The definitive answer to the social cadence question (sort of)...

This week's newsletter seeks to answer that fiendishly difficult question that many social media managers struggle with, how often to post? Spoiler alert, there's no hard and fast rule or cheat code for cadence outlined in this article but six guiding principles to help you plan better!

So what prompted this newsletter? Well, it’s the football off-season and there’s seemingly very little to talk about unless you are Fabrizio Romano, David Ornstein or one of the thousand social accounts claiming to be ‘ITK’ because your mate’s mate spoke to Declan Rice's gardener in Ibiza and said he prefers Arsenal. Yet brands seem desperate to maintain their daily posting cadence, possibly driven by FOMO and desperation to maintain the sea of green on their results dashboards. Let's be honest this attitude typically leads to a big drop in the quality of content with some meaningless, or even sometimes, damaging 'filler'.

I wanted to apply a bit of science to fuel some useful guidance for SMMs which may alleviate some anxiety about ‘going quiet’ and help drive better brand outcomes.

#1: You are almost definitely over-worrying about going quiet

The first fairly brutal point to realise is that people don’t actually care too much about what you have to say. And yes this even applies in the mega-exciting world of sports and entertainment. If you want proof, check out how many people actively visit your IG, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or YouTube pages. From data across our sports client base, it is typically way less than 5% of the overall impressions you'll generate.

Social media is a push platform, outside of rare usage occasions people don’t go looking for you, they're doom-scrolling through social praying to be entertained or informed and there's no real loyalty about where this content comes from. This should kill the myth that ‘it will look bad if we go quiet for too long’’. If you went from posting 15 times a day to twice a day nobody will notice, trust me.

#2: Post at least twice a week on average

On the flip side, humans have short memories, particularly when it comes to advertising, if we don’t communicate often enough we lose a valuable place in the subconscious memory of our target audience. Luckily, some neuroscientists far smarter than I am can and have measured this concept of memorability. And on average, over 80% of people who consume a piece of branded content on social will have forgotten the details, and most likely the brand responsible, after three days.

There is a genuine risk that if you go too quiet you give your competitors a valuable opportunity to fill the void. So for people who love hard and fast rules, then posting quality content at least three times per week isn’t a bad one. This will make sure you have some presence in the minds of your followers all year round, this also protects against those platforms that punish you in the algorithm based on an absence of recent engagement history. The caveat here is memorability will vary widely depending on the quality and nature of your content (see point four for more guidance!).

80% of people can't remember content details three days after 
seeing it. 

50% won't remember any details whatsoever after three days.

Source: The Science of Attention: 
Prezi & Cognitive Neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon (2017)        

#3: Flex your cadence around relevancy

To complicate the above statistic there are significant factors that increase your memorability and will increase the percentage of consumers who remember you for longer. One of these is relevancy. It’s proven that the closer your comms land to a point of need the longer they will be remembered for. So when your brand has the opportunity to be highly relevant, go hard.

One of my bugbears in social is this idea of fixed cadence patterns or targets. Your cadence should actually vary massively across the season, week and even by the day. Brands often feel the need to maintain a high cadence when they’ve not got any value to add or even more criminally actually under-post when they have maximum opportunity to be relevant.

When Manchester City won the treble, they posted over 30 pieces of unique content to their Instagram feed before the players had even boarded the flight home the following day! Some would call this overkill but I have absolutely no issue with this, they’re cashing in hard on a moment where they can be super-relevant way beyond their core fan base and everyone is active on social looking for hot takes on their treble win. On the other hand, if you’re a rights-holder for a cup competition that only plays games once a quarter, don’t get obsessed with padding the calendar, keep your powder dry and protect your production budgets to go big around the big moments!

#4: Vary your production budget and content formats

The other factor that impacts memorability is the quality and type of content you produce. Emotional video content will live longer in the memory than a simple informational graphic. So flex your production budget accordingly, the bigger the moment and the more value you can add, the bigger your budget on content production and potential advertising budget. This is, of course, providing you have time to plan ahead, which is a luxury we don’t always have in the world of sport!

#5: Adapt to platform tendencies

This nuance relates to platform behaviours and algorithms. Some platforms have longer-lasting content than others. YouTube sits at one end of the extreme where people log in less frequently but will engage for longer periods of time, with Twitter sitting at the other end of the extreme where people will log in frequently but spend barely any time engaging with individual pieces of content.

#6: If you are a bigger brand you can afford to post less often

Yes this might seem counterintuitive, it sometimes seems that the biggest brands you know on social media are out there all the time smashing your news feed. However, big brands benefit from high amounts of cultural relevance, if you’re already purchasing a brand or seeing it elsewhere in culture then when you see it on social media you’re more likely to spot it and remember it for a longer period of time.

The best example of this is Nike, their usual cadence is around once per day, very low by modern social media marketing standards. Or Apple who haven't actually posted for 3 days at the time of this writing (which is also further evidence of point 1, Apple fans aren't crying into their iPhones this morning wondering where the Apple posts have gone in their Instagram feed!). It’s actually smaller brands who need to fight harder for relevance and who need to post with greater frequency to get cut through.