It’s a digital marketing question for the ages, and it can leave many B2B business owners and B2B marketers scratching their heads. Perhaps the most important thing to remember in a topic like this is that success on social media is a balance of many variables. Post frequency is just one factor in a successful B2B social media marketing strategy and implementation.
Even with the perfect social media posting schedule, your B2B brand can fail in social media without the backing of a comprehensive and well-thought-out social media strategy. If you need help building or revamping your social media strategy, Bold Entity can help, Contact Us!
More Must Be Better, Right?
At first glance, that can seem like the most obvious answer: as many posts as often as possible. But, the truth about posting on social media as a B2B brand is that you need to find a cadence that’s right for you and your audience. Your social media presence needs to walk a tightrope to find the Goldilocks zone of posting just the right amount for your followers. Post too often, and your followers will feel overwhelmed or spammed by your content, leading to skipping over your posts, unsubscribing, or even muting your accounts.
Another thing to keep in mind with your posting frequency is the law of depreciating returns. Once they hit a particular volume of posts in a day or week, most social media accounts will begin to see a diminished return on added efforts. Some social media platforms and brands are less susceptible to depreciation, but even if it’s not true, posting more doesn’t necessarily mean your brand’s visibility will improve.
Social Media Platforms Don’t Want Your Posts to Succeed
We can break social media down into two types of accounts: personal accounts and business accounts. Social media platforms operate on a free account, B2B business model. In this model, personal accounts are the valuable product they offer to businesses through the medium of their platform. Their customers, companies like yours, pay to run advertising to reach well-defined target audiences on their platform.
Consider, if your organic social media postings were allowed to be extremely successful, why would you buy social media advertising? Their feed algorithms work against high-tempo organic posters, specifically from business accounts. Social media platforms are smart, and they’re not giving the milk away for free. In 2020, Facebook made nearly $86 billion in ad revenue, comprising 97.9% of their annual revenue. Social media platforms are doing everything possible to make advertising with them as enticing as possible.
At this point, you may be asking if organic social media is even a worthwhile marketing expense. The answer is yes. Social media allows your B2B company to engage in two-way communication and share information outside of direct advertising in attempts to convert more sales. Social media can showcase your brand’s culture, public relations, customer service, and yes, even advertise your offerings. All for free.
Quality, Consistency, and Engagement are More Important than Frequency
We’ve said that frequency is just one ingredient to cooking a successful B2B stew. It can be very easy to throw out sporadic sprees of “Buy Now” advertising posts at your followers. Quality content that engages the audience has always been the key to success in social media and will continue to be so. People would rather follow a brand that consistently schedules two high-quality posts a week than an account that posts 0-10 times a day at seemingly random intervals with big breaks of silences in between.
And perhaps more importantly, not all social media platforms are the same when it comes to quality, consistency, and engagement. Each has its own best practice when it comes to successful postings and ideas about post frequency.
Rethink Post Frequency, Set a Schedule Floor
One helpful thing we’ve learned as social media marketers at Bold Entity is to redefine how we think about posting schedules. In discussions of frequency and scheduling social media posts, we often hear that X times a day or a week is optimal. Instead, change your perspective to think about a posting schedule minimum, an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for your B2B social media presence.
What is the absolute minimum frequency you can accept for your social media presence? This minimum is different for every B2B brand and every social media platform you utilize. To start, do a little competitive research to see how often your competitors, partners, and other industry influencers are posting. The point is not to whole cloth copy, what they are doing but to draw insight from what you see that is and is not working for them. This shift in thinking about your social media presence and posting frequency has a lot of benefits. First, it’s less restrictive. In a hard-set frequency, you may have to push something new to highlight to a later date or reschedule your queued posts. Or, more commonly and less productively, you find yourself creating a poor-quality post just to hit your frequency quota.
Setting an easy-to-achieve minimum frequency for your posting means there are fewer times when you need to muscle out a low-quality post. And, whenever you get something timely and unexpected to highlight, you can post it without disrupting your queued posts. Think of these posts as special, surprise bonus posts for your followers. It can give your followers a reason to check their feed or your B2B brand’s page even when it’s not a time you usually post. It has the added benefit of making your B2B brand’s presence on social media feel less planned and more tied to what’s going on at your business while it’s going on. Just be sure you don’t do so many of these bonus posts that they become expected posts rather than something special.
Another significant benefit of setting a minimum post scheduling floor is it helps you avoid sprees, burnout, and the resulting social media silence. Reduce the occurrence of one week having three posts every day, then burnout, and the next two weeks going by with just a single post. Reducing the number of posts helps improve your consistency and allows you to spend your B2B brand’s time on social media in efforts beyond just posting. Engaging as a brand on social media by sharing, responding, and commenting on existing posts from your account, followers, and B2B partners in your industry provides you a more robust and engaged presence on social media.
Creating a solid content curation strategy for your B2B brand is an excellent start to improving your social media presence while reducing the amount of original content you need to create. Learn how to start putting together a content curation strategy for your B2B business.
B2B Social Media Posting Frequency Recommendations by Platform
Below we have researched what some of the foremost experts say about social media posting frequency and added our own recommendations based on our B2B social media marketing experiences. Let’s start by reviewing Hootsuite’s Internal Research.
According to the popular social media scheduler tool Hootsuite, business accounts should be posting on Instagram 3-7 times per week. On Facebook, they should post 1-2 times per day, on Twitter 1-5 times per day, and businesses on LinkedIn should be posting 1-5 times per day. If that sounds like a lot, you’re not wrong. In total, that’s between 42 and 91 individual posts per week across all the key social media platforms. While you may feel shocked at those numbers, it’s crucial to note Hootsuite’s findings did not take company size into account. In fact, most of the best practices and statistics used for business social media advice are based on large, B2C companies with one or more internal social media teams.
Forty-two to 91 posts per week is a surprisingly reasonable number if you are a large company with a full-time social media staff. But, it’s an insurmountable mountain to SMBs with few or no, dedicated internal marketing staff. Below we will be adding our own agency experience with B2B SMBs to help you find a more reasonable frequency for your B2B social media presence.
Instagram Posting Frequency
Instagram’s own Adam Mosseri suggests accounts looking to build a following on the platform make two standard feed posts per week and post two stories per day. Overall, Hootsuite business users average 1.56 feed posts per day, and internally the Hootsuite social media team focuses on 2-3 posts and 2-3 stories per week.
Previously, Instagram Stories were a significant barrier to entry because they were a type of post you couldn’t create and schedule beforehand. However, earlier this year, Facebook and Hootsuite both began offering the ability to create and schedule Instagram Stories to post later.
From our personal experience working with B2B SMBs, a mixture of 2-3 feed posts per week works well. Peppering your social media feed with more impromptu Stories do a good job of providing relevant, low-stakes bonus postings. Use them to candidly capture the day-to-day fun and exciting things that are happening at your business.
Facebook Posting Frequency
The average business page posts 1.55/day on Facebook. These numbers back up Hootsuite’s recommendation and match the frequency their internal social media team follows. Buffer’s social media team also posts twice a day, seven days a week, mid-morning and mid-afternoon.
Facebook offers us the best insights into the law of depreciating returns we touched on previously. This graph from Hubspot shows that brand pages with less than ten thousand fans saw a 50% drop per every post after the first on the same day. The algorithm and audience both show favoritism to huge brands on the platform. Similar diminished results were found by Track Social, who reported that when a brand posts twice a day, the second post receives 57% of the likes and 78% of the comments per post.
Our recommendation is 2-3 posts per week as a minimum posting frequency for B2B SMBs on Facebook. For B2C companies, we believe a one post per day minimum posting frequency would be best, twice a day if you have a lifestyle-focused brand that will better resonate with Facebook’s audience.
Twitter Posting Frequency
Twitter is an odd duck when it comes to social media platforms. While most of the major social media platforms share similarities in best practices and tips for success on the platform, Twitter often proves to be the exception. For example, some popular big accounts compose 100 Tweets a day. That’s a full-time job at less than 5 minutes per tweet, day in, day out.
Needless to say, the best practices for posting frequency are quite varied. Some experts say once a day, some recommend 15 tweets every day, and others go as high as 30 times per day. The internal social media team at Hootsuite posts one individual tweet and one tweet thread comprised of 7-8 tweets every day. Their enterprise social media team only posts two tweets per day.
Hootsuite’s competitor, Buffer, and their internal social media team post 14 times per weekday, 12 AM – 10 PM, and never more than once per hour. Buffer’s team runs a more relaxed schedule on the weekends, seven tweets per day at roughly every 3 hours between 3 AM and 9 PM.
Because of how different and intensive Twitter is, our foremost advice for SMBs is to decide whether you are a Twitter-first or Twitter-last company. How plugged into Twitter is your brand, your social media team, and your target audience? In our experience, if you’re brand is not firing on all cylinders when it comes to Twitter, it can be challenging to gain traction on the platform.
For Twitter-first B2B SMBs: Conservatively tweet 1-3 times per day, but make sure they are high-quality tweets with the right hashtags and entice users to engage. Consider making one of these daily tweets a Twitter thread to boost quality and engagement.
For Twitter-last B2B SMBs: We advise these clients not to think too much about the platform. Double up on posts from other platforms with some minor editing to make them fit the character limit. Our experience with Twitter has led us to be very upfront with clients; if Twitter is not the tip of your B2B social media strategy spear, you probably will not find any accidental success on the platform.
LinkedIn Posting Frequency
Bold Entity is a branding, and digital marketing agency focused on serving B2B SMBs. As such, our primary focus when it comes to analyzing social media and making recommendations is LinkedIn. Hopefully, as a B2B SMB, your company is already listed on the platform with an up-to-date and fully filled-out business profile page.
If you need help setting up or updating your page, here are the official SMB best practices from LinkedIn. If you need help setting up or refreshing your B2B company’s LinkedIn, or any social media profile we can help with that, Contact Us.
Buffer’s internal team posts once per weekday, just after 8 AM. This year, Hootsuite’s internal social media team upped its focus on LinkedIn. As a primarily B2B-focused company, this isn’t a surprise. From the previous twice a day, Hootsuite now posts regularly on LinkedIn three times per day but can go as frequently as five posts when pushing one of their big initiatives.
For most B2B SMBs, we recommend 2-3 times per week as a good cadence for LinkedIn, focusing on the middle of the week. If you or your company is big into networking or account-based marketing, we recommend increasing your frequency up to once per day to allow you to tag more people and companies in your posts.
TikTok Posting Frequency
Right now, there aren’t any substantial studies about the platform. So without that, authorities can only make a recommendation based on gut feeling. Given how fast content moves through the TikTok zeitgeist, exposure to the platform as consumers, and what seems to be working for content creators on the platform, the general recommendation is 1-3 videos per day. Of course, this amount is primarily based on individual brand influencers/content creators.
TikTok has yet to gain much foothold in most brands’ social media mix, especially in B2B, given the platform’s relatively young average user demographic. So unless you are targeting B2B services towards young entrepreneurs or consumers along a “prosumer” angle, we recommend ensuring your account is registered on TikTok. Still, our official advice is to wait and see what happens in the coming months and years on the platform before creating a formal social media marketing strategy around it.
B2B Social Media Posting Frequency Takeaways
Outside of the individual recommendations for posting frequency, here are some key points to consider when developing your social media strategy. Bold Entity’s rule of thumb when it comes to social media is 2-3 posts per week across your high-value social media platforms. That is the base recommendation we use and make adjustments based on the individual brand, availability of high-quality content, competitor, and industry standards for posting. The 2-3 posts per week frequency rate is a great place to start or reset your social media strategy as a baseline before experimenting.
Focus on Your B2B Social Media Goals
We want to emphasize that it’s always vital for you to stay focused on your goal. Why are you posting on social media, and what do you want to achieve by building an audience on social media platforms? Your social media strategy and posting schedule should always be in service to furthering your goals for being on social media. If you can’t see how social media is helping you reach your goal or even what your goal is on social media, it’s time to reassess your strategy.
Tread Carefully When it Comes to Best Times & Days to Post
These blanket recommendations tell you when the most amount of people and engagement happens on social media. They also tell you the most competitive time for attention and can lead to your posts going unnoticed by your audience. Give your first attention to your analytics and engagement metrics and experiment with different combinations to find the best day and time for your brand to post on each social media platform. Often, the middle of the week works best for B2B brands on social media. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are good days to begin posting and tracking your engagement.
Start Slow & Build Inertia
People are more responsive to posts frequency increasing than decreasing. If even 2-3 times per week sounds like a struggle, start with just one post. Creating original content takes time and effort. Starting slow and learning what type of content curation works best for your brand can help you build inertia over time. Then, when you feel confident in your posting capabilities, look at upping your frequency.
Use the Right Social Media Platforms
Each social media platform has a different core audience, and different types of content perform differently on each platform. What worked well for your B2B SMB’s Facebook page won’t necessarily perform well on your LinkedIn. Ideally, you should create individualized content for each social media platform, but even choosing 1-2 primary platforms to focus your content towards can help you achieve your social media goals better. You can always repost this content with little to no alteration on your less-engaged social media accounts.
Give Your Posts Space to Breathe
If the ideal time to post on your social media is 8-9 AM, you may feel tempted to post your three posts for the day within that hour. Fight back that urge and provide each post time to breathe. We agree with Buffer’s approach to spreading out multiple posts during the day. This approach can ensure you aren’t double-dipping on your audience’s attention and letting a new post accidentally bury your last post.
Social Media Analytics ABCs (Always Be Checking)
The only way to determine what does and does not work on your social media efforts and their success is by keeping an eye on your analytics. One of the best pieces of advice we can give SMBs is to memorialize your analytics offline. Most social media insights don’t allow you to review old, in-depth analytics for your account. Make it a monthly task to capture your social media analytics data and keep it somewhere else so you can always refer to it later.
Just having your analytics isn’t enough; you have to use them. Use your analytics to judge whether increasing your posting frequency is paying dividends. If it’s not, then it’s time to make an adjustment. Use your social media insights to determine what content types and posts work the best for your B2B brand. Do more of the content that resonates with your audience and keep experimenting with new and different post content to find what your audience likes and doesn’t like.
Take Social Media Posting Recommendations with a Grain of Salt
Whether it’s the biggest names in the social media marketing industry or our recommendations, remember that they’re just that, recommendations. Without knowing the specifics of your business, audience, or brand, it’s impossible to give an ironclad recommendation for your specific needs. General recommendations are an excellent place to start when determining your social media posting frequency or overall social media strategy. But, recommendations are no substitute for understanding your social media presence and what works best for your B2B brand.
If you’re looking for a partner to help you develop any aspect of your branding or digital marketing, trust a Leading B2B Service Provider and Award Winner like Bold Entity. We can help with your social media marketing strategy from start to finish including: analysis of your performance, post captions and visuals, creating a posting calendar, or even serving in a consulting role to help your internal team learn and follow the best practices for each social media platform.
