How often should you post on social media?

By Cassy van Eeden

The frequency at which you post on social media can say more about your brand than what you actually post. Posting too often can irritate followers and drive them away; while not posting often or consistently enough can result in people losing faith in your brand.

Stop being annoying, you’re posting too much

The most effective way that your brand can be on social media is to be as active as possible, right? Wrong.

“There’s nothing worse than a brand tweeting and posting for the sake of appearing in people’s feed every day,” says Holly Wiggill, communications specialist and founder of aitch. She continues: “That’s the quickest way to spoil brand trust and ruin your brand voice, by being too familiar.”

Isadora Isaacs, PR engineer at Idea Engineers, says brands should value quality over quantity when it comes to posting on social media. “Although we attempt to post regularly throughout the day, brands should only post content that is interesting and relevant to the consumer,” she advises.

Kevin Lee, writer for Fast Company, likens posting too often to annoying TV ads that we know off-by-heart because they are constantly aired. Is that an effective strategy or being just plain annoying?

The science behind not posting enough

On the opposite side of the scale is not being active enough on social media. Having social media accounts that don’t ever post is more damaging than not having an online presence at all.

Not posting enough is not only going to turn followers away, but you’ll actually not be reaching them at all. This is because there is a science behind who your posts reach and how.

“Posting infrequently means your algorithm drops and less of your audience will see your post,” explains Wiggill.

Isaacs says that Facebook’s algorithms, for example, limit how much of an audience reach your posts will have, based on their engagement with the post. “The more you share posts, the more chance you have of the audience engaging with the content being shared and as a result, the post reaches more of your audience,” she adds.

How often do I post then?

There is a fine line between posting too often or too little. So what do you stipulate about posting frequency in your social media strategy? There is no simple answer or set-in-stone recipe for success.

However, what you post, how you post and where you post are all decisions you have made based on what you know about your audience. So deciding how often to post is dependent on the same thing. It’s a case of getting to know your audience through existing data and testing for yourself.

You need to know who your audience is, when they’re online and what kinds of posts they’d engage with.

“You have to try and catch your audience whilst they are online,” recommends Isaacs. “Testing various time slots is often beneficial as you can monitor when you get the highest levels of engagement,” she adds.

Wiggill says your decision should also depend on what it is you are posting and what message you want to communicate to your audience.

How often is too often to post on social media? How many times a day is your brand active? Let us know in the comments below.