FrontGate Media’s blog series on The Science of Social Media: Posting analyzes the five major considerations to think about when creating a social media posting strategy as exemplified by our own experience and tips from serving clients in social media since 2007, and references from an excellent study conducted by Track Social. 

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This week’s blog covers maybe the most debated science of posting topic, the frequency of posting.  How often should you post?  Many brands are afraid to post too much in fear of alienating users and flooding their newsfeed, thus influencing lower response rates and unlikes.  Others simple believe that more posting is better.  This Track Social analysis shows the frequency of brand posting per day, with the response levels to each post.  Take a look:

Relative Response Per Post by Facebook Post Frequency

As you can see, the drop off from like and comments as the number of posts increases per day is steady.  “When a brand posts twice a day, those posts only receive 57% of the likes and 78% of the comments per post. The drop-off continues as more posts are made in the day.”

Now to support those who believe less posting is more:

It was recently measured by PageLever that only 6-19% of brand page fans are reached per Facebook post, depending on the number of brand-page likes.  Obviously, post visibility is important.  Which means that getting the most engagement from each post is also important.  As stated in the Optimizing Facebook Engagement study, “Response Per Post is important because it impacts your engagement levels, Edgerank score, and hence the visibility of future posts.”  Simply put, if you post once a day, according to the analysis above, the post will typically gather more response because it is visible at the top of your page longer than if you posted more frequently.  If your post gathers more response, it will positively impact your brand’s Edgerank score, which will, in turn, increase the visibility of other future posts by your brand.

In defense of more frequent posting:

The Optimizing Facebook Engagement study did find that while there is a definite decrease in per post response when posting multiple times each day, total daily response actually doesn’t appear to be largely effected by the frequency of posting.  Meaning that daily, if you are posting once or three times, the total daily response will probably break about even.  That’s not to say that posting so frequently doesn’t have consequences, but those consequences may not be as dire as many have believed.  This study did not take into account unlikes or the attitude or sentiment of a response.

To conclude, remember that while posting more than once a day hurts response per post and in turn, your Edgerank score and brand post visibility, it may not have a large effect on your overall total daily response.  Think about the audience of your brand, type of brand, and personality when taking these results into account to create your posting strategy.  For example: if you are a news outlet like the Wall Street Journal, you’ll want to post frequently to keep up with the current news stories.  If you are a brand like Old Spice,  posting once a day is a great strategy to let posts get as much exposure and interaction.

 

For other tips for successful post-writing, check out our previous blogs in this series:

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Overview (Part 1 of 6)

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Visual Posts (Part 2 of 6)

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Content (Part 3 of 6)

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Post Length (Part 4 of 6)

Look for the finale of this series next week, in which we’ll be exploring the best days and times to post!