Maybe you’ve been engaged in Instagram marketing for a while now. You may even have been one of the first companies to catch on to how big of a deal Instagram would be for connecting with audiences. But have you ever really gotten a good grip on what your posting frequency should be?
For a lot of companies, jumping onto any social platform comes with a lot of trial and error before adopting a solid strategy. You may want to see better results for your efforts around Instagram marketing, and that may mean diving into your posting frequency.
What Happens When You Post Too Little: Everyone is trying to find that magic number: once per day, twice per week or maybe multiple times each month. You may feel that you should err on the side of posting too little so that you aren’t driving anyone crazy, but there’s good reason to rethink this. The first, and most obvious, risk is that you miss out on some reach when you post too little. But there’s more.
When you work on the side of posting too little, you miss opportunities for engagement. And while you may first think of this as a vanity metric, it comes with two important factors that work in your favor:
- Engaging content triggers the popularity signal on Instagram. This is an important signal because it gets your content in front of more users.
- If your followers tend to engage when you post, this connects to another ranking signal that Instagram uses to determine what will be interesting to a user for placement in their feed.
In other words, posting too little causes Instagram to rank your content as less important, giving it a lesser priority than other posts.
What Happens When You Post Too Much: When you feel pressure to kick your Instagram marketing into high gear and post more often, the quality of your content tends to slip. That means that your followers are less likely to engage with it, leading Instagram to believe that your content is low-quality, not engaging and should not be prioritized in your followers’ feeds.
You should also keep in mind that, aside from Instagram’s ranking signals, posting too much carries a significant cost. All of those social media management efforts aren’t free. The more images and videos you are creating, the more negatively your return on investment is impacted.
Get a Grip on Posting Frequency: You may want to start with the guideline of posting based on data you gather from your Account Insights section of your Instagram dashboard. Look at the last seven or 14 days to determine how engagement metrics interacted with your posting frequency.
While determining the right posting frequency is important, you also need to embrace consistency. So, while you may need to tweak a little timing and formatting, try to avoid jumping all over the place with your frequency. Determine a content timeline and watch your engagement for a while.
Does a topic like determining your posting frequency overwhelm you? Some things are best left to the professionals, and social media marketing management might be one of them. Whether you need insights into your Instagram marketing or you’d like to turn the whole thing over to our team, contact us at SJC Marketing for assistance!