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Your social media channels are key tools in building brand awareness, demonstrating the value your business provides and driving sales. In order to reap these benefits, however, you need to post a regular stream of quality content that provides value for your followers.
But you don’t want to go overboard either; you need to focus on the quality of your content just as much as the quantity. Avoid posting mediocre or irrelevant content just to fill a quota. Most platforms serve up content based on algorithms that favour the most engaging posts. If you post too often, you run the risk of cannibalizing your own performance.
The answer varies, depending on the platform and your goals. Here’s a look at four of the most common social media platforms.
An analysis by Hubspot concluded that large Facebook accounts with more than 10,000 followers topped out on engagement at 1-2 posts per day. However, the optimal frequency for smaller accounts was less than 6 per month, if maximizing engagement per post was the goal.
Use these numbers as a starting point and decide how much incremental overall engagement is worth your team’s time to plan, create and post more frequently.
Union Metrics studied successful brands on Instagram and concluded that consistency mattered more than frequency. They noted that most brands posted once or twice per day, but the best schedule for you will be one you can maintain.
Plan daily if you can manage it, or at least 2 posts per week. Any less than that, and you might as well not bother having an Instagram account. Keep in mind that your posts can be a mix of feed posts and Instagram stories.
LinkedIn frequency recommendations are similar to Instagram, based on Hubspot’s data. The marginal effectiveness of LinkedIn posts maxed out at 2 per week, with large performance drops after 7 weekly posts.
Since LinkedIn usage drops on weekends, 2 to 5 weekday posts each week should be a good target for most organizations.
This is the one channel where volume is relevant — and even necessary — to maintain any sort of share of voice. Since Twitter feeds move at lightning speed, the average lifespan of a tweet is just 18 minutes. Still, there is a limit to the engagement you can drive.
Rival IQ studied top-performing Twitter accounts and found that the average tweet frequency for the most successful accounts was 12-13 per week. That’s twice daily, or even more if you only post on weekdays.
That kind of volume might feel impossible if your team is lean. Keep in mind that your tweets can (and should) be a mix of original and curated content, including retweets. To stay relevant, some of this needs to happen in real time, but you can use scheduling and curation tools to help manage your posting volume. For optimum efficiency on Twitter, look for a tool that enables bulk uploading of tweets.
The social media beast requires constant care and feeding. Ensure you have – or hire – the resources to sustain it.
If you’re not ready to hire someone full-time, consider bringing on a part-time remote team member or virtual assistant to manage your social media channels. Virtual Gurus has a large pool of talented VAs who are masters of social content. Get started with us today and offload your social media management worries to us.