How Often Should You Post on Social Media?
There are a lot of different opinions regarding how often to post on social media, but one of the things I’ve found is that there are a lot more factors to keep in mind than just a number.
Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- The best number is the one you can be consistent with
- Sometimes it depends on your niche
- It depends on how much content you have
- It can depend on how many followers you have
- Each social media network is different
- You have to get creative to attract attention
- Always use videos, graphics, and photos when possible
Twitter:
There are many successful people posting up to 80 times per day on Twitter, or more. Twitter works on a momentary basis, so you want to add lots of great tweets regularly. The thing to keep in mind with tweeting a lot is not to post the same message over and over – because then it just looks spammy. This doesn’t mean you can’t tweet the same message more than once a day, but you could word it differently or use different graphics to freshen it up so it’s not always exactly the same.
You can start out tweeting less when you have less than 1,000 followers, but one way to get more followers is to post more regularly. As your follower number grows, you can gradually increase your number of tweets as well because people love consistent growth.
So, for example, if you only have around 1,000 followers, you can post anywhere from 5-20 times a day without looking too spammy. Be sure to include a variety of content types as mentioned in This Post.
Facebook:
Facebook less is more – but at least once a day. Even though most experts recommend only posting once per day on Facebook, some people are very successful posting several times a day on Facebook, but when you’re first getting started and you have less than 5,000 fans it’s better to keep it to around 1-5 times a day. As you grow and have fans from 5,000 and upwards you can safely post more and more content without annoying your fans too much. Just be sure to be posting a variety of relevant content, as with any social media network.
LinkedIn:
With LinkedIn once a day or even a week is sufficient. LinkedIn is a totally different kind of platform from the others and posting too much there gets frowned upon. Usually people like to read one decent article from you once a week. Your articles should be content rich and long-form.
LinkedIn has specific guidelines for posting articles which can be found here.
Instagram:
Instagram is a bit more like Twitter – you can safely post lots of photos throughout the day on Instagram – the more the better in this case. People love photos, just be sure you’re posting a good variety. You wouldn’t be very popular if you just posted 30 different selfies, doing the same thing in different poses. Stick to interesting variety in all cases.
Pinterest:
Pinterest is much like Instagram and Twitter – pin lots of different content to keep things interesting on a daily basis. With Pinterest you don’t have to really pay much attention to how many followers you have though, just pin away since this is how you gain followers, much like Instagram.
Take a look at this awesome social media cheat sheet infographic (mid-post) from CoSchedule to help you keep your social media lively and interesting.
If you have any questions about social media posting frequency, or anything regarding author marketing, don’t hesitate to ask – I’m more than happy to help!
Have an awesome day!
