Social Media Engagement And Posting

How often you should be posting to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to really optimise your reach

There is a huge misconception that posting a lot of content on social media profiles is good for gaining followers and getting to the top of their newsfeed, but this is not true. Algorithms can be confusing and feel like you are fighting a constant losing battle to grow your client’s social media platforms, as most people don’t understand exactly what they are, but using the right social media strategy you can optimise what you are posting. Algorithms perform better when original and engaging content is slowly fed into the profile, but there is no changing them, it’s how you adapt your tactics and content which will win you growth within social media marketing.

Algorithm: An algorithm is a mathematical set of rules specifying how a group of data behaves. In social media, algorithms help maintain order and assist in ranking search results, advertisements, directs pages and content to display in a certain order.

Instagram:

Unless you are an influencer, it is generally recommended to post to your Instagram feed 2-3 times per week, and no more than 1x per day. However, using the stories feature more frequently is an amazing way to nurture your audience without overloading your profile. During Instagram’s Creator Week in June 2021, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, suggested that posting two feed posts per week is ideal for building a following on Instagram. This proves that quality works much better for engagement than quantity and the algorithm favours valuable content higher.

Facebook:

Facebook is a great place to connect with your community, but it’s important not to overdo it. There are no set rules for how often you should be posting on Facebook, but it is generally recommended to post once per day, and no more than 2 times per day if possible. If you post too frequently, your content could get buried by people’s feeds, leading to a drop in engagement over time. Hubspot found that social media platforms with under 10,000 followers experienced a 50% drop in engagement per post if they posted more than once per day.

Twitter:

It is generally recommended to post 1-2 personal tweets per day, and no more than 3-5 times per day. Twitter is the easiest platform to engage with your followers on a more relaxed level by regularly responding to questions or retweeting and favouriting other people’s content. The more you interact with fellow Twitter users, the more likely people will pay attention when you post original content, so we recommend liking a retweeting other people’s content which applies to you or your followers.

LinkedIn:

Posting on LinkedIn is a form of public relations, and you should use it to help your business connect with potential customers. It is generally recommended to post at least once a day, and no more than 3x per day. In fact, brands that post weekly see twice the engagement, while brands that post daily gain even more traction. This can be accomplished in many ways: company blog articles, job postings, product updates and promotions, or posts related to industry news.

Overview:

Not over posting keeps you as a regular presence on your follower’s profiles, while not bombarding their feeds with low quality content simply to satisfy the algorithm. Algorithms can be hard to understand and be very confusing, but they can’t be controlled or changed to how you want them. They are unique to each person or companies’ social media platforms and their interests or sectors, but staying on the right side of the algorithm will open your profile to more potentially followers, without loosing any along the way from over posting. While posting more content may help to some extent, the more relevant and useful your content is to the audience, the better your social media platforms will perform. Users tend to respond better to higher-quality posts that are equally spaced over frequent and repetitive posts that are promotional, rather than personable.

ALWAYS:

• Check your insights regularly – this gives you a good indication of how well your post has performed. Reach, engagement, gender and age range, followers/non followers can all be viewed, meaning you can monitor if your content is reaching your target audience. As a social media agency this should be monitored weekly for all your clients to gauge what is working and what to develop for the future.
• Post regularly on stories – this is the best way to share content without it clogging up somebody’s timeline. They have interaction features on for people to engage with you and viewers names can be seen, unlike on posts. Not all social media platforms have this feature, but make sure to utilise them on the ones which do.
• Post at optimised times – posting at 3AM is not the best time to be posting something business related, as people will be asleep and get lost further down people’s feeds. Posting at the most popular time followers are on their socials can make engagement on posts rise, as it’s fresh on the feed.
• Use hashtags – although they aren’t used as much in social media marketing as in prior years, this is an amazing way of gaining traction on posts as they are categorised under that tag, meaning people searching that tag can find your post. They are essentially SEO for social media.
• Use original content –Algorithms hates regurgitated content, this will flag this up and push it further down the feed, meaning your content may not be seen much. It realises this has already been posted by numerous other accounts and decrease your pages search rankings or visibility.
• Include call to actions – this speaks directly to the follower, even though it is posted to numerous people. This will prompt people do what you want, use a small round up sentence with a contact number or email.
• Invest in paid ads – This is a shortcut to gaining reach, which you would struggle to reach otherwise. You can customise audiences, age, distance, and lots more to make sure your content is reaching the right audience.
• Have a social media plan – Planning is key, not making sure you know what you are posting and when is setting yourself up for failure. Across all your social media platforms, each must have an individual plan especially tailored to that platform and its audience. For example – on LinkedIn your audience, language, and content will be different to what you post on Instagram.

If your engagement and reach is not where you want it to be, don’t be scared to try something new. Quality over quantity will always boost rankings when it comes to social media marketing, so look at your strategy, see where you can make a few changes and trial it for a month. Very rarely people will find social media strategy that works for them first go, you can’t change the algorithm but let the algorithm change you!

We are constantly checking and using these tactics to make your social media apps as optimised as they can be. As social media experts, we know how to engage with your audience and strategise our work so that you are getting the most you can out of your socials. From planning, to design, to posting, we cover everything for you so you can sit back and know your online presence is in good hands with Trinity Create.