I was recently working with an individual and we were going through his Facebook page talking about what could be done page engagement. Before the conversation even started I already knew what to expect as one of if not the first question.

“How often should I post?”

The advice I shared with him and the answer I will share with you is, it depends.

Social Media is a lot of things and part of it is about creating new relationships and growing brand exposure among many other things. I see what I do in social media as a little bit an art form and a whole lot of mad scientist, let me explain.

In order to be successful using social media as a brand you’re going to have to:

1. Have a strategy (You do have one don’t you?)
2. Be consistent (The question of posting when and how often)
3. Develop and maintain relationships with your audience (talking with them not at them)
4. Experiment and expect failure

While your strategy is extremely important and being consistent is also very important you will find that experimentation with posting will often times lead to changes in your strategy. Your initial strategy may call for you to post 3 times per day on Facebook during work hours (typically 9 -5) and during work days (Monday to Friday) and after a while you may find that through looking at your insights that engagement levels are low. Your strategy may not be performing as intended and now it’s time to bust out the lab jacket and play mad scientist.

Begin by experimenting with posting after work hours and on the weekend always making sure to measure and collect data as you do this. You may be surprised to find that these off hour and weekend experiments might lead to higher engagement levels. Or maybe not. The idea here is to keep experimenting with times and dates and content types to see where your sweet spot is for engagement and user exposure.

While all the experts in the world can gather data and give you and your business a sheet of best practices to follow. The truth is your business and your audience is unique to you and should be treated as such. Starting with a strategy of best practices is a great place to begin but after that, you have to continually try new things and push the envelope if you want to succeed.

You know your audience best (or at least you should) and if you track and measure your actions (wash, rinse and repeat), you will begin to form a very precise and clear picture of what your audience is looking for in terms of content and when they want to see it.

This advice applies to more than just Facebook as well. Take Twitter for instance. How many tweets a day/hour will your followers handle before unfollowing? What times do you see more retweets? On Instagram which days of the week and times of day see more comments and likes? Pinterest what types of content sees more repins?

This of course all depends on your audience and that is why you need to get down and dirty, wade through your analytics and examine and track engagement levels to determine the needs of your audience and then feed that need.

Tools such as an excel spreadsheet, Facebook Insights and Hootsuite are great for gathering data and helping you find when your audience is online and recording your experiments. Don’t get stuck listening to what the experts, roll up your sleeves and start experimenting because science is fun.

So, how often do you post?

Thanks to socialthreesixty.