HubSpot ran a seriously interesting study on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook social media publishing. The original article is here: “How Frequently Should I Publish on Social Media? A HubSpot Experiment”
Writer Daria Marmer analyzed 10,000 HubSpot customer accounts, plus 15,000 LinkedIn company page posts, 25,000 posts to Facebook business pages, and 60,000 tweets. This is what she found out. (For more details and charts, click on the original post.)
Time: Doesn’t matter. Focus on content, not time of day.
Day: You guessed it – no statistical significance. Post whenever you like.
Frequency: Frequency does matter. The more you post, the more visibility, the more clicks.
Content: Don’t publish trash tweets, but quality is not as important as quantity in this medium.
LinkedIn Company Pages
Time: There is a small click loss (very small) with posts published in the evening. It’s not a huge difference, but best to publish during the business day.
Day: Unlike Twitter, days make a difference in LinkedIn. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday generally perform better than Saturday, Sunday, and – surprisingly – Monday. Of the better days, Tuesday and Wednesday perform the best in terms of clicks.
Frequency: The top frequency seems to be 2-5 posts a week. More than that and you get diminishing results, especially if you’re posting more than once on the same day.
Content: Good content will get more likes and comments, and will build your business reputation over time.
Facebook Business Pages
Time: Timing doesn’t matter very much, because the majority of Facebook posts don’t get much attention anyway. (Awesome.)
Day: Once again your post probably isn’t going to any action anyway, so who cares. There is a dip on Friday and Saturday and an uptick on Sunday.
Frequency: You’ll see diminishing returns if you post more than 5 times per week and more than once a day. Like LinkedIn, posting 2-5 times a week on different days is best. Your motivation should be to get those likes and comments – Facebook likes interactive and engaging posts, and rewards you with more appearances in news feeds.
Content: Like LinkedIn, better quality content has more of a chance to rise to the top.
Question: If it’s so hard to get traction, why publish at all on Facebook? According to HubSpot, there are three reasons:
- Prospects will research companies on Facebook, so have something attractive to show them.
- Most posts don’t get much action — but when they go viral, it’s a very big deal with thousands of clicks.
- Facebooks Ads offer high ROI among social media platforms.