Question: Are there any hard and fast rules as to how many times per day we should post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+?
This is a great question that I get all the time and while there are no hard and fast rules, a little understanding of how things work on each platform may help you decide what you want to post where. Remember, what I always say…post where your audience is!
Having said that, let’s take a quick look at best posting practices for each of the platforms, but do take into consideration that these tips are somewhat general and the best approach may vary depending on your company, products, services and appropriate reader.
Twitter: Twitter is the fastest moving stream with the shortest attention span. Most of your followers will see very few of your tweets so to some extent it is a numbers game. Depending on the size of your audience and the quality of your content you can post a couple of times an hour and not be seen as a nuisance. If you are strictly self-promoting I recommend much less frequency or better yet not to do that. A lot of companies worry about Tweeting too often however I think that it is hard to actually Tweet too much. Just focus on making tweets relevant and try to be creative in the brief content of your tweets to provoke action on your content.
Facebook: With its rapidly diminishing reach, Facebook has become a hard place for a lot of small businesses to justify marketing. However if you are still using Facebook pages for marketing I think 1-2 posts a day is a good balance. Again, focus on curating your content in a way that captures people and makes them want to click. Since a much smaller group is now seeing your content, you want to make each set of eyeballs count!
LinkedIn: For LinkedIn company pages I like to recommend companies post all of their blogs, white papers and other articles there. However, I think LinkedIn sharing is really most effective when individuals share the content to their status, groups and individuals. Company page updates only go to those following your company and if that is only a few hundred that means very few people will actually see your posts.
Google+: Google+ has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the social community but it is a super powerful tool. Since this article focused on posting and not using G+ as a whole I will keep it on topic but in short, my recommendation for G+ is make sure all of your posts are being shared on this platform. If you want to better understand G+ and how it will help you business check out this post as well.
Last thing I may suggest is to experiment just a little bit with your posts, timing and frequency. If you are not getting the engagement or click-thru that you are looking for sometimes change is the best method to improving performance.
How often are you sharing content on each social media platform? What have you found works best for your company?
Do you have a question for “The Mailbag?” Click Here to submit your question and have it featured in an upcoming Mailbag.
Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.
