How Often You Should Post on Social Media, According to 10 Studies

There’s a lot of debate when it comes to recommended frequency for social media publishing. Here’s what the data has to say about it.

When it comes to determining the optimal frequency for posting on social media, even the industry giants can’t seem to be able to come to a consensus. One publication or study will tell you to post three times per day and the next will tell you 20. Lucky for everyone though, data doesn’t lie, and CoSchedule (a social media pre-scheduling tool) crunched the numbers from 10 data-driven studies to put an end to the debate once and for all.

According to the company’s research, here’s how often you should be publishing on each of the major social media platforms on a daily basis:

• Facebook: 1 post per day
• Twitter: 15 Tweets per day
• Pinterest: 11 Pins per day
• LinkedIn: 1 post per day
• Instagram: 1-2 posts per day

Notice something about these numbers? They’re pretty darn high. The cold hard truth about social media marketing is it’s going to take a great deal of leg work to build up an actively engaged audience and become a thought leader in your niche.

That being said, no need to get overwhelmed just yet. There are ways to unpack this information and apply it without losing your mind. Here’s where to start.

1. Hone in on email marketing and a couple of social media platforms.

Unlike social media platforms that come and go year after year, email addresses are relatively unchanging. By zeroing in on one or two social media channels along with email marketing, not only will you save yourself from the headaches of posting a thousand times per day, you’ll also set yourself up for future success by investing in a medium unlikely to change any time soon.

Additionally, many entrepreneurs out there may not have the financial resources to allocate to a team or agency that posts on all major social media channels every single day. Handling one or two social media platforms is a reasonable request that won’t take too much time away from running your actual business.

2. Quality over everything.

Simply “going through the motions” on social media won’t necessarily lead to results, so thinking of social media as a checklist is a dangerous mindset to have. Quality, in-depth content beats mediocre, high-volume content any day of the week.

However, people often misinterpret this advice as an excuse to put off creating social media content in the first place. You still have to put in the work and use the recommendations above as your guide, but if you know for a fact you’ll only be able to publish three high-quality Tweets per day, it’s better to do that than posting 15 lackluster, spammy Tweets.

3. Use a pre-scheduling tool.

There are a number of apps out there that allow you to pre-schedule all your social media content from one dashboard: Hootsuite, Buffer, MeetEdgar, Agorapulse, CoSchedule and more. Choose one, block out a chunk of time on Sundays or in the evenings to create your content, and let the tool take care of the rest. This way, you’ll only have to worry about responding to comments.

4. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.

Developing a sound, efficient repurposing strategy is absolutely crucial to social media success. For starters, I recommend Chalene Johnson’s repurposing strategy, where her team creates hundreds of social posts from a single Facebook Live video.

Begin by determining what your core piece of content will be (a YouTube video, a Medium post, etc.), then get creative on ways to make content for each of the social channels you’re active on. For example, if you wrote a Medium post, create dozens of Tweets with quotes from your post that drive traffic to your original article. Then, create infographics on Pinterest using Canva covering the content of your blog post, word art quotes on Instagram and more.

From developing a solid strategy to content planning to crafting high quality content, social media marketing is already tough enough, so don’t let posting frequency add to that list. Use this data as a blueprint to take your social media presence to the next level. Best of luck.