Do You Know How Often to Post on Social Media

Frequency of posting is one of the key elements of success in social media marketing. “How often do I need to post on social media”, is a frequently asked question of clients.

For the answer to this question, see what your audience wants. Besides this, there are several other factors as well that affect your frequency of posting.

Contrary to the general perception and understanding, posting on a daily basis and/or more than once a day is not desirable to post on social media. Although marketers believe that by increasing posting frequency they can increase outreach but by doing this they will only reduce their campaign reach instead of enhancing it.

Engaging your audience is more important than simply worrying about how much to post.

Now let’s see some of the crucial factors that will help you decide how many times you should post on social media.

#1. What is your strategy – Do you follow a theme calendar

A strategy is important to set goals and targets that can be measured.

A proper strategy in place will help you prepare a theme calendar which will, in turn, determine your social media content schedule and set posting frequency.

Your content calendar will guide you on the number of posts you require to flash on a given day to post on social media pages. If it is strategically important then you can increase or decrease the timings of the posts.

While developing the content schedule, think about your goals in terms of engagement and outreach. Subsequently, you can decide how many content copies you’ll need daily, per week and in a month to achieve your goal. Think of alternate channels like blog etc. to generate pieces of content that you can share on social media to regulate your posting schedule.

#2. Type of Social Networks

Your network will also dictate how often you should post and on what time of the day. In social platforms such as Facebook, you may post more than once a day depending upon your requirement. However, the same approach cannot be replicated to other social platforms such as LinkedIn where the audience is more professional and focused and would therefore not like to engage so frequently in their feeds.

So, your content distribution strategy should be adequately aligned to address the nature of the platform where you will share your posts.

#3. The Psychology of your Target Audience

Your posting frequency should mainly be guided by the needs of your target audience – what they want to see and how often. There could be different reasons for a different set of audiences to hit your social media page.

#4. Posting frequency can influence the number of shares

Sharing on social media in the digital age is like word-of-mouth publicity. If your posting frequency can impact the number of shares for your posts, go for it else introspect and analyse the reasons how to optimize it.

Transforming brand messages into a recommendation or testimonial can create compelling reasons for people to share on social media. But the process has to be slow else it may be misconstrued as hard selling. And hence how often to post will play a critical role in enhancing the brand image.

Digital adverts are now costing more than ever. Therefore social share tactics acquire more important today than ever before.

#5. Produce content that matters to your audience

Taking a cue from the previous point, for generating maximum social shares the key element is good quality relevant content.

The top reason people post on social media is to provide their connections with valuable and helpful content.

#6. Posting frequency can influence your relationship with your audience

This might not mean a lot to many businesses, but as a matter of fact, is a very crucial strategy that can have a strong impact on the overall relationship with your target audience.

On some social channels, constant postings can help in creating a strong brand recall while on others it may show desperation.

Think about how you can incorporate this approach into your social media marketing campaigns and set the posting schedule accordingly.

Conclusion

Most of us would generally know what to post but we tend to ignore how often to post. Do not take this lightly. Your posting frequency also determines key elements of your brand image in a subtle way.

Think about these factors and reflect back at your content marketing efforts, particularly the frequency of your social posts. Does your posting schedule look evenly distributed or is it too compact to provide your audience with any value. Is your audience engaging with your content and during what time of the day, what day of the week.

Marketers are generally concerned about the quality of content but do not ever think about the optimal posting schedule.

The crux of the matter is simple, if you want your content to become viral and engaging, you need to experiment a bit with the number of postings you are going to share on social pages.

Before you create any piece of content, have your target audience and the social platform of engagement firmed up in your strategic plan of action.

Remember, your audience will engage with your brand not only if you constantly follow them but also sometimes give them their share of space to internalize the content you have just shared.

These are some of the key factors that can help you refine your social media marketing efforts by regulating the number of posts on social platforms.

You can give it a shot. Your number of posts can very well create your next piece of viral content and give the inspiration to move ahead.

Further Reading:

Importance of Tagging in Social Media Marketing

How to Attract International Students Using Social Media

Can Social Media Boost Business Intelligence for Universities?