How Often Should You Post to Social Media?
Social media posting schedules can vary based on a number of factors, including how often your customers use social media and your social media strategy and goals.
Posting to social media is vital these days if you run a business. In fact, for about the past decade or so, social media has become one of the largest and most important marketing assets a business can have.
How Vast is Social Media’s Reach?
In fact, according to the University of Maine, there are collectively around 5 billion social media users across the world.
This means that the vast majority of humans on the planet use some type of social media each year, and statistically speaking, some of those people are your customers or potential customers.
Does Every Business Need to Use Social Media?
Whether you operate a small retail shop on Main Street, you’re in charge of a regional plumbing business or you oversee the marketing for a multi-location manufacturing operation, you can’t afford to let social media posting slip your mind.
The Benefits of Social Media for Businesses
For the most part, social media is free, it offers insane reach in local communities, and it provides so many opportunities to quickly spread the word about brands, products, ideas, movements, and virtually anything else.
Determining how often to post on social media can make a big difference for businesses of all sizes.
How Often Should Your Business Post to Social Media?
Despite being an essential asset for business success, one of the biggest questions business owners, managers and marketers have regarding social media posting is “How often should you post on social media?”
While we wish there were a simple answer, at Charlotte Content Marketing, we always tell our clients – “It depends”.
Factors That Influence How Often You Should Post on Social Media
We say “it depends” because there’s no specific formula. Your customers are unique, their social media habits are unique, and your digital content is unique.
On top of that, social media content can serve different purposes, including raising brand awareness, engaging in customer outreach, lead generation, and direct sales.
To help you determine the best posting schedule for your brand, below are some factors that influence how often you should post on social media:
How often do your customers and fans use social media
Whether you have something valuable to post
Whether posting is part of a larger strategy or funnel
What types of content you’re posting and to which platforms
Posting just to post is a bad idea for a number of reasons.
Reminder: You’re Not Posting Just to Post
Before we get more in detail about developing a posting schedule for your brand’s social media accounts, it’s important to point something out: You don’t want to post just to post.
What we mean by that is that you don’t want to make social media posts just to have something on your brand’s profiles.
Why?
Because you end up wasting your time and your customers’ time.
People use social media for different reasons, including to be entertained and keep up with friends and family.
If someone has taken the time to follow your company on social media, you shouldn’t take that lightly. By liking or following your brand, they’re signaling that they’re interested in what you have to say.
Value Your Customers’ Time
You should value that just as you would value a potential customer who visited your company’s website or walked into your business’ front door. One way to demonstrate that you value your business’s social media followers is by providing valuable content with every post.
With more and more people using social media daily, having a plan in place to post to social media is incredibly important for business owners.
Does Posting Frequency Make a Difference?
Another question we get asked often at Charlotte Content Marketing is “Does posting frequency matter on social media?” Without taking a deep dive into search engine optimization, social media sends signals to search engines like Google, but as noted by AHREFS, social media posts are not ranking factors.
What this means is that posting to social media does not directly affect your website's rank in search results. Social media signals can, however, tell search engines more about your brand.
So, while posting frequency doesn’t affect search engine optimization efforts, it can affect your marketing in other ways.
Social Media Platform Algorithms Consider Posting Frequency
Social media platforms use algorithms to organize accounts and posts. As evidenced by the Institute for Internet and the Just Society, these algorithms are partially what determines what content someone sees when logging onto a social media account.
Some algorithms may favor accounts that post valuable content on a consistent basis, but this isn’t the most important reasons to consider posting frequency.
Instead, you need to focus on your customers or followers. They should ultimately be the deciding factor in how frequently you publish new social media content because your content should always begin with your audience in mind.
Posting Regularly Keeps Customers Engaged
Beyond that, posting on a regular, consistent basis keeps the attention of your followers. If someone sees that your brand is engaged on social media and posts regularly, they may be more likely to follow you.
If they see that your last post was from years ago and you haven’t replied to comments others have left, they may think you don’t care or you’re out of business.
There are pros and cons to different social media posting strategies, but not all of them apply to all businesses.
The Pros and Cons of Social Media Posting Strategies
Now that you understand why it’s important to post to your brand’s social media accounts and what’s at stake, we want to share some social media posting strategies that you can factor into your own efforts.
Once again, every business is different, so not all of these strategies will work for all businesses. These are simply some common posting strategies to give you some direction about where to take your own posting schedule.
Option 1: Posting Every Single Day
Posting every single day is a common strategy for big brands, and some small and medium-sized companies also try to follow this type of schedule.
The Pros of Posting Every Single Day
You provide regular content that can keep customers engaged
More content means more opportunities to receive engagement and shares
Daily posting shows that your brand is active and engaged with customers
The Cons of Posting Every Single Day
Developing a valuable piece of content worth posting each day can be tedious and time-consuming
Your followers may tune out after a while
Setting out a month-long posting schedule may leave little room for flexibility if you need to post something different at a moment’s notice
Many companies start out with the intention of posting every single day, but most quickly find out that maintaining that frequency is incredibly difficult. Unless you have a marketing team that can handle content creation and posting on a daily basis, this approach may not be the best idea.
Posting only when you have an important event to share can have pros and cons.
Option 2: Posting Only When You Have an Important Event
Another strategy is to only post when you have something important to post such as when you have an event coming up or to advertise a sale.
The Pros of Posting Only When You Have an Important Event
May capture more attention since followers know your company only posts for special events
Won’t clutter up your social media profile timelines
May be easier to focus on targeted messaging
The Cons of Posting Only When You Have an Important Event
Your brand may not appear engaged if you post seldomly
Can make your social media efforts appear promotional instead of personally engaging
Option 3: Posting on a Consistent Schedule
Another approach to social media posting is to post consistently on certain days of the week. For example, you could post every Monday and Friday or every other Wednesday.
The Pros of Posting on Specific Days of the Week
Your audience comes to know when to expect new content
You can schedule your posts to save time
You can plan out specific content to achieve goals (i.e. funnel content)
The Cons of Posting on Specific Days of the Week
You lose flexibility
You may feel obligated to post content even if you have nothing valuable to post
Your audience may miss content if they aren’t on social media the day you post
Other Factors to Consider When Creating a Posting Schedule
Aside from the actual schedule itself, there are some other important considerations to factor into your strategy. Below are some things we recommend our clients think about when we’re creating a social media strategy:
Make sure all social media content is on-brand, regardless of your posting schedule.
Is Your Content On-Brand?
We’ve mentioned several times about ensuring your content offers value, and one of the ways to do that is to keep your content on-brand.
While posting “engagement bait” might get lots of likes on social media, pictures of cute puppies or funny memes don’t actually further your business (unless your business is cute puppies and funny memes.)
Our advice? Skip the vanity metrics and post content that will further your business goals and create stronger customer relationships.
How Are You Measuring Success?
You should also think about how you measure the success of your social media marketing. Are you checking analytics or just basing your measurement on engagement? Do you track which times of day are the most active for your users or do you want to simply post when you feel like it?
Tracking metrics and analyzing them can play a big part in determining your posting schedule. You want to look at factors like which days of the week and times of day offer the most engagement, but then also what types of engagement your content receives.
Are people clicking links to go to your website or landing pages, or are they simply clicking “like” and never going further?
Your brand is unique, and your customers are unique, so make sure your social media content is unique.
Your Social Media Marketing is Unique
However you decide to go about posting to social media from your brand’s accounts, focus on your customers and potential customers.
Create persona documents that outline who your ideal customers are, what they’re interested in, what their pain points are, and how your brand can best speak their language.
There is no one-size-fits-all rule when it comes to developing a posting schedule, and in some cases, experimentation is necessary. Try different posting schedules and various forms of content, measure the results, and refine your strategy from there.
We encourage you to avoid developing posting schedules that are so rigid that they hem you in, but there should be some type of structure in place.
Work With a Professional
If you’ve tried the above tips and found that you’re still not making the headway you’d like, consider partnering with a social media marketing professional.
Social media strategists can work with you one on one to analyze your audiences and help develop a posting schedule based on your content.
At Charlotte Content Marketing, we provide expert social media marketing solutions, and our team would be happy to discuss how we can help you extend your reach on social media.
Contact Charlotte Content Marketing to Learn More About Developing a Killer Social Media Strategy
Charlotte Content Marketing provides a range of digital content services in Charlotte, the Carolinas, and across the world. Our team can help you find the best social media strategy and posting schedule to meet your business needs and your customers’ expectations.
Call Charlotte Content Marketing today at (704) 323-6762 to discuss your goals, or use our contact form to reach our team on the web to schedule a free consultation.
