I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, and a question that gets asked me in many different ways is, “How often do I need to post to be effective at this whole social media marketing thing?” And unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size fits all strategy for each business. There isn’t a plug-and-play method that is effective because what works for one business most likely won’t work for another business because the community of the account is different. But here are a few things I do share that I consider the bare minimum part of a social media marketing strategy: posting three times a week to your feed is the bare minimum, checking in with your community on stories once a day a few times a week, I would encourage you to daily check in but know that this isn’t always feasible for business owners. When you are sharing a post to your feed a quick and easy way to share your story is to send the post to your story via the paper airplane at the bottom of the post.
A few ideas for your story are anything behind the scenes, packing orders, setting up for an event, unboxing new merchandise, and asking your community questions.
I also advise and use as part of my stories strategies with clients using the stories for market research. If you are trying to decide between an offering, packaging, or anything like that, ask your community. Humans are very good at giving their opinions and usually always seek opportunities to give them.
I have tried to offer “one size fits all” social media templates, which fall flat because the voice is lost. When ’ is lost. When the post templates are done for everyone, they don’t feel like they need to contribute to the post, and the connection to the community isn’t there. It all comes down to the intention of putting up the post in the first place. If you don’t know the intention behind sharing the post, your audience won’t know what to do with it. When you are posting to post because an expert told you that for social media success, you should be posting seven times a week between these times, and then you need to throw in a 6.2-second reel, not a 6.5-second but specifically a 6.2-second reel with trending audio that has less than 900 videos attached to them every other day. How exhausting!
Ok, there are many things wrong with this approach; first of all, the definition of “success” qualifies as a successful post to one business owner but most likely isn’t the same as “success” to another business owner. You don’t know what the account owner's definition of success means.
Consider this next part your hall pass/permission slip from a social media expert to do whatever the fuck you want on your social media feed. The rules for marketing your business is there are no rules. Only want to connect with your community once a week or whenever it feels authentic to you to connect with them when you have something to say. Do that.
You love making short-form videos and want to do that daily with voiceovers instead of trending audio great; you do you.
Here’s the thing, if you’re reading this, the chances are that you are a business owner who is running a business and is also operating as their business’s marketing director, content creator, and social media manager. This is your hall pass/permission slip to post in the hallways of social media, whatever feels good to you whenever you have the time to schedule and post to social media.
I want you to know that your priority is to keep your business running. The secondary is to keep people in the know about your business. The minimum posting suggestion of 3 times a week helps your account to stay top of mind for people IF social media is your one marketing avenue because, at the time of this writing, the Instagram algorithm can have a delay of up to 72 hours for people in your community that are not interacting with your content regularly.
My other recommendation is to become best friends with your social media analytics and frequently check in to see what content people enjoy and interact with. When you get in your analytics and see what and where your community is hanging out on social media and measure if that is similar to where you like to hang out and what you enjoy posting, it becomes easier to identify how often and where to post your content—removing this pressure to be creating more and more fresh content constantly. Recycling content is totally ok- hardly anyone is going to even know.
Running a business is tough; please come back to this post when you need a hall pass/permission slip to do your digital marketing YOUR way, not necessarily an “experts” way who has an entire social team behind them. You are a small business doing what you can marketing wise is better than doing nothing at all.