For a successful social campaign, you should consider the right time and frequency to post on social media.
Hitting on the right number of times a potential customer should see your brand to get them to buy is critical for digital advertisers.
In traditional advertising, such as print, direct mail, TV and radio ads, the goal is to push your products or services to as big an audience as possible, as often as possible. This same rule does not apply in today’s digital world, where consumers are inundated with information and online ads. If you show up too often, you risk hurting your campaign.
It’s estimated that the average person encounters between 6,000 and 10,000 ads a day.
This is especially true if you’re using social media to get the word out about your brand. You want to consider what time you should post on social media and how frequently. You want to post enough to convert potential buyers but not so much that you overwhelm them. Posting on social media should be part of your larger marketing strategy used to reach customers at different stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration and decision.
Build the foundation for your social media campaign
Regardless of whether you’re using LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram — the social platforms we’ll focus on in this blog — begin by defining your goals and your ideal customers. What do you want to achieve? Are you trying to build awareness for your brand? Generate leads? Drive traffic to your website?
Next, create detailed buyer personas for each of your market segments. This will give insight into what motivates your ideal customers, the challenges they face and how to best influence their decision-making.
With this information, you can build out a content strategy and campaigns that will most resonate with your target audience. Be authentic and provide content your audience wants and needs. Then share it at the right time and at the right frequency.
It’s also important to make sure you create content that is specific for each social platform you use. It simply won’t work to share the same post on each social network. The audiences are different, and they have different expectations and preferences when it comes to content. Take the time to consider these differences and tailor your content accordingly.
Here Postmedia Solutions helps you answer the critical question: How often should you post on social media?
How to optimize your presence on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has evolved from the place to post and find jobs to the most effective social platform for lead generation. It’s where the decision makers are and a critical tool in B2B marketing.
94 per cent of B2B marketers distribute content on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s advertising platform allows you to choose from more than 20 different audience attribute categories to precisely target your high-potential customers, including location, job title and seniority, and interests. It also takes you through each step of launching a campaign — including how to optimize it.
How often you should post on LinkedIn
The platform recommends posting once each business day or up to 20 times a month for maximum impact. This can help you reach 60 per cent of your unique audience. The greatest engagement occurs with the first two posts.
When you should post on LinkedIn
Research from Sprout Social shows the best times to post on LinkedIn are during typical working hours. Specifically: Tuesday through Thursday, between 9 a.m. and noon.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best days to post on LinkedIn.
What you should post on LinkedIn
When it comes to the type of content to post, remember why you’re here. This is where professionals go to gain industry insights. LinkedIn recommends creating content that answers the top questions your company receives. “Top” lists are particularly popular and will get shared, helping spread the word about your brand. In all cases, make sure what you post is thoughtful, strategic and helpful.
To make sure your posts get noticed, include images, which typically enjoy a 98 per cent higher comment rate than posts without them.
How to optimize your presence on Facebook
Facebook is focused on ensuring relevance for its users. One of the ways it does this is by providing advertisers with ad relevance diagnostics to help ensure ads are pertinent to the target audience. The higher your ad’s relevancy, the lower its cost per click and the higher its click-through-rates.
How often you should post on Facebook
As a rule of thumb, optimal ad frequency is between one and two exposures a day during the length of the campaign. Serving an ad to the same audience three or four times will render it ineffective.
Tip: Ad frequency is the average number of times your ad is served to each person. It’s calculated using impressions – the number of times your ads were displayed – and reach – the number of unique users your ads reached. Here’s the formula:
Frequency = Impressions / Reach
Using its customers’ Facebook data, HubSpot found that the number of followers a business page has also impacts the dynamic between exposure and effectiveness.
Business pages with more than 10,000 followers that posted more than twice a day increased the number of clicks, but not significantly. Businesses with fewer than 10,000 followers that posted more than 60 times a month received 60 per cent fewer clicks per post.
When you should post on Facebook
According to Sprout Social, the best days and times to post on Facebook are Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
What you should post on Facebook
In terms of developing content for Facebook, stay true to your brand’s personality and develop high-quality content with a strong visual component. Infographics are a great way to showcase information and grab interest.
Videos continue to grow in importance when it comes to engagement. More than 1.25 billion people visit Facebook Watch each month to discover and share videos.
Use Facebook Page Insights to find out which posts get the most attention and how each of your Facebook page posts have performed over time.
How to optimize your presence on Instagram
In just a little over a decade, Instagram has evolved from a photo-sharing site to the top social platform to follow brands. Instagram now has more than a billion users worldwide. Some 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile each day.
How often you should post on Instagram
When it comes to how often to post on Instagram, top brands post on average of 1.5 times per day. That’s it.
When you should post on Instagram
According to Sprout Social, the best times to post on Instagram are Monday through Friday at 11 a.m. The best day to post is Tuesday, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
What you should post on Instagram
According to a recent study by Socialinsider, the most successful posts on Instagram in terms of engagement contain a carousel of up to 10 photos and videos, as opposed to just one image or video.
The study, which looked at more than 22 million Instagram posts, found that while 88.8 per cent of carousels featured images, carousels that mixed images with videos earned the highest engagement rates per post: on average 2.33 per cent. Carousels that included a call to action, such as “swipe left,” performed better, with engagement increasing from 1.83 per cent to 2 per cent.
Post fresh content every day on Instagram Stories. Stories have prime positioning at the top of the newsfeed.
There is no one size fits all scenarios when it comes to how often you should post on social media. Be willing to experiment with the type of content you create and when and how often you post it. Remember, quality trumps quantity when it comes to content. When you find a strategy and content that work best for your business, create a schedule and stick to it!
