First things first: If you haven’t already, decide which social platforms are best suited for your small business.
Then: Commit to a posting schedule and stick to it.
But knowing how often to post can be tricky — there’s a fine line between posting too much on social platforms and not enough. If you post infrequently, you miss opportunities to convert casual followers into customers. Post too frequently, and you may annoy and lose followers.
Ultimately, you need to decide what works best for you, but here’s a sensible beginner’s guide to posting frequency on the top social platforms.
Facebook & Google+
Of all the social platforms, Facebook followers are probably the most likely to unfollow a business. Many users still see Facebook as a medium to interact with friends and want to minimize marketing messages appearing in their feed. It’s important to keep this in mind.
At minimum, post every other day on Facebook to establish a sense of continuity. Every day is even better. If something especially interesting is going on, you can post as much as twice a day, but that should only be on occasion and not a regular goal.
Treat Google+ similar to Facebook. That said, if you don’t have an active community on Google+, you can get away with posting more to reap the SEO benefits of posting to Google+.
Unlike Facebook, posting once a day on Twitter isn’t going to cut it. You’ll find articles recommending you tweet anything from a maximum of four times a day to 22. In all honesty, most small businesses are going to find it challenging to post 22 relevant, interesting items a day. But you don’t have to be a Twitter power user to make the medium work for you.
Similar to Facebook, you may want to employ an every-other-day strategy to start for Twitter as well. You should post about others more than you do yourself, so aim for a minimum of three tweets when tweeting: one about yourself and two about others. Spread these tweets out over at least 30 minute intervals, unless engaging in a conversation with someone.
Now if you feel you have more to say, by all means, say it! If you tweet more, you can include more tweets about yourself as well. A small business could aim for eight tweets a day on the high end — or more if you’re seeing results. But keep an eye on your numbers to see if you’re losing followers or engagement as you tweet more. If these numbers shift downwards, scale back.
Pinterest is a newer medium and has less definitive numbers to guide small businesses using it for marketing. I recommend using it at least weekly. Daily is great too — if you have the time. And you can even get away with pinning multiple times a day on Pinterest. One of the wonderful things about Pinterest is you can download their “Pin It” button, which I recommend, and pin an item on the fly whenever you come across something that interests you on the Web. You don’t necessarily have to devote specific time to poking around Pinterest itself.
The best guide for determining how much to post on Pinterest in one sitting is to look at your feed and determine at what number you feel someone overly dominates your feed. For me, that number is 11 (yes, very specific), so I never post more than 10 pictures to Pinterest at a time, and I typically aim for at least five pins during time that I’ve set aside to devote to Pinterest. But I pin one-offs through my Pin It button all the time.
LinkedIn is a different animal. Remember that many LinkedIn users receive automated emails describing any actions their LinkedIn connections have taken. For this reason, you’ll need to use a lighter hand with LinkedIn. Consider posting anywhere from once a week to three times a week on LinkedIn.
So there’s a posting plan to get you started — and here’s some ideas on what to post on social platforms.
What posting frequency have you found works best for you and your business?
Photo by seanrnicholson via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution
