Social media engagement is an important part of almost all successful marketing strategies. When done correctly, posting to social media drives brand awareness, engages your customers, and boosts your sales. But is it possible to have too much of a good thing? The answer is most definitely yes.
When your current social media campaign is getting results, it might seem like posting more often would get even better results. But optimizing your social media strategy means finding the sweet spot between posting too much and not enough. Personalized Creative is here to help you find that spot. Read on to explore several steps you can follow to decide how often your brand will post on social media.
Step 1: Understand Your Followers
Your business has a unique target audience, and understanding their social media preferences is your first step. You’ll need data from expert market research to determine just who your audience is and what they want. Focus on understanding a couple of key aspects of your target demographic:
Current engagement
Before making any changes, pay attention to how users are reacting to your social media posts now. Are there certain types of posts that get more reactions and comments than others? Are there certain times of day when your posts are getting more activity? If you can identify how many posts (if any) are already lagging behind when it comes to engagement, you can estimate a percentage that you may need to decrease your posting frequency.
Peak posting times
Your users’ demographics, like age, education level, income level and location, can all impact their social media browsing habits. Capturing your audience’s attention at just the right moment is crucial. If you post amazing content at a time when your users aren’t online to see it (or don’t have the time to look closely at it), it will probably sink to the bottom of their feeds before they ever get a chance. Our pros at Personalized Creative use social media analytics to determine the posting times that make sense for your brand.
Step 2: Discover The Right Balance
Once you understand your audience thoroughly, it’s time to start the trial and error process of finding the right posting frequency.
Each social media platform has its own set of unspoken “posting etiquette” rules. If your prospects are mostly on Facebook, for example, they may expect to see posts between 3-5 times a week. If most of your target audience is on LinkedIn, on the other hand, they’ll expect content that’s much more polished and less frequent. Here are a few other common rules of thumb (they may be different depending on your brand):
Post to Instagram between 3-7 times a week
Post to YouTube at least once a week
Pin between 5-30 pins a day on Pinterest
While these estimates can be good starting points, it will be important to observe your audience’s reaction to your posts and adjust accordingly.
Step 3: Stay Consistent
No matter what platform you choose or what posting frequency you finally decide on, staying consistent is crucial. Consistency helps to build trust with your audience, who will come to expect your posts and will wonder what happened if anything changes. Maintain a detailed content calendar, and use a high-quality scheduling tool to ensure you always have posts ready when you need them.
Step 4: Adapt and Evolve
You may discover the perfect posting schedule for your brand, and start getting amazing results. But be sure to write that magic formula down in pencil. A successful social media marketing strategy involves regular auditing to determine what’s working, and what needs to be changed. When your engagement metrics start to change, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Warning: Never Sacrifice Quality For Quantity
Some business leaders discover the perfect social media posting schedule – only to realize they can’t produce enough high-quality content to follow that schedule. Even if your followers prefer more content than you’re providing, sacrificing quality for quantity will make them change their minds about that pretty quickly. Part of maintaining your post quality is varying the format of your posts. To keep things fresh, offer a good variety of videos, text, images, and interactive content.
Have Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
Still wondering exactly what your social media strategy should look like? Personalized Creative is ready to help you design a strategy to meet your brand’s unique needs. Contact us today to get started!