It’s one question that every social media marketer asks when starting the social media campaign. “How often should I post in the company’s social media accounts?”
Well, the answer is “it depends”. Social media encompasses a lot of things, and a part of it is about creating new relationships and building stronger engagement among your audiences.
In order to be successful using social media as a brand, you need to:
- Have a strategy
- Be consistent
- Develop and maintain relationships with your audience by communicating WITH them, not AT them
- Experiment and expect failure
While your strategy and being consistent is very important, you will find that experimentation with posting will often times lead to changes in your strategy. Your initial strategy may call for you to post 3 times per day on Facebook during working hours (9am until 5pm), during work days (Monday to Friday), and after a while, you may find that your engagement levels are low. Your strategy may not be working as intended.
Now it’s time to improvisation. Begin by experimenting with posting after work hours and on the weekend. Always making sure to measure and collect data as you do this. You may be surprised to find that these off hour and weekend experiments might lead to higher engagement levels. If it doesn’t work the right way, just keep experimenting with times and content types to see where your nice spot is for engagement and user exposure.
Always keep in mind that your business and your audience is unique and should be treated as such. Starting with a strategy of best practices is a great place to begin, yet you have to continually try new things and push every single opportunity if you want to succeed. You are the one who know your audience best. If you track and measure your actions, you will begin to form a very precise and clear picture of what your audience is looking for in terms of content and when they want to see it.
This advice applies to more than just Facebook as well. Take Twitter for instance. How many tweets a day/hour will your followers handle before unfollowing? What times do you see more retweets? On Instagram, which days of the week and times of day see more comments and likes? What types of content sees more repins on Pinterest? This of course all depends on your audience and that is why you need to get down and dirty, wade through your analytics and examine and track engagement levels to determine the needs of your audience and then feed that need. Tools like Facebook Insights and Tweroid are great for gathering data and helping you find when your audience is online and recording your experiments. Don’t get stuck listening to what the experts say, roll up your sleeves and start experimenting today.