Why Less Can Be More On Your Social Media Accounts

While the 3.2 billion social media users across the world may have enticed your brand to pursue a following on certain platforms, there are many pitfalls that can be a detriment to your brands online presence. With over 68% of U.S adults and over 90% of Millennials using social media, it can be tempting to push out any readily available content to your current or potential audience.   

Pushing content out is a necessity for any brand that wants to become or remain relevant on social media. However too much content can make you a disturbance to your audience and end up hurting your presence. New York Times Bestselling author, and one of Forbes top 10 marketers Neil Patel broke it down, “If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist and you will quickly fade into the deep dark recesses of their minds. However, if you are posting too often, you will become a complete nuisance and they will dread seeing your posts overcrowding their feed.” 

So what is the right thing to do?

Optimizing your platforms can be ideal starting place for most businesses. With the sea of people on social media it can be tempting to jump into various platforms in order to attempt to reach your audience. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, Vimeo and others can all be viable platforms to have a social presence on, but which apply to your brand? 

It’s no secret that different audiences tend to favor certain social media platforms. By selecting only the ones that apply to your ideal target persona, you won’t spread your brand too thin. Limiting your brand will make it easier to develop and share original content on a consistent basis.

After deciding which platforms best suit your brand, posting frequency on those sites can be the next difficult task to conquer. How do you post and get good impressions or engagement from your audience without overdoing it? 

While there is no universal number that is the perfect amount of posts, there are some general guidelines that can help boost your social analytics. 

A Facebook study from Hubspot showed that businesses that held more than 10,000 followers were the only pages that received more clicks on average the more they posted. For smaller brands, limiting yourself to 30 or less posts per month can help drive higher engagement rates within your audience. For larger brands, (those who maintain above 10,000 followers) posting between 31-60 times per month provides some of the highest click per post results.  

Twitter sees two fundamental strategies when it comes to frequency of posting, driving impressions or driving engagement. Posting 1-5 times per day on Twitter has shown to drive the highest rate of engagement without drowning your audience in a barrage of tweets. While driving engagement is recommended, tweeting up to 50 times per day has not shown to have a detriment on the amount of impressions each tweet receives on average, but rather the engagement. 

No matter what platforms your brand choses two pursue, two truths always reign true, consistency and content should be your focus. Creating a schedule of when to post, and creating engaging original content, will push your social media forward without investing countless hours into hundreds of posts that receive low engagement.