Social Media Post Frequency Guide
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
Ah! My favourite topic to argue with my fellow social media marketers! Feel free to agree to disagree and add your comments!
Social media is a tool for reaching actual people. That being said, it’s important you use each channel appropriately. For just like in real life, we are looking to be informative without being annoying. Depending on your industry and preferred channels, your social media plan will look a bit different.
- Create content appropriate to each channel
- Post frequency per channel that is normative with best practices
So what is the perfect balance of talking, sharing and listening? Talking implies you have some original content that you create. Sharing implies that you share the great content of your peers and listening well, hopefully you are replying to interesting posts of others and of course reading their posts.
Finding the optimal frequency requires testing and observation of examples on each channel that you’d like to emulate. And quite often, it’s just common sense.
Each channel has its optimal frequency and optimal time of the day and day of the week. This article is to give you a ball-park idea of post frequency per channel, and of course it will depending on many variables.
The channels you may want to use:
- Blog
- LinkedIn Pulse articles
- Google +
- Tumblr
- Voat
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Flickr
- Slideshare
The Post Frequency Per Channel
1.Twitter – 14x per day
Content: At least 1 video a day + 1 infographic or gifographic
Tip: use different Hashtags#
Facebook – 2x per day
Blog – 3 posts per week
DOW: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
LinkedIn – 1 post a day
TID: Between 8:00 and 09:00 am
DOW: Week days
LinkedIn Pulse articles – 2 posts a week
TID: Between 8:00 and 09:00 am
DOW: Week days
Google + - 2 posts a day
TID: Morning & Evening
DOW: Weekdays
Instagram – 3 posts a day
Content: 2 posts of pictures, 1 short video (evening)
Tumblr – 1 post a day
Pinterest - 7 posts a day
Content: 3 photos, 1 quote, 1 infographic
Reddit – 3 posts a day
Content: 2 links, 1 text
Tip: Engage actively in discussion
Voat – 1 posts a day
Youtube – 3 posts a week
Content: 1 entertaining, 1 informative, 1 hybrid
Note: Since video content is optimized for mobile by its very nature, always be an early adopter to video hosting sites you believe have potential for your business.
Vimeo – 1 post a week
DailyMotion – 1 post a week
Flickr – 1 post a week
Content: A good place to post social pictures of your company, where you can link them to other channels periodically.
Slidshare - 1 post a week
Activity on Social Network
People mistake post frequency for quality activity on social media. Expanding your contacts and your reach is obviously very valuable as well. Commenting and engaging your network is also key.
Because let’s face it, even if you post often and have decent content, if you only have 100 followers you aren’t going to get much engagement unless one of your posts happens to go viral.
Time Investment
This is how I happen to spend my time currently on social media activities.
65% posting and creating content
15% engaging and commenting
10% expanding contacts network and reach
10% optimizing social posts
Does your differ? How so?
A Word on Inbound Marketing
However the golden ratio in inbound marketing is 20% content, 80% promotion.
So a significant amount of your time if you work in lead generation should be optimizing your content's SEO and visibility, gaining links and improving yourself as a knowledge authority in your domain.
Simply posting content is not enough, you have to optimize each post if you want to use it to generate leads. This may be sharing it on other channels, linking it to groups and communities and contacting bloggers about linking to your blog, etc.…
For you inbound marketers, how else do you suggest to optimize the views and traffic for each post?
Conclusion
Social media is not passive work, it’s pro-active and engagement is largely dependent on your ability to:
- Post high quality with as much original content as possible
- Share the best industry content
- Connect with people via discussion
- Create partnerships, make associates and creates friendships with the peers in your field
In this example scenario, your social media manager would be posting 10,000 posts a year including a ton of original & shared video content.
If you don't have someone full time just on social media, depending on the size and nature of your company, you may find that 1 post a day on many channels is sufficient to get a decent amount of engagement. If your business has niche channel, you may want to be more active on there.
Finally remember that your social media marketing is only as good as your content marketing.
Health Innovation Advocacy at WHO
9 年Hey, great to have a sense in which are the best practices according to you! Sometimes this is so difficult to define, this is a simple guide that will help me a lot.