How much should I post on social media? This is most likely the first question that comes up when first approaching the social media world on behalf of a business.
Whether it’s for a company or to lay the foundation of a personal brand, building a strategy to guide communication on platforms is the first thing to face to find a way to reach your target audience.
In this strategy, besides defining communication’s topics and goals, you must determine the publication frequency for every platform; so, here’s our challenging question.
In this article, in which we hope you will find an answer, we have decided to focus only on the most popular and used social networks in Italy: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn.
FREQUENCY OF PUBLICATION
First of all, we want to highlight that, in general terms, the content calendar is something very subjective: every brand defines the editorial line that best suits its availability and its audience activity on the platforms. Indeed, it will be pointless and time-consuming to define a strategy involving a high publication frequency if the company does not have the resources needed to deal with it or, in the case of a personal brand, one is engaged in other activities: you will be pursuing an unachievable goal that will lead to a sense of overwhelm and frustration, and this is not what we want.
How do we work out what is the right balance for us?
Obviously, as in all things, there is always a starting point: in this case, we can follow some best practices until we feel confident enough to define a personal strategy, specifically tailored to our needs and goals.
FACEBOOK BEST PRACTICE
It’s the pioneer of all social platforms and, although its use is decreasing among younger people, in Q4 2023 it had more than 3 billion monthly users, of which more than 2 billion are active daily.
In terms of audience, a worldwide analysis by Statista identifies the 25-34 age group as the most present on the platform as of January 2024, confirming that millennials who saw the platform’s birth are still the most active, followed by the 18-24 age group. As for gender, however, it reports the presence of a male audience for 56,8% and a female audience for 43,2%.
At the engagement level, considering the organic drop that is afflicting all platforms, Facebook would seem to be the most affected, so much to “force” Meta to insert a paragraph called “Why has my Page’s organic reach dropped?” directly on the Help Center.
In any case, if you decide to preside over this social, Hootsuite experts recommend posting on Facebook 1 to 2 times a day. Brayden Cohen, Social Marketing Manager at Hootsuite claims that “Daily posting will grow followers 4x faster than posting less than once a week.”
INSTAGRAM BEST PRACTICE
We can say that Instagram is one of the most used and, above all, trafficked social networks today. With 2 billion monthly active users, it’s the fourth most used social platform (as of January 2024) preceded only by Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.
According to data collected by Statista, as of January 2024, its audience is mainly concentrated in the 18-24 bracket (with 31,8% of users), closely followed by the 25-34 bracket (the exact opposite of Facebook). Even here, however, the male gender is slightly more present, with 50,6% vs. 49,4% of the female gender.
In most areas, Instagram remains the social where the Reach Engagement Rate (i.e. the rate of users who interacted with the content after seeing it – different from the classic Engagement Rate based on the number of followers) is highest. For our convenience, Hootsuite has collected the Engagement Rates of all platforms by sector, providing us with some useful benchmarks.
Given the high traffic of content on the platform, we suggest not exaggerating with posting to avoid possible cannibalisation between contents: for this, a weekly scheduling of 3 contents on the feed, using a mix of formats like image, carousel and reel, could be a good starting point. This will have a double benefit – compared to posting 1 post per week: on the one hand, the chances to be featured in the Explore section and reach a new audience will be higher, on the other hand, it will be possible to test what works best, and when, for the audience that already follows you.
Regarding stories Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, advises us to publish 2 stories per day, but you can also publish more. If you prefer to opt for several “sets” of stories, it might be useful to publish them at different times of the day, instead of publishing them all in bulk, to be present in the stories section many times in 24 hours.
But, in addition to the publication frequency, on Instagram it’s very crucial to choose the right timing: it’s essential to be able to understand when your audience is online to maximise the chances of creating engagement with the content and improve its evaluation by the algorithm. Luckily, the platform itself is there to help us with this analysis: in the insight section, indeed, it’s possible to have visibility of the days and hours when your fanbase is most active.
To view the data, simply enter your profile and click on the three lines in the top right corner, then select “Insight” – “Total followers” and, after setting the time frame of interest (the wider the frame, the more the data will indicate average behaviour), you will be able to consult the “Most active times” section at the bottom of the page, where you can examine the hourly and daily timetables. For greater precision, it will then be possible to tap on the graph to get the exact numbers.
LINKEDIN BEST PRACTICE
The social that made networking its core business. But it’s not only this that differentiates LinkedIn from other socials but rather its algorithm: in fact, when someone engages with a post within the platform, it will also be shown in their contacts’ feed, thus increasing its potential audience.
Speaking of audience, data as of January 2024 collected by Statista tells us that the age group most present on the platform is 25-34, with the male gender at 56,4% and the female gender at 43,6%.
In general, from LinkedIn’s best practices, we pick the advice to publish at least once a day and test publishing at different times to understand what works best for your audience.
But suppose the daily posting is too hard to handle for your organisation. In that case, a more concentrated scheduling can be considered: specifically, it’s better to take advantage of weekdays, especially Monday to Wednesday, when people are more operational and more focused on business topics, and to prefer the morning slot – ideally from 9 am to 11 am.
Finally, the metric that is best valorised by the platform would seem to be the comment, so it’s important to stimulate conversations as much as possible, both in the copy – perhaps through questions to the community – and in response to the comments themselves, to which LinkedIn recommends responding as real-time as possible.
TIKTOK BEST PRACTICE
At last, we come to the hottest platform of the moment, with a total of 1.5 billion active users as of January 2024 and the podium of the most downloaded apps in more than 40 countries.
Our trusted global data collected by Statista in January 2024 informs us that the platform’s main age group, with no surprise, is 18-24, made up of 18% females and 18,6% males. Second place goes to the 25-34 age group, composed of 15% female users and 17,6% male users.
In this case, unlike all the social networks seen above, the recommended publication frequency is exaggeratedly different: TikTok itself suggests posting 1 to 4 contents per day, to test how the audience greets these contents. This is because, according to the platform “Once your content is live, it travels freely on TikTok, reaching users based on their interests. To captivate new audiences, the key is to continuously share fresh and diverse content.”
Nevertheless, it’s perfectly understandable that such a frequency is very difficult to maintain regularly. Therefore, it’s much better to aim for a more realistic schedule that allows to maintain consistency in publishing, which is essential to reach new and wider audiences: publishing 3-5 posts per week could be a good starting point.
If you have just opened your profile, it is also good to test the publication timing. Hootsuite carried out some tests on over 30.000 posts in 2022, calculating the best combination of days and hours to post. You can start with this analysis and then customize the scheduling with time, based on your results.
So, here is our brief guide on publication frequency, which we hope will help you get your bearings in the dense world of Social Media Management. As we already mentioned above, we invite you to use the data provided as a guide to starting creating your content schedule, and not as sure-fire data on which to base your entire strategy.
EXTRA TIP: if you are afraid of not having time and/or resources to create all the content you need to populate your editorial calendar as you would like, it might be a good idea to take advantage of two of the most popular activities in the world of social communication: collaborations and influencers marketing. In this way you can involve creators – in target with your audience – in the creation of your content and thus reap a double benefit: on the one hand this will help you to enrich and complete your calendar, on the other hand, the creator’s different point of view on your product or service could lead to fresh and diversified content.
We have adopted this strategy for the management of the TikTok channel of Istituto Secoli, a fashion school in Milan and Novara: we asked some students to create content inside the school, involving the learners and thus producing spontaneous and genuine formats showing life at the institute, to be published on the client’s TikTok channel.
Try, test and fail; only in this way, you could gather enough information to understand what works best for you and which – WARNING! – does not necessarily work for someone else.
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