If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve already heard about how sites like Facebook are constantly changing their news feed algorithm.

What this has meant for most businesses is that it’s getting harder for them to get their social media posts noticed by their followers.

But if you have a strategy around posting frequently, you could increase your visibility dramatically. Consider the following stat:

Studies say 20 social media updates a month will get you in front of 60% of your audience. Of course, posting 30 or more times a month will lead to a larger percentage of reach (Buffer).

If you’re looking to get the most out of your social media presence, it’s only fair to assume that you’re interested in developing an effective strategy too.

Here are some thoughts on how often you should post on social media… backed by science.

 

Experiment, Measure & Tweak

This is probably the furthest thing from “science”, but according to Kevan Lee at Buffer, it’s impossible to know how often you should be posting.

What you can do is build some predictions based on previous experience, experiment, measure, and then tweak as necessary. Repeating this process will prove invaluable to figuring out your social media strategy.

Lee goes onto say that there is plenty of data out there, but that it should only be used as a jumping-off point. With that in mind, let’s dig into that data.

 

How Often Should You Post To Facebook?

According to Socialbakers, top brands post an average of once per day on Facebook, while media companies post an average of roughly 7.1 posts per day.

iTunes is the most active of the brands with an average of 2.29 posts per day, while a media company like The Economist posted an average of 15.9 times per day.

The logic behind these numbers can be explained this way. Brands only have so much to share, and unless they have something particularly noteworthy to post, it’s almost better to leave a bit of space. Meanwhile, media companies have more stories to share, and more content to pull from.

Socialbakers concludes that there isn’t an ideal number of posts to share on Facebook. They suggest that posting more than twice per week will help with engagement. They also caution brands against posting more than two posts per day.

They identified that 4 to 10 posts per day or more is the ideal number for media companies, but 5 to 10 posts per week is what brands should aim for.

 

How Often Should You Post To Twitter?

The general sentiment around social media is that if you post too little, you won’t be seen by your followers, and if you post too much, you will annoy them.

On a crowded and noisy social network like Twitter, however, that can actually mean posting a lot.

According to Track Social, tweeting once per day is generally ineffectual. Their study shows that tweeting 2 to 5 times per day can drive up engagement and re-tweets by up to 300%!

Another interesting thing about their study is that they found they got fewer responses when they were tweeting more than 5 times per day. Engagement helps with increasing the visibility of your tweets, so you might be inclined to conclude that 5 times is the ideal number of times to tweet in a day.

But what Track Social found was that, even though engagement seems to decrease after 5 tweets, the total number of re-tweets increases with volume.

Their advice is to commit to continuity, to experiment with a higher volume of tweets and monitor the results, and to ensure that your content is relevant and engaging.

 

Final Thoughts

What we need to keep in mind is that the social landscape is constantly changing. Despite what the aforementioned data might suggest – some of it dates back several years – the need to increase your social output has never been more critical to your success.

Obscurity is often the bigger enemy in the game of social media, where people are often a little too cautious in sharing more, even if they feel they should.

This is why we offer social media marketing packages tailored to your needs. If you aren’t sure how often you need to post, and your strategy isn’t fully fleshed out, we want to encourage you to get in touch with us.