How Often Should Businesses Post On Social Media Channels
Posted by Bill Faeth on Mon, Jun 25, 2012 @ 07:11 AM
How Much is Too Much?
"How often should we post to our Facebook and Twitter accounts" is one of the questions we get most often when we discuss social media with companies. If you don't post often enough, your followers will abandon you. If you post to often, you run the risk of them hiding your account or worse, leaving.
There is not a magic number of times to post per day or per week for a given business or industry, but there are some methods you can implement to figure this out on your own.
The first thing you need to understand is that the two main social media channels that most businesses use, Twitter and Facebook, are different. Twitter is very fast paced which allows for more posts and communication. Many businesses will even post the same message multiple times in a day to hit different time zones and personas. This make sense as long as there is enough valuable content in between these posts and your followers are OK with it.
Companies that use Twitter average 2x more leads/month than those that do not.
Facebook on the other hand is much more conversational and visual with lots of pictures being posted. If you post the same message multiple times in a day on Facebook your fans are more likely to see it and may think you are spamming them especially if you are hawking a product or service.
The key here is to understand that these platforms are different so your volume of posts and even your messages need to be customized to each. You also need to understand the life of a tweet and Facebook post to gage the volume of posts per day, but ultimately your followers will decide your frequency and show you by their actions.
The average tweet has a lifespan of 2 hours.
The average Facebook post has a lifespan of 3 hours.
Here are some interesting facts about Twitter from @DanZarrella:
- Tweet slower to get more ReTweets (don't tweet every 15 mins)
- Optimal time of the day to get ReTweets is 5:00PM
- Later in the day is better for getting ReTweets
Facebook facts:
- Content posted later in the day gets more likes and shares.
- Peak posting time for likes and share is 8:00PM
- Peak share time is 6:00PM
- Saturday and Sunday have the like percentage
- 33% of Facebook postings are mobile
Takeaway
The bottom line is you need to test the volume of your posting on all of your social media channels since they are different in so many ways. Not only will your posting volume influence your followers reactions, but the quality of the content factors heavily into the equation. Treat each channel uniquely ans test your volume. Learn from the number of ReTweets, Shares, and the number of followers you gain or lose. You don't need special software for this as you can use the built in analytics from both Facebook and Twitter to monitor.
How many times do you post per day to Twitter and Facebook? Is it effective? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.
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