In a digital landscape saturated with advice on social media marketing, it’s natural to question the necessity of yet another article on the subject. However, this aims to be the definitive guide, allowing marketers and business owners to refocus their efforts on effective strategies, product promotion, and addressing critical industry disparities, rather than endlessly debating posting frequency.
Building upon a previous exploration into media frequency, it’s crucial to understand why this seemingly niche topic holds immense significance for social media managers. The core takeaway is that reach is paramount for impactful marketing, and maximizing reach involves strategically minimizing frequency. Instead of consistently engaging the same small audience, the focus should shift towards ensuring a broader audience encounters your brand message, even if less frequently.
This principle should serve as a wake-up call, especially for those entrenched in organic social media, relentlessly chasing content updates and real-time engagement. If you believe the primary challenge on social media is overcoming algorithms that limit post visibility, this insight is doubly critical. Regardless of arguments for exceptional earned media instances or the cumulative effects of organic social over time, the undeniable reality is that organic strategies inherently lead to extremely high frequency directed at a comparatively limited audience. You’re essentially battling to capture an extra fraction of your existing audience when the true growth potential lies in reaching audiences ten times larger. Brand expansion is fueled by attracting new, infrequent buyers.
Imagine if your media agency proposed a strategy mirroring your organic social media approach – prioritizing super-high frequency to a small segment. You’d likely question their expertise and perhaps even consider seeking new representation. In conventional media planning, meticulous frequency management, maximized reach, and consistent campaign duration are fundamental. Similarly, a marketing strategy solely focused on high-frequency engagement would be immediately flagged as misinformed, perhaps prompting a recommendation to consult marketing fundamentals like ‘How Brands Grow’. Yet, inexplicably, the prevailing response in social media over the past decade has been to intensify efforts to outsmart the system. Tactics like chasing trending hashtags, optimizing posting times, capitalizing on viral topics, and manipulating engagement metrics to boost visibility have become commonplace. It’s time to reconsider this approach.
It’s important to clarify that this discussion excludes customer service interactions. Responding promptly and effectively to customer inquiries is undoubtedly valuable. The focus here is on proactively pushing content into the digital sphere with the primary goal of business impact. While B2B contexts with smaller, more engaged audiences might seem like exceptions, even in these scenarios, precisely targeted paid media remains a more efficient avenue for reaching your intended audience.
So, How Often Should You Post, and When is the Best Time?
Let’s address the core question directly: how often and when should you post on social media?
It’s feasible to tweet multiple times daily, accumulating impressions, retweets, and follower counts to generate seemingly impressive total impression figures. However, a closer examination reveals that these numbers often mask a critical flaw. The reach is frequently concentrated among a small, highly active segment of your followers who are repeatedly exposed to your content. This results in plans that achieve moderate reach among a limited group at an excessively high frequency. While this approach might be sustained throughout the year at a relatively low cost, it fundamentally contradicts sound media planning principles and arguably represents a misallocation of resources.
This perspective often encounters resistance within the social media industry, yet it should be liberating. Instead of being perpetually tethered to the content creation treadmill, churning out endless posts and reactive updates, you can redirect your energies towards crafting superior, more impactful communications, shared less frequently. After all, no amount of frequency can compensate for ineffective content.
But Doesn’t Posting at the ‘Right’ Time Enhance Reach? What About the 2 PM Tuesday TikTok Myth?
Paid media is the only reliable mechanism for guaranteeing reach with controlled frequency across social platforms. Paid social isn’t a punitive measure designed to restrict communication with your audience; it’s a revolutionary opportunity to engage with millions. Your content strategy should be guided by a meaningful media approach, deploying resources when you have a valuable message to convey. While emerging platforms like TikTok might offer fleeting opportunities for brands to achieve organic cut-through, or leverage influencers for genuine reach, these are likely temporary advantages. TikTok’s rapidly expanding paid media offerings already present marketers with significantly greater potential than relying solely on organic profile engagement in most cases. Even TikTok’s distinctive discovery algorithm, which operates on different principles, means that immediate reach and impact are often less dependent on posting time.
When utilizing paid media, advertisements typically run over several days, rendering the precise posting time inconsequential. In fact, scheduling and uploading campaigns days or even weeks in advance is advisable. While time-sensitive messages might warrant adjustments to day-part targeting, such optimizations are exceptions rather than the rule. Any article claiming to unlock substantial organic reach gains through clever tricks, timing hacks, or engagement manipulation is, frankly, a pointless distraction. Cease reading and creating such content.
While examples of viral organic successes like Burger King campaigns exist, they are exceptions, not the norm. Earned media, PR, and influencer marketing undoubtedly hold value in specific contexts. A clever organic post might even spark broader attention. However, consistently pushing out organic content as a routine, daily strategy is inefficient and undervalues both your time and your content. Even Oreo’s celebrated Super Bowl tweet, often cited as organic social media triumph, reveals a different reality upon closer inspection – a successful PR campaign, but not an endorsement for organic reach as a consistent strategy.
Even for small businesses, a modest £5 investment in paid media behind a key post will likely yield greater results than countless hours spent on organic content creation. Your time is valuable. If you have highly specific customer segments for direct engagement, organic interaction might be justified. However, for broader profile building, prioritize promoting posts and leveraging paid reach to achieve scale. Large businesses should unequivocally embrace paid social media to reach consumers where they are in their purchase journey. Continuing to invest heavily in organic social media simply because of a perceived obligation is a misallocation of resources. Many brands find themselves in this unproductive middle ground, wasting time and effort.
Practical Implementation: What Does Effective Frequency Look Like?
In practice, a robust strategy typically involves reach and frequency-based paid campaigns targeting broad social audiences, with frequency capped at approximately once per week over the campaign duration (aim slightly higher to ensure delivery). This approach aims to deliver one to two impressions per week to a meaningful number of consumers, sufficient to impact business outcomes.
Create content strategically, only when you have a media plan to promote it and a compelling message to share. Never post simply because of a misguided notion that you must maintain a constant presence or fear audience abandonment. Don’t waste resources chasing marginal organic reach improvements when the real opportunity lies in reaching audiences ten thousand times larger than your follower base.
At most, producing one to two pieces of content per week is sufficient, as anything beyond that is unlikely to reach a significant audience organically. Optimizing for a frequency of one or more impressions per week suggests that even a single high-quality content piece per week can be effective. Furthermore, mirroring established marketing principles across all touchpoints, repeated exposure to the same creative can enhance familiarity and message retention.
The social media sphere exhibits an unusual preoccupation with content “wear-out,” often implicitly assuming that constant novelty is essential to prevent audience fatigue. This assumption lacks justification, except in rare instances of highly time-sensitive content or excessively high frequency campaigns.
With a frequency of four to five impressions per month, using the same content piece remains relatively safe. To mitigate potential repetition, consider rotating two content pieces over a two-month period, or alternating between new and previously successful content. This approach suggests that a social media plan might require only six to ten content pieces annually. This could include one or two larger video assets, supplemented by shorter versions, animations, or other formats suitable for capturing attention within the fleeting attention spans of social media feeds. Think of social media as an animated print campaign, rather than a condensed television commercial.
This content volume represents a significant reduction compared to conventional social media practices, but it aligns with the strategies employed by many leading brands. Many major brands post only once or twice a month, or even less frequently, often distributing content primarily as promoted “dark” posts. While some brands maintain a higher posting cadence and derive marginal benefits, particularly in categories like fashion, the underlying principle remains consistent. If your brand aligns closely with a significant cultural moment, seize the opportunity to engage, but support your efforts with paid media to avoid being lost in the digital noise.
This approach is empowering. If your social media team is tasked with creating one impactful post per month instead of two daily posts, they have a greater capacity to produce truly exceptional content that resonates with audiences, drives brand growth, and potentially achieves organic virality – amplified by strategic paid media promotion.
Segmentation and personalized targeting offer further refinement. While challenging organically, paid media enables tailoring creative and messaging to different audience segments, potentially justifying a larger content volume. However, over-targeting and audience narrowing carry risks. Surprisingly, research indicates that content designed for “other” groups can sometimes outperform content specifically tailored to a target audience.
Performance marketers, focused on rapid sales optimization and leveraging product feeds, operate at a different scale, potentially deploying thousands of creative executions. However, even in performance marketing, brand building remains crucial. Notably, performance marketers are typically too astute to waste time on ineffective organic posting strategies. Their data-driven approach offers valuable lessons.
Okay, So Precisely When Should I Post Then?
If you’re still preoccupied with the precise posting time after understanding sophisticated reach and frequency strategies, it signals a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing principles. The exact posting time becomes an insignificant factor in a well-structured paid media approach. Articles that extensively elaborate on optimal posting times are often indicative of a lack of comprehensive marketing knowledge.
Crucially, this shift in strategy does not diminish the importance of high-quality content; in fact, it amplifies it. With paid media, your target audience will actually see your content, unlike in the organic realm where visibility is limited. The new battleground is earning consumer attention. Paid media can secure impressions, but compelling content is essential to capture and retain audience interest.
If you insist on continuing the fight against the “algorithm monster,” consider this: Apple, not a devious algorithm, is largely responsible for the decline in organic reach. Smartphone operating system changes, driven by privacy concerns, have fundamentally altered the organic reach landscape.
P.S. This isn’t a novel concept. The industry has been misdirected for years.
