How regularly should my business publish on Social Media?

Sep 16, 2015 | Social Media

Reading Time: 4 minutes

How regularly should my business publish on Social Media?

Posted by Kevin Fouche, Pixel Fish Director

Kevin handles the planning, design, launch and training of every website that Pixel Fish creates. He ensures that every website is highly engaging and aligned with our client’s goals. With over 20 years of design and web industry experience to draw upon, Kevin aims to pass on his knowledge to our clients and like-minded businesses wanting to grow their online presence.

Businesses need answers to some very specific questions regarding their Social Media Publishing.

How often you publish on social made? What platforms do you use? Who you target with your social media advertising?

These are all important questions your business needs to ask and find the right answers. Social media often buries business brands; finding the right mix of content, schedule and organic vs paid advertising is difficult to do.

If you are wondering how often you should publish business information, what type of information you should publish and whether you should use PPC or organic growth, read on.

Posting Schedule

How often you post depends upon the platform you use and your target market. There are some social media platforms, Twitter is the largest, which do not filter your content results for your followers. Other platforms like Facebook heavily filter your reach and content with mathematical algorithms. The following are some site-specific strategies for your posting schedule.

Twitter

With no filters, Twitter delivers fast-paced information to everyone. In order to get your business found on Twitter, it is essential that you have regular posts. 3 times a day is a minimum to stand out in the fast-paced twitter environment.

Facebook

With an algorithm filtering out page’s content from news feeds, the important thing to focus on is getting the most out of the people who see your posts. 3 a day is a good goal for a proactive Facebook campaign. The important thing to remember in planning your Facebook campaign is to post content that is shareable: videos, images and thought provoking or witty content.

In general, there are many different strategies that work for different businesses, but as a post by Buffer says, the most important aspect to creating content is to plan your activity, measure your results and then adjust your new plans.

In modern marketing, metrics and tracking give businesses the correct tools to manage their own specific business needs. Although the arguments about specific numbers have unique perspectives based upon your business everyone agrees that you need to publish more than once a day.

If you feel that this is too much, think about when you use Facebook. Is it after a hard day’s work? During your work day for marketing? People are online at different times because they have different schedules, not to mention different time zones. If your business is going to be found by customers when they are online, you need to be creating new content when they are online.

Content Types

What type of content is the most likely to get clicks, likes, shares or re tweets? As discussed on this post by Weebly, getting people to interact with your content starts with your headline. A question that grabs the attention of your readers by promising an answer to a problem they have, lists and provocative headlines all draw readers and viewers in to your page.

While the headline, or tweet, is very important in getting leads to your site, it is also important that you have quality content. What do you do best? Lead with your best content and perform analytics and split-testing to determine what types of content work best for your business and the social platforms you use.

Organic vs. Paid

There is a constant tension between social media platforms and businesses over the desire for social media to make money off of advertisements and business’s desire to grow their organic reach. As shown by this small business, advertising on a social media platform can drastically affect your organic growth, especially a platform like Facebook which already filters your results so they show on something like 2% of your fans’ homepages.

To decide whether to focus on organic or paid reach, a fundamental question to ask yourself is whether there is a measurable ROI in conversions. If you are just trying to build a brand, stick to organic. If you are advertising a product or service, use paid growth because you can more easily track and budget your marketing spend if you know what your per customer cost is compared to your per customer income.

Again, in order to know what the best publishing system is for your business, it will require experimentation, measurement of results and keeping a weather ear open for any changes coming your way. Many times social media platforms will change what content they weight more heavily in their algorithms. Facebook does this often.

If you want to start or improve your social media publishing and marketing but do not have time to invest in keeping abreast of changing algorithms and performing market-level experiments, contact us to outsource your social media publishing today.

Further Reading:
What is Social Media and how can it benefit my business?
Social Media Monitoring: 10 reasons your business can benefit from it