Back to Basics: The Top 3 Things That Determine How Often To Post On Social Media

25 Apr Back to Basics: The Top 3 Things That Determine How Often To Post On Social Media

One of the most common questions I hear is – “Dhariana, how often do I need to post on social media?”. The answer isn’t always so clear cut. In this post I’ll outline some of the questions I ask when determining how often a brand should post on social media.

Lets tackle the first problem

NEED. Lets eliminate that word – why? Because there is no magic number. The number of times you post on social media is determined by many factors. This includes your niche and of course what your audience responds well to. No two accounts, even within the same industry, will be the same. The one thing I want you to realize is that you don’t NEED to post every day, and you definitely don’t need to post multiple times a day – I cringe whenever I hear a marketer suggest that this is absolutely necessary. With the decline of organic reach, spending time to interact, to find and take part in conversations is just as important as posting. Now more than ever, you should be social, on social media.

Now that we’ve made that little mindset shift, let’s discuss the top 3 things that determine how often you’ll want to post on social media.

1. Your Goals

First and foremost if you don’t have a social media strategy put together, you need to figure out what your social media goals are. This will determine the themes you’ll want to narrow down to and post about within your social media content schedule. Your themes can be the number of times you post, but you should go through the next two points before deciding if it makes sense to post as often as your themes and goals would require individually.

2. Content Creation Capacity

Your content creation capacity is really important when it comes down to figuring out how often you’ll be able to post on social media. Going off of your social media goals and posting themes, think about how many pieces of content you’ll need per week or month. If you’re already creating big pieces of content (like blog posts or white papers) think about how you can break these down into “snackable” pieces of content that you can share on social.

Remember that content doesn’t always means images and videos – we’ll discuss that in the next section.

3. The Network(s) You’re Concentrating On

The last thing you’ll want to think about when it comes to how to determine how often to post on social media is to take a look at the social media networks you’ll be active on. This is important because not all social media networks are built the same. While you can simply write text on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, you’ll have to get a little bit more creative when it comes to transforming your text into a visual. Or if you want to be active on TikTok you’ll need to be able to create videos.

One other thing to think about here is that you might post more on one network than another. For example, let’s say your brand is a publication. This usually means there is a lot on content for you to share. Twitter is great for frequent updates because of the natural speed of the network, while on Facebook or Instagram posting often causes your audience to get tired of you – unless your audience expects frequent updates like they do from a news source or publication.

Putting It All Together

The bottom line is that there is no “right” amount to post on social media, just a right amount for your brand and your capacity. Don’t overthink it and don’t spread yourself thin. The one piece of advice I’ll leave you with is to try to post at least 3 times a week, and even this is just a guideline as I’ve worked with clients who only post once a week and still see growth in followers and engagement! I’ll also challenge you to test different post frequencies to see what your audience likes.

How often do you currently post on social media? Let me know in a comment below

<3 DhariLo