It’s no secret that marketing your small business on social media can be a very time-consuming endeavor. Creating and posting brand-building content is labor intensive; even sharing the content created by others takes time and energy.

In order to keep social media from becoming completely overwhelming, many business owners want to know exactly how active they need to be. How many posts per day are required to maintain a viable social media presence? How many are ideal? How many posts are too many?

Different Social Media Platforms Require Different Posting Frequencies

There’s no one size fits all rule for social media posting. The ideal number of posts varies by the platform, because people have different expectations and experiences for each particular venue. What works on Twitter can be disastrous on Facebook.

The rule of thumb you’ll want to remember is the faster a newsfeed moves, the more frequently you want to be posting.

Twitter and Instagram are platforms that move very quickly: in a single minute, it’s very easy to get between 12-20 new updates in your feed. On Twitter, users will generally look for the highlights – users or content that grab their attention. However, with Instagram, though content may be updated frequently, users generally take more care scrolling through their feeds to see every post, as each photo can be seen in a matter of seconds. It’s easy for them to detect when a company is posting too often.

Facebook and Pinterest move slower, and people engage with this content differently. There’s less competition for your audience’s attention, and they expect to spend more time looking at what’s available to them. Additionally, Pinterest gives users the ability to drill down to see pins they are most interested in via pre-defined categories, search, and guided search, making the total amount of content on the platform and the use of keywords in your pin titles and descriptions slightly more impactful than posting frequency.

LinkedIn is the slowest of all: the content shared here is expected to be of high value, and people will devote more time to it because they expect to receive some kind of professional benefit from it, in terms of industry knowledge or insight.

Understanding this, the ideal posting frequencies per social media platform tend to look like this:

• Twitter: at least 5-6 posts daily
• Instagram: 1-2 posts daily
• Facebook: 1-2 posts daily
• Google +: 1-2 posts daily
• Pinterest: 3-4 pins daily or a large batch of pins weekly
• LinkedIn: 1-2 posts per week

Now, there will be individual variations based upon your brand’s personality, your customers’ preferences, and what you have going on in your business during that time. For example, the jeweler who’s hosting a special event one particular day and uses Facebook as the primary messaging vehicle may see their posting activity go up – perhaps 3-4 times as much – for the duration of that event.

To learn more about how to use social media effectively to market your business, I invite you to check out our free informational resources. You can also schedule a free consultation with us; we’ll be happy to answer your questions and help you get connecting with your customers more effectively!