Social media is a must for all businesses but can be costly in both time and money so important to get ROI.
Part of the success is to figure out just how much attention you should be giving each social media channel. Research has been carried out to answer the question?
How Often the Research Says to Post On Social Media
The answer will depend on which social media sites you are active on. Here’s an indication for each of the five main social media sites:
- Facebook: 1-2 times per day. Research found that results varied based on how many followers you have. For most brands, any more than twice a day and you’re likely to see less engagement per post.
- Twitter: 5-10 times a day. On the fast moving platform, more is generally better so you increase your chances of being seen.
- Pinterest: 5-30 pins a day. Research suggests starting with 5 pins if you don’t have much content, but going up to as many as 30 if you can, as more pins lead to more exposure and engagement.
- LinkedIn: 20 times per month, or about once per business day. LinkedIn’s research shows that, with that frequency, you should be able to reach 60% of your audience on the platform.
- Instagram: 1-2 times per day. Union Metrics found that top-performing brands on Instagram post an average of 1.5 times a day.
What That Means for Your Business
These answers, just like any piece of marketing research or advice are merely a guide as every business and audience are different.
You need to consider:-
- What can you manage? Fewer, high-quality updates made consistently will generally get better results than a higher number of low-quality ones.
- Who are you Audience? Pay attention to your social media analytics as you go and tweak your frequency based on what works.
- Consistency and quality On social media, consistency typically matters more than frequency. Quality and interesting posts that appear to your audience are important.
Tips for Posting on Social Media
1. Don’t try to be everywhere.
Your business doesn’t need to be on every social media platform. Think carefully about where you’ll get the most engagement. This will depend on:
- The social media sites your audience spends the most time on. If your primary audience is middle-aged businessmen, then LinkedIn is probably more important than Pinterest, for instance.
- The channels that make the most sense for your business and strengths. If your product is visual, then Instagram will definitely be worth your time.
2. Follow relevant accounts and share and retweet them.
Good trick for sharing more often without spending as much time is to share other people’s updates. On each social media channel you’re on, look for accounts that are in your industry or cover topics related to what you do. Then pay attention to what they share and, any time you like an update, pass it along to your followers as well. When possible, add your own commentary or spin on it first so you’re contributing to the conversation.This will both help put you on the radar of the people in your industry (people like to see others sharing their stuff!) and makes it easier for you to update more often, since you won’t always be coming up with something from scratch.
3. Share content from sites your audience will care about.
Your social media channels are a great place to promote your own website and content, but don’t make it all about you. What does your audience care about?
Get to know influencers in your industry—and share any good content you see them publishing.
If you’re always helping them find useful information, it gives your followers more of a reason to pay attention to your feed. And it takes some of the pressure off you, since you won’t have to try to create as much original content to share.
4. it’s ok to share the same link multiple times.
Channels like Twitter move so fast that if you only share your content once, your audience is likely to miss it. Don’t worry about bothering people by sharing the same post a few different times, most either won’t notice or won’t care. And in fact, research shows that sharing the same link multiple times increases the click-through rate by up to 192%.
5. Publish at the times people are most active on the platform.
For your updates to work, people have to see them. Time your updates for when your followers are most likely to be online. Pay attention to your own analytics and what they tell you about when your audience is around and engaging with your posts.
6. Don’t forget to be social!
It’s called social media for a reason. Some of your updates should be about responding to other people, or trying to get a conversation started. Ask questions. Reply to the accounts you follow when they say something you have an opinion about. Join groups or Twitter chats to engage with the community.
7. Automate your posts, but take time to engage.
One of the best ways to make posting more often on social media time effective is to automate the process. Tools like HootSuite allow you to schedule your updates in advance. Instead of hopping on each platform several times a day, you can commit a few hours each week to scheduling all your social media updates at once. Automation doesn’t mean you should forget about the personal social touch.
Social media is hard for businesses to get right. But if you approach it with a strategy and pay attention to what works as you go, you can start to get better results out of the time you spend on it.