A lot of clients and potential clients inquire about best practices for social platform selection and how to determine posting frequency.
With a clear picture of your target audience, we recommend that you ask the following questions:
- What are you using the platform for? (i.e. Brand Awareness? Referral Links?) What are our goals?
- Is this platform relevant to the selected target audience?
- Is the target audience active on this platform?
- How do your competitors currently use the platform? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- Does your budget allow for optimization of the platform’s capabilities?
- What is trending?
Post frequency varies by platform and is closely related to content strategy. Here’s a good chart from Hubspot about post frequency for CPG, Retail and Ecommerce Brands:
And here are few rules of thumb that we’ve honed over time at Flightpath:
- Facebook: Posting 3-4 times a week has been proven to be successful, assuming that all posts can be boosted. Posts that are not boosted will not be visible to most of your fans.
- Instagram: It is important to post daily since organic reach is still significant for this platform. The success of Instagram Stories makes testing this option important and will allow for new key learnings about how things are evolving.
- Twitter: This varies from 3 to 30 times a day. Tweets have a short shelf life, so it’s important to spread your tweets at different times. Twitter has evolved as a niche platform for industry news, PR, events, customer service and more specific content that works well “in real time” or in a more supportive role.
- Snapchat: Recognizing that the majority of users are under 25, it’s wise to consider that they’re up later, and on their phone frequently throughout the day. We recommend testing various content series’ and monitoring ongoing engagement to see what works best.
- Customer Service: Consistent monitoring and community engagement is an indispensable piece of any social strategy.
The most important rule of thumb is to test, test and test some more. Platforms and consumer behaviors are constantly evolving and what works for one brand at one time may not be true at for someone else or at another time.