Marketing on social media represents a fast and user friendly way to interact with a target audience, it can be difficult to gauge how much attention it should be given as a platform.
An important question for businesses is how often they should be posting content on these channels. Failing to understand the right time frames or appropriate frequency for posting can have negative results for a business.
Posting too infrequently can lead to a business being simply forgotten about and losing valuable mindshare in their target audience. Posting too often will make potential customers see the business as a nuisance that is clogging up their feeds.
With an obvious need to strike a careful balance, here are some general rules for a business to follow when carrying out this form of marketing. An SEO company will have expertly crafted social media packages that take care of all the hard work in creating and scheduling content.
The Right Day, Time and Date
Determining the best possible times to post content to social media requires a business to understand the platforms it is using and how their target audience engages with them.
Generally speaking, it’s a good strategy to perform market research to determine the windows of time that an audience uses a platform and what the relevant hashtags are. There are several free tools available online that will provide analytics on a defined target audience.
Using this analytical data combined with observing the behaviour of competitors will give a business insight on what days and times to post content that will result in the most engagement.
Particular dates are important to prepare for as well, especially holidays. Even small, silly holidays are a great excuse for a business to get some extra engagement. These dates allow for unique content that provides opportunities to better relate to target audiences.
How Many Times to Post Each Day?
This is a difficult question to answer because each business will have different types of marketing content and different sized followings to deliver it to.
A common rule is to post to sites like Facebook only twice a day if the businesses’ following is more than ten thousand strong. With this in mind, there should be about five to ten posts in any given week. This is backed up by research proving that this strategy is the best for maximising clicks and engagement.
Posting frequency on sites like Twitter depends more on the type of goal the business has. If it wants higher engagement per post, then a smaller amount of carefully crafted posts is ideal.
For generating a large number of responses, a business can post as many times a day as they want without any consequence. However, focusing on delivering high volumes of posts is less likely to be worth the time it takes to write them.
Clearly, there are different philosophies for post frequency per day depending on the specific goals of the business. Studies reveal a clear trade-off between engagements and reach as the number of posts increases.
An SEO firm will provide social media packages that take all relevant metrics into account and optimise a posting strategy that will meet their clients’ goals.
The Quality of Posts
Several websites have implemented algorithms that prioritise the feeds of users so that they are experiencing fresh content that is informative to them. For this reason a business must reconcile the frequency at which they post content with its inherent value to the target audience.
A business cannot simply post the same ad copy five times a day and expect their content to be valued in an algorithm. Just like search engine optimisation, a business needs to consider what end user experience a platform wants to provide its users.
With this in mind, social media content should be unique to that platform and not just regurgitating copy found elsewhere online. This can be difficult without an adequate amount of attention being paid to each platform by the marketing team.
Conclusion
There is a complex relationship between content and scheduling when it comes to marketing on social platforms. Content cannot be created effectively if it is not harmonious with the time at which it is shared and what its engagement goals are.
For these reasons its clear why so many business rely on social media packages delivered by SEO specialists. These packages are tailored to the business’ specific goals and are based on proven research in regards to the ideal frequency to post on popular social platforms.
