How Many Times Per Day Should You Post to Facebook?

Discounting the quality and content of your posts, there’s one important factor you need to consider; posting frequency. How many times per day, per week, per month should you post?

Social Bakers has performed a study measuring companies. They found that some brands post on the low end, like Coke, Oreo and Disney, with an average of one post every two days. Other brands post on the high end, with Victoria’s Secret posting once per day with an extra post every three days, and iTunes posting twice per day, with occasional extra posts.

Those are the stats for large brands, and they seem fairly stable. Post 1-2 times per day and you’re right in the average. What about other industries, though? Media companies are much, much more prolific. Fox News posted 1.3 times per day, and they’re the low end. The high end had the BBC at 14.5 times per day, and the Economist at nearly 16 posts per day. The average for media companies was 7 posts per day.

A heck of a difference, huh? Well, it makes sense. Large brands like iTunes and Coke don’t need to worry about people not knowing what they are or what they sell. They’re in it to promote specific things and keep awareness up. Media companies also don’t worry about their own brand presence, but that’s because their brand isn’t the focus. Instead, they’re striving to be the most prolific, best sources of information on world news. By posting as often as possible, the BBC and the Economist are building their own reputations as hubs for news.

Things to Consider

There are a lot of factors that go into determining how often you should post.

• Users don’t visit your page itself. There have been studies that show most users, once they’ve liked your page, never go back to it. They rely on the news feed to present them with the important content they want to see, while filtering out the content they don’t particularly care about. Heck, if they liked your page from a social button on your blog or from a suggestion box on Facebook, they’ll never visit your page.
• The way Facebook’s news feed works highly promotes brands that post frequently. Every post you make is a chance for people to engage with your brand. Brands with more engagement get more time in the sun. See how it works? When you post more, you get more engagement, and thus get more exposure to get even more engagement. It’s why, when you get the ball rolling, it can snowball into an avalanche.
• Posting once or twice a week isn’t going to cut the mustard. Why the mustard needs cutting, I don’t know, but it does, and you need to do it. Cut the mustard by posting at least once per day. You might be able to get away with posting every other day, but that’s cutting it close to the absolute low end, and you don’t want to be known as the one putting out the bare minimum, do you?
• Posts don’t last long. Most of your exposure and engagement comes in the first few hours after your post is made. A lot has been written about the precise timing of your posts, whether you go for peak or off-peak hours, and so forth. Posting once during a day is only going to get the attention of a certain subset of your audience, those people who are active at that time. Posting multiple times during the day gives you access to different segments of your audience, on at different times for different reasons.
• Furthermore, it’s been analyzed time and again that the more often you post, the higher your engagement rates overall. You have more active, engaged users when you post every day, and even more when you post twice per day. More than that it gets a little hairy, but you have to test to find out if it works for you.

Speaking of Testing

Testing is the way to go with this, and all other things Facebook. Try it out yourself. How often have you been posting for the last few months? Once per day, once every two days? Try upping your post frequency. Monitor how much engagement you get per post, and how many active users your posts reach. Try again, slowly increasing the number of posts you make every day until you start to hit diminishing returns.

Keep in mind that just posting isn’t all you need to consider. You also need to be aware of:

• Post Quality. Posting one high-quality post every day is going to be better than posting three boring, misused memes every day. You need to maintain or increase your quality levels moving forward.
• Post Topic. Posting multiple times each day requires that you dial back on how much of your posting revolves around you. The brands and companies that post multiple times every day tend to be posting about topics other than themselves. iTunes doesn’t crowd their feed with posts about themselves. The BBC isn’t posting about the inner workings of the BBC, they’re posting news. Your job will be to curate content as well as post your own content.
• Post Timing. When you’re comparing two posts, make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. A post late at night is probably not going to have the same reach as a post during the day.
• Post Promotion. Again, apples to apples. Promoting posts will skew your results, so leave them out of the equations.

About content curation, there’s a lot to learn, but the main point is to dilute the self-promotion inherent in posting your own content. You can, and should, post links to your own blog posts when you write them. You should also break up those posts with posts about other industry content, interesting events happening, funny stories and anecdotes, partner mentions, news and anything else that comes along.