A Question of Time: How Often to Post on Social Media
How often should I post on social media?
This is a question that many small and big businesses alike ask themselves. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t always necessarily clear-cut. When clients come to me trying to decide how often to post on social media, invariably the answer depends upon money. Ultimately, you have to decide how much money you want to spend on your social media presence. It comes down to the almighty dollar and what your budget allows. The more money you have to spend on your marketing plan, the more you can do.
Even if you are handling your social media postings yourself though, money is still a factor. Your time is worthwhile too. Every moment spent monitoring and responding to Tweets, Instagram comments, or Facebook queries, is time taken away from other activities. Whether that time directly comes from other necessary work tasks, or is parceled out from your personal life, there are only so many hours in a day, and an active social media account definitely requires time.
So how much time and effort do you want to personally put into your social media marketing? Well, think about what customers might think when they explore your social media pages. An erratically or infrequently updated account shows a lack of concern by the page owner. This is your chance to make a first impression and if it is haphazard, then regardless of how great your company is, you just might not get the chance to prove it.
How Much Time Should you Spend on Social Media Accounts?
- Consider updating Facebook accounts daily or a few times a week, at the bare minimum. Anything less than that and your feed won’t be shown to your followers, making your efforts less effective. Some accounts post twice a day or more, but make sure not to inundate your followers with too much information and risk losing them or the message you are trying to put out.
- Spend at least 15 minutes on Twitter when you update your feed, so that you can respond to comments, retweets, and like tweets, and to follow new accounts. Ideally you want to do this daily, but at the minimum a few times a week
- Post new Instagram photos daily, to a few times a week. You want to post at least once a week to keep your feed fresh and current.
- Check on your LinkedIn account weekly. To make your presence known, spend at least 15 minutes browsing your feed to comment, like, and follow new people, as well as to post new updates.
- Add to your Pinterest accounts at least once a week. Spend about 15 minutes following new boards, pinning new images, and commenting to build a following.
As you can see, all those little snippets of time quickly add up. Know that there are plenty of other social media channels where you can spend your time too, like Snapchat, YouTube, Google+, and many more. Unless you have an unlimited budget and/or a team of people to monitor and interact with your accounts, it is hard to keep up with. The more social media channels you create a presence on, the more places you have to maintain.
A good rule of thumb is to be active on a few sites, and do a good job of your presence there. You do not have to be everywhere. An effective social media presence focuses on doing what you can well, versus taking on too much and doing it all poorly. Marketing execs state it again and again; quality is the key in an effective social media strategy. A thing worth doing is worth doing well. If that means only having a presence on one or two sites, but using your time effectively there, then you are ahead of the curve as far as social media marketing goes.
How much time do you spend on social media?
