How many times should you be posting on social media and specifically for each platform? You know, that does matter!
The organic side of social media is what we will be discussing today, rather than the paid. That is about half of the puzzle that your business really needs to figure out when it comes to marketing and growing through social media practices.
Organic social media refers to everything that is basically not paid, and promoted through a paid avenue. Even if you bought the photos from a photographer or paid for a video shoot, anything organically posted and how it organically performs without paid is called organic.
I don't know if you all have heard of this on Instagram, but Instagram has a creators account and they do a thing called Creators Week. The Instagram Chief is Adam Mosseri, and he went over some pretty interesting things.
For Instagram, they recommended posting 3 to 7 times per week. On Facebook, they said 1 to 2 times per day. So, that's 7 to 14 times per week, and about double for Instagram. Twitter, the author said you can do up to 5 tweets per day if you want. For LinkedIn, same thing as you would do for Twitter! They're 1 to 5 times a day, which is actually higher than I would've anticipated. That's a lot of content to create!
He had said for the stories getting 2 to 3 per week at minimum would be great on Instagram. Something for us to keep in mind when we're going through Instagram, is that there are 500 million stories being viewed every single day from people. The platform gets 3.5 billion visits every single day and the users on average spend 30 minutes. So there's not a ton of attention to be taken up there when people are only spending 30 minutes a day on Instagram.
With Instagram being only 30 minutes on average, there's less people spending time on the app and that means that you basically don't need to be posting as much on Facebook. Your Facebook should basically grow almost 4 times faster just by posting less, which is pretty crazy to consider.
I think that this is one of the number one things that not only my clients, but just prospecting businesses like mine, when I talk to them we will go over how many times they're posting and the engagement on the post as well as the story. I hear every single time “I have 5,000 followers on the page and I only get 10 likes on every post.”
“What am I doing wrong?” I go on their pages, and there's a post at 9:00 AM, a post at 12, a post at 5, 3 posts the next day, and 2 posts the next day. They're typically creating 15 to 30 posts per week, sometimes even per month. That's too much just because you don't have enough people underneath your following for that to be served too.
It's a bit liquid or the lines are a little blurry when you get to Instagram. The reasoning for that is because the algorithm for Instagram is massively trying to compete with TikTok right now. So they're giving more engagement on Reels than they do for posts or even IGTV. I've had good success with the reels lately, I am still experimenting with that.
The next thing I wanted to talk about is the corporate giants out there, what are they doing on social media? They clearly have to know something if they're paying hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and PR. Right? Right! Forever 21 is the first one I wanted to go over. I was just thinking before I even went on Instagram, who's kind of hip and trendy. Forever 21 has 14.4 million followers on Instagram and they post 20 times per week.
On those posts they are getting roughly 3,000 likes on average. That is a whopping 0.0002% engagement. That's forever 21. I really was bummed about that. I thought that they would have had some better engagement.
They're not only spending the money on the actual photos and video shoots with the pure purpose of posting it to Instagram, but then they're posting it and it's not getting more than even half of a percent of engagement. I don't know how many of their followers are fake or real because the bots, whether they bought them or not, will just consume some of those bigger numbers by the millions because they want all the other people on the list.
Coca-Cola has 2.8 million followers and they are only posting on average 1 time per week. So, 20 times less than Forever 21. Their average likes per post is 45,000, and on average 0.016%, which is 80 times more engagement than Forever 21 is putting in. There's not as many creative avenues that they can really exhaust at this point in time.
Coca-Cola could be spending more on the actual marketing efforts behind social media and everything, but obviously they're doing better because they're getting 80 times the engagement. So, I think that might be something to learn and we are starting to build on a theory here that posting less is better.
There's not a lot of things that you can post on Instagram, about Facebook itself. Most of its user features, like featuring people on the platforms and like the things that they participate in. I wanted to choose something that was more like a software because software's in general are just harder to market and service-based businesses are just harder to market. So I chose Facebook. 4.2 million followers on Instagram. 2% engagement. They do 8 posts per week. On average, they're getting about 10,000 likes proposed. Now, they have some that will hit like a million and then some that flop and do like 1,200.
That is still better than Forever 21 with the posting being down. What we learned from those 3 pages just there, remember these are the corporate giants of America that are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
Some of these people still aren't cracking the code. What we need to remember when we go into posting for social media accounts is that different platforms require different amounts of posts.
It's not just the size of your page that necessarily predicates how often you should be posting, because those of you with big companies that have large product catalogs or ever-changing SKUs, you're just going to have to post more just to even make your following aware of the products, but something that everyone forgets is that posting can be in the form of a story.
You can post stories about the same things a couple of times throughout the week, if you just spread them out and it never hits the feed and it doesn't have to have such a put together effort.
Then, the engagement goes up by 30% at times. A lot of what that has to do with as well is the actual quality of the posts. If you imagine having an employee and you tell them, “Hey, I need 1 post per week” versus telling them “I need a post every single day”, the anxiety and the stress inside of the employee's head not only just immediately spikes, but then they're doing all these other things as well.
The actual effort put into the post probably declines because they have less time to do more. When you have say the same 10 hours per week to make posts, that means you are able to have the time to think more thoughtfully and more intention to give to the posts that are being posted less frequently.
Apart from the people with giant product catalogs are the people that are changing their products up frequently and have to be adaptable. I think for the most part, lowering on Instagram would be one of the number one recommendations I give to small businesses. For Facebook, I would say unless you're already at a pretty good frequency, you need to get up to what the article was talking about, anywhere between 1 and 2 times a day.
That's going to obviously impact how the posting happens as well. The cool thing is Facebook does have a bit better delivery. They have more delivery options whereas Instagram has 4. You can post Reels, IGTV, Hard Post, or a Story. That's generally the main 4 options.
You can ask questions or you can go into your group if you have a group inside of your page and count that as your post for the day. You're still speaking for the business on the business's behalf.
Remembering that or Organic is literally half of the equation for your Social Media success and Paid as the other half.
