuable Customer Insights

Some of you are probably thinking that “Yes, social media is great but it won’t work for my industry.” Occasionally, that argument does have merit but it is usually not true. There are so many different social media platforms out there; at least one of them, is bound to fit your business.

Now that you’ve seen some basic benefits of social media, let’s talk about how often you should be posting on different platforms. Because they are the most well-known, we are going to go over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google +.

Facebook:

Facebook is tricky because it depends on a variety of variables. How many followers do you have? What type of content are you posting? Etc. According to Hubspot.com, companies with less than 10,000 followers that posted more than 60 times a month received 60% less clicks per post than companies that posted 5 times or less a month. On the other hand, companies with more than 10,000 followers were the only ones to receive more clicks per more posts. However, they still peaked at 31-60 posts a month.

Buffer has also said that you should never post more than twice a day on Facebook or 5-10 times a week. Those companies that do post twice a day only get 57% of likes and 78% of comments per post. That number continues to drop as more posts are made throughout the day.

Figuring out a posting schedule for Facebook can be a bit tricky. However, the consensus seems to be at least once a day, but no more than twice a day.

Twitter:

Posting on Twitter is less complicated than posting on Facebook. Most marketers agree that 3 – 5 posts a day on Twitter is plenty. In fact, engagement decreases slightly after the third tweet. However, Track Social did a study to measure engagement and discovered that you could tweet up to 30 times a day and still see positive effects on engagement. It might not meet the maximum engagement rate of 3 – 5 posts a day but it didn’t hurt either.

Instagram:

The most successful brands post on Instagram 1-2 times a day, similar to Facebook. However, different than Facebook, there’s no engagement loss if you post more. Of course, that depends on if you can keep the rate of posting up. If you do decide to post more often just remember to keep the quality of your posts high, otherwise you will suffer lower engagement rates.

Google +

3 posts a day seems to be the sweet spot for posting on this social media platform. However, the most important thing on Google + is to remain consistent. Socialmouths’ Daniel Sharkov shared a report on his Google + posting and found that when he posted less, he lost up to 50% of his traffic.

When it comes to posting on social media, it can be confusing. There are no fast and hard rules for social media marketing but there are several resources available. Use these guidelines above for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google + and start making your social media work for you.