Optimizing Facebook Engagement – How Frequently To Post

How much is too much? There is a common, and intuitive, assumption that brands should not post too frequently, or they will annoy their audience, who in turn will be become less receptive to their messages. However, hard data on this has not been available until now.

We used the Track Social platform to analyze the effect of Posting Frequency – how often a brand posts – on the Follower response levels to those posts.

It turns out that although posting more often does have consequences, it is possible to post far more frequently on Facebook than many brands believe.

We start by looking at the response level per post, as increasing numbers of posts are made per day. The response level at each Posting Frequency is represented as a percentage of the response received when a brand only posts once in a day.

Response Per Post drops off markedly as more posts are made.

When a brand posts twice a day, those posts only receive 57% of the likes and 78% of the comments per post. The drop-off continues as more posts are made in the day.

Response per Post is important because it impacts your engagement levels, Edgerank score, and hence the visibility of future posts. However it is not the whole story.

It is the Response Per Day, rather than Per Post, that represents the total amount of interaction a brand is having with its consumers, and is representative of the total amount of touch-points they have to get across their marketing message.

So next we look at what happens to the Total Response, or Response Per Day, as the Posting Frequency increases:

There is no significant change in Total Response as the Posting Frequency increases.

Interestingly, although the response per post decreases, the total amount of response stays more or less steady as posting frequency increases.

We need to emphasize that this result does not suggest that any brand can increase posting frequency without an impact on their total response levels, only that some brands are achieving this, so it certainly possible. Also, this study did not look at ancillary effects of posting activity such as people Unliking a page, nor did we consider the sentiment of the response. However it was observed quite consistently amongst the brands in our study that increased posting levels were sustainable without a drop-off in total response.

The overall impact of Posting Frequency is hard to judge, and is best analyzed on a case by case basis.

Given that Response Per Day and Response Per Post are important we have calculated a Response Score that is a weighted average of the two.

The overall Response Score does show a consistent drop-off in response with posting frequency. This is a warning that over-posting does have consequences, however the relatively modest rate of the drop-off gives brands an opportunity to perhaps post more frequently than they thought.

Our overall advice to brands is:

1. Be aware that response per post does decrease with posting frequency, and with this your visibility via Edgerank will be decreased.
2. If done with careful monitoring, it is certainly possible to post quite frequently on Facebook without upsetting your audience
3. Regardless of how often you post, your content has to be relevant and interesting to your audience.
4. Increase posting frequency with care and use analytics to find the Posting Frequency that is right for you

Track Social offers enterprise clients a customized analysis of Facebook Engagement as well as many other aspects of social media performance. For more information, and to apply for a free assessment of your brands posting patterns, go here.

Stay tuned for the next article in our series, which will look at additional variables that impact Facebook Engagement. To sign up to receive alerts for our Facebook Engagement series, learn more about our methodology and more, go here.

Read more:

• Optimizing Facebook Engagement – Part 3: The Effect Of Post Length