How Often Should a Small Business Post to Social Media

How often you post to social media can impact if the platforms shows your posts to your followers. We have all heard rumours that the best option is to post daily to ensure the platform keeps pushing out your content, but is this true? In this article, we explore how often to post to which platform, and how to get content on multiple platforms without investing all your time.

Do you need to post daily on social media for it to be effective? How do you keep up with posting to so many different platforms? Mitzi Payne answers these questions in this article. The information in this article is taken from Episode 19 of our podcast, The Small Business Mastermind, "Social Media for Small Business: Where to Start, Finding Your Audience, and What to Post." 

1. Instagram

"For Instagram, we always recommend at least five in feed posts and at least three to five stories per week. Stories are really important for Instagram because Instagram is tracking two different types of users. There are people who scroll through their feed and there are people who just scroll through their stories and ignore their feed.

If you can not keep up with doing five posts in your feed and stories, then I would do less in feed posts and more stories.

The other thing with Instagram is, if that is a platform of priority for your business, I highly recommend that you try to find other features within the app to use because Instagram loves when you use their features, especially their new ones. They actually do give you a bit of an algorithm bump when you use some of their latest features first.

Any opportunity to use Reels is really important. AR filters are great or you can include the photo stickers or countdown stickers."

2. Facebook

"For Facebook, we communicate this to our clients, we do not see Facebook as a social platform. We see it as an advertising platform simply because Facebook does not give businesses any organic traction - it is a pay-to-play zone.

For that reason, I think posting frequency is less important because what matters is how much you are boosting it for because people would not see what you are posting unless you are boosting it. We recommend $5-10 per boost, or if it is a key part of your strategy then doing a bigger boost for that would be great."  

3. Twitter

"For Twitter, it moves so fast. It is the shortest life span of any social platform. You will have to post a lot more frequently on there. But, I think, it is more important on Twitter to not only just post more, but also engage more.

The algorithm on Twitter rewards retweets, comments, and getting likes, so the goal is to try to get clicks on your tweets and engagement on your post. That means that your copy has to be snappier, it has to be more engaging, and trying to do threads is important. If that means doing a bit less than that is okay as long as the content that you are sharing is snappier.

The great thing about Twitter is that it is very rare that people just go and read through your feed. If you have a great tweet that did really well and it is not super timely, it is something that you can re-purpose like a week later that is all good and fair for Twitter. It is just about snappy, short, and frequent posts for Twitter."

4. TikTok

"A great place for a product to shine is on TikTok because people can take videos with your product and share it and you can leverage Instagram influencers which are really affordable right now. It is a great space for that.

If you are a service it is a little trickier to demonstrate that on TikTok. I think a better route would be to partner with an influencer who can speak to that and then maybe you do not necessarily need a full TikTok feed or full TikTok strategy, instead, you just piggyback on other influencers that way."

To learn more: Listen to our podcast episode about Social Media Marketing