How many times a week should you post content on social media?
One of the keys to succeeding in social media marketing is to post frequently. The more infrequent your posts, the less your followers will be aware of your presence and pay attention to your business. On the other hand, posting too often can annoy your audience to the point where they stop following you because you're too present on their feed.
There are ways to strike a balance between posting frequently and not-too-frequently, but it can vary in many ways. Here are some basic rules for posting on the most common social media outlets.
While Facebook has a common rule of "two posts a day," this can be toxic for you if you don't have at least 10,000 followers. If you only have a few hundred to a few thousand at most, a HubSpot study found that posting twice a day in this case can result in nearly 50 percent fewer clicks per post than posting a few times a week. Unfortunately, your engagement per post will also be lower with infrequent posts. One of the best strategies when you have a small following is actually to post 1-5 times a month, as your clicks per post are likely to double, building up your traffic until it's ideal to post more frequently.
Like Facebook, there isn't a certain universal answer as to how frequently you should post, but unlike Facebook, it doesn't hurt to post as often as you'd like. 50 Tweets a day won't have the same negative effects that might occur when posting multiple times per day on Facebook, considering the likelihood of your followers' feed being consistently filled with other accounts they're following. It all depends on your goals: Do you want to optimize engagement per tweet? Then tweeting 1-5 times a day is ideal. Want to generate a maximum number of total responses? Tweet as often as you want.
However, you should keep in mind that the more often you tweet, the more time that takes from other aspects of your campaign, including posting on other social media outlets. 1-5 tweets isn't time-consuming, and you'll still be able to increase audience engagement with high-quality tweets over a large number of them.
The key difference with Instagram is frequency. You want to maintain a consistent posting frequency as long as you have your Instagram account. If you post 10-20 times a day for a while but then fall back to a few times a month, you'll begin to see your audience shrink. Make sure you continue to post on a regular basis and you'll be able to take full advantage of this outlet.