This is the most common question that businesses have when working on Social Media. How often to post on Instagram and other channels is 100% determined by your audience, but we want to shed some light in common best practices to keep in mind.

I’ve gathered together some charts about the 5 most relevant social networks to explain and illustrate frequency and best times the best times to post.  Remember, these are just general, best practices based on averages! These rules doesn't apply if you have useful, interesting or time-sensitive content for your company. If you do, just click that Share button whenever works best!

How often to post on Instagram?

1.5 TIMES PER DAY OR MORE!

When are posts more effective?

• Off work hours

Instagram is taking over the world of Social Media. With an increasing (and annoying) amount of advertising and overwhelming amount of contact in Facebook, users are diverting to Instagram searching for more closed and personal interactions with the people they follow.

Considered one of the best acquisitions in tech, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 Billion in 2013, and has continued to grow its user base to over 800 million by 2018.

Brands have also found a deeper connection with their customers through Instagram. Also, Instagram stories had become a complete hit and overpass Snapchat use.(see video).

There’s little to no drop-off in engagement for posting more than 1.5 times per day on Instagram (unlike Facebook, for example); well known brands post an average of 1 to 2 times per day on Instagram, but many also have discovered that sharing up to 10 photos a day can still maintain an important per-post engagement.

For our Slidebean campaigns in Instagram, we've discovered that 3-4 posts per week can gather important engagement, without requiring an overload of work for our marketing team. Since Instagram is all about visual, stunning content, we started a campaign earlier this year focusing on sharing abstract art versions of our pitch deck templates and our color palettes.

Facebook

2 POSTS PER DAY (MAX)

Everyday, your followers or potential customers are getting bombarded with tons of content from the hundreds of brands they follow. This is a game changer for every company that wants to have a presence on the network. Now, in order to be on top of things, you need to decide wisely what content performs best and how often you should promote it. You can try to use the Instagram scheduling tool that will make your job more effective.

The sweet spot of posting frequency on Facebook ranges from 1-2 posts per day, but it always depends on your audience and company’s goals. What else does it depend on? Well, your followers’ age, habits, interests... all these have a big influence when deciding how many posts you should share on a daily basis.

Before posting on Facebook we usually check FB Analytics to get specific insight into how well Slidebean is performing. Here, you can track the reach that each post has, to determine whether you are doing it right (keep doing it) or wrong! (change it). Also, you can analyze when your fans are more active and the negative feedback that you’re receiving. There is a lot of data offered, so we recommend that you to focus on the following specific insights..

• Page Engagement indicates interactions beyond just simple views (includes likes, comments and shares).
• Reach measures how many people have seen your post.

            Post reach: The number of people that saw your post.

            Total reach: The number of people who saw any activity from your page.

• Demographics indicates the percentage of people who liked your page. It also provides useful information about of the individual (country, age, gender and language)

HERE’S SOME ADVICE WHEN POSTING ON FACEBOOK…

• Don’t overwhelm your customers- Be selective when you are publishing content in order to avoid spamming your clients.
• Less is more - Focus on crafting better Facebook posts rather than crafting a lot of posts for Facebook.
• Target a specific audience - People are more prone to like or share posts that suit their interests or needs.
• Experiment with a different type of posts - Some users tend to prefer videos, while others prefer photos or text posts; experiment and track engagement from customers with these type of posts.
• Fanpage Karma - This tool helps you find the optimal time tailored to your audience.

When are posts more effective?

• 1pm to get the most shares
• 3pm to get the most clicks
• 9am-7pm

Twitter

3 TIMES PER DAY OR MORE

Some brands tend to overwhelm their followers by posting more than 20 tweets per day, while others just post a few tweets every once in a while. What you need to find is a middle ground between these two approaches. If you tweet too much there is a higher chance that the engagement with your followers will decrease, while the same thing happens when you don't tweet on a daily basis.

Studies have shown that after the third tweet your followers lose their interest in the content that you are sharing. So, instead of spamming all over Twitter, focus on creating tweets with high value content, that are actually are helpful or interesting to your followers.

In Slidebean we only post about 3 to 5 tweets per day that are related to our company, or that provide valuable content to our followers. This doesn't include replies or retweets that we also do on a daily basis.

CREATE FREE SLIDEBEAN ACCOUNT

We use Hootsuite as our social media management system to create automated tweets that are sent regularly to people on Twitter who might be interested in the service that we provide or in the content that we create on our blog. Another tool that we use for this purpose is BuzzSumo! This tool allows us to easily identify which topics related to our company get the most attention. Our goal is to attract new potential customers to our platform, so they ultimately subscribe to a paying plan.

When are posts more effective?

• 5pm for highest retweets
• 12pm and 6pm for highest CTR

LinkedIn

ONCE PER DAY

This social network was specifically designed for the business community. In other words, the audience of LinkedIn is full of professionals who are using this site to establish connections. It is recommended to post only once a day in order to reach a specific audience without losing their interest. According to the LinkedIn Small Business Guide, companies that post 20 times per month reach at least 60 percent of their audience. Also, on weekdays, during business hours is the best time to post.

When are posts more effective?

• Best time to post are 7am-8am and 5pm-6pm
• Worst times are Monday and Friday
• To get the most clicks and shares: Tuesdays, 10 am-11am

Summary

When in doubt about which social media tool to use to reach a wider audience, it is good to check which social media management tools other companies use to reach their goals.

We hope that this article has been helpful for you! Try to see these guidelines as a starting point for your own experiment. Don't hesitate to try different approaches for your company to see which one works best for you. Here's a summary of the tips: CREATE A MARKETING PLAN