How Often Should My Business Post To Social Media

A digital-age old question. 

“How often should I be posting to social media for my business?”

While the question may seem inherently cut and dry, the honest answer is anything but. The reality is every business is unique, and should be advised accordingly. The optimal content output and strategy for an “average” company isn't necessarily the optimal content output and strategy that will yield the best results for you and your business.

Therefore, it is important for you to take the time to formulate an implementable content marketing strategy that best suits your business’s current capabilities, brand, product/service, and target market, etc.

So without further ado, let's dive straight into some of the core factors you will want to consider when deciding on how often your business should be posting to social media.

Questions To Ask Yourself

Here are some of the key questions to consider when deciding on an initial social media content output:

• What are your current content creation capabilities?

• Do you have a content production budget?

• What social media platforms is my target audience hanging out on?

• Who will be in charge of creating the content?

• After the content has been created and approved, who is in charge of publishing the content on social media?

• What content types/styles do you believe will resonate with your target audience? (photo, short-form video, long-form video, etc.)

• Who is your target market?

• What does your customer journey look like?

• What does the entire process look like from content ideation to content output, and who will need to be involved?

Choosing A Starting Post Frequency

Now that you’ve taken the time to ask yourself some foundational questions pertaining to your social media content output capabilities, it’s now time to choose a starting point.

From our experience working with clients to scale their social media content output, we have come to find that one core principle holds true when looking for the optimal post quantity.

Ideally you want to aim for the highest possible output in which you can maintain consistency, without intense loss in quality.

Scaling Your Content Output

Once you have a starting output target, now it’s time to execute, learn, and optimize your strategy, systems, and processes.

Remember consistency is key. Produce quality content, properly post the content in a way that aligns with your social media marketing strategy/goals, and as you continue to post with consistency maintain a close eye on your performance as this will act as your gauge as to whether or not you are ready to scale your output.

As a rule of thumb. Once you feel that you are successful in maintaining your initial post frequency while maintaining acceptable quality, now it is time to scale.

When you feel you are ready to scale, we have found it is best to apply the aggregation of marginal gains. The aggregation of marginal gains is predicated upon the idea of small incremental improvements which compound into significant improvements/gains. So how does this apply to scaling your content output?

Put simply, you should aim to scale your content output a few posts at a time. Incrementally increasing your capacity enables you to keep your finger on the pulse of your efforts, and spot any holes or gaps in your strategy that need fixing/optimizing as you scale.

Allow me to provide you with a metaphor I find myself using whenever I am describing this exact scaling process to any of our Social Media Management clients.

Imagine you have a bucket which represents your business, and a water tap which represents your businesses opportunities in the marketplace. Now if your end goal is to fill this bucket, then the first thing you may feel the need to do is to turn on the water tap to full force in an effort to fill your bucket. However, what you perhaps may not have realized is that your bucket has holes in it, and by the time you realize that there is a sizable hole in your bucket, you may very well have already lost a large portion of the water in your bucket.

Now, had you slowly taken the time to incrementally increase the amount of water you are pouring into your bucket then you may have realized the holes before you suffered a drastic loss of water. In this scenario you would have been able to spot the holes, perhaps lower the water pressure, fix the whole, and continue to fill your bucket (your business) without suffering any significant or dramatic loss of water (opportunity).