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As you run your small business’s social media operations, one question likely comes to mind: How often should you post?
Truth be told, there’s no universal answer. Your audience has its own social media consumption behaviors that you’ll need to adapt to through data.
But, you can look to other businesses’ practices to get a jumping-off point. Use their numbers as an estimate, then tweak your habits as you watch how your followers respond.
That’s why we’re here today. We’ll share businesses’ posting frequencies from our benchmark groups and original survey data to help you figure out how often you should post on social media.
Time to dig into these two topics:
Let’s start by establishing some context behind the survey we conducted. While we had a total of 68 respondents, we narrowed that number down to 58 small businesses — businesses with 250 employees or fewer. 50% of the participants we included are agencies or consultants working for small businesses, while the other 50% are small businesses. Most of them have profiles on all three of the platforms we’re covering — LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
When we asked respondents what social media they use the most frequently for business purposes, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram each received about a third of the votes. LinkedIn had a slight lead at 36.21%.
But while each platform has about equal popularity, the reasons for their use may resonate differently with your business needs. Here’s why each group uses its preferred social network:
The businesses who vouched for LinkedIn in our open-ended questions specialized in business-to-business (B2B) products and services. LinkedIn’s focus on business needs over consumer needs makes it ideal for organizations in this space.
“We found LinkedIn allows us to be as 101% transparent with target buyers as possible, and like the popular saying goes, ‘transparency is important in business.’ So far, we found LinkedIn helps with communicating our values clearly, and buyers are on LinkedIn for the same reason we are (to be well informed and to find great partners),” says Jacob Chikaike of BloggingForests, a business serving blogging businesses.
Seema Rao of the marketing agency Baotris prefers LinkedIn for its stability and business focus. “Linkedin is the most stable business platform, in terms of B2B. First, Facebook and Instagram have so many algorithm changes. Second, agencies are more likely to find business through Linkedin, as that platform is geared toward business.” Rao adds that Instagram is a close second because of its large user base and even split between business and personal use.
At Health Reporter, a health publication, Nadzeya Sankovich counts on LinkedIn’s healthcare audience. “LinkedIn is a great platform for healthcare businesses because it provides a professional network for healthcare professionals to connect, share their expertise, and build their personal brands. Additionally, LinkedIn’s demographic is heavily skewed towards white-collar professionals and decision-makers, making it a valuable platform for B2B marketing and networking. Furthermore, LinkedIn has several features that allow healthcare businesses to showcase their products and services, such as company pages, sponsored content, and groups, which allow businesses to engage with their target audience and build brand awareness.”
Agency leader Alex Birkett has a similar experience with LinkedIn:
“LinkedIn is easily the highest ROI channel with the most target buyers in our ideal customer profile. The algorithm still makes it possible to reach them through consistent organic content. It’s the obvious choice.”
Alex Birkett
Head of Sales and Marketing at Omniscient Digital
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Related: How to Measure the Success of Your LinkedIn Company Page: Best Practices from 50 Marketing Pros
Marketing and media businesses mainly told us about their preference for Facebook. Facebook has in-depth targeting for its paid posts, helping agencies and consultants find their ideal customers.
“I leverage Facebook in my business because the platform is designed for building relationships and networking,” says Jeannine Betts of Jeannine’s Advice, an educational site for marketers. “It also promotes short-form video content which performs really well on Facebook. Also by leveraging Facebook groups, I can easily create copy that attracts my ideal customer and begin to build a relationship with them. Facebook allows my audience to connect with me as a person and not a faceless business or brand.”
Marketing agency Blue Pig Media’s David Curtis prefers Facebook for its large audience and versatile features: “I still think Facebook is an effective platform for publishing and reaching a large audience. When posting on social media for our clients, we have the most trust in Facebook and believe it can bring the best results. The algorithm for having it appear in new people’s feed, and the ability to share different types of content makes it the best for publishing, even in 2023.”
Related: The 2022 State of Facebook Ads Performance
At the marketing agency Twelve Three Media, Megan Thielen relies on Facebook’s advertising capabilities. Thielen says, “We use Facebook for both organic and paid efforts. I would classify this platform as the one we use most for ‘business purposes,’ as we have robust targeting capabilities that tie back to our business objectives. It also allows us to place ads on Instagram, too. So Facebook gives us the biggest opportunity, robust targeting/audience size potential, and a range of objectives/ad formats that help us achieve our overall social media goals.”
When we asked businesses that preferred Instagram about their choice, we had an even split between business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B organizations responding. The platform’s ability to appeal to both spaces makes it a versatile choice for many businesses.
“We strive to align our social media strategies with our target audience, which is young parents, a demographic that is drawn most to Instagram and Facebook,” says Nabiha Akhtar of Lil Deenies, a product for children and parents. “Our product needs to be showcased properly in order to draw in customers, which is why Instagram has worked best as a marketing tool.”
Related: 13 Ways Small Businesses Can Leverage Instagram for Marketing
Daniel Climans from StickerYou, a business that prints stickers for businesses and consumers, tells us, “Instagram is the platform I choose most when it comes to posting on social media. This platform is easy to use, and there is a larger audience via this specific platform than other social media. I use this platform the most for our business because I find it much easier to repost customer content when they tag us in their own Instagram posts. A picture speaks for itself, and I find by sharing customers’ reviews and pictures, you are increasing the chances for customer loyalty to form. Instagram makes it easier to highlight customers which I feel is a more personal approach to marketing. It helps you to create more organic content which consumers are much more likely to interact with.”
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Now, let’s get to the heart of the question we’re trying to answer today. Based on other businesses’ behavior, how frequently should you post on social media?
When we polled survey respondents about their posting habits, they reported posting most frequently on Facebook and Instagram. More than half of all participants post at least once a week on these platforms.
This means that the small businesses we consulted post the least frequently on LinkedIn, which brings some of our previous data into a new light. LinkedIn was the most popular platform among respondents. The trend between these two statistics could indicate that companies regularly spend time on LinkedIn without posting as much as they do on other platforms.
We also examined companies’ posting schedules per platform as reported in our survey and benchmark data. As you read our results, keep in mind that companies posted a minimal number of posts in January 2023 compared to other months. When you experiment with your posting frequency, you may find more success in posting a slightly higher number of posts per month than reported.
Here are the average posting frequencies from our benchmark reports, accompanied by commentary from our survey. We asked participants about their company’s posting frequency and what they consider the minimum posting cadence for each platform.
According to our LinkedIn Company Page Benchmarks for SMBs benchmark group data from 258 sources, the median number of updates published in January 2023 was 9, meaning most business post multiple times a week on LinkedIn.
To compare your performance on LinkedIn against other SMBs companies, join the group for free here.
The open-ended answers to our survey regarding LinkedIn posting habits covered a wide range of schedules, depending on the respondents’ LinkedIn strategies. Same as in our Benchmarks Groups, the survey data and open end answers indicate business post multiple times a week on LinkedIn.
When we asked Lilian Chen of Bar None Games about the ideal posting frequency, Chen took a quality-focused approach. “We typically post two to three times a week on LinkedIn. You need to deliver quality content, so posting at a higher frequency with lower-quality content will dilute the amount of engagement. With two to three times a week, this ensures that we’re posting high-quality content that our followers will engage with. The more frequently you’re posting, the better, but all of your posts need to actually be high quality and drive value to the viewer. If you’re unable to create high-quality content at the frequency that you choose, then you should lower your frequency,” Chen advises.
Some companies recommend posting once a day on LinkedIn.
Logicata’s Karl Robinson recommends a much higher frequency, on the other hand. “At Logicata, we post about once a day on LinkedIn. This frequency is necessary to maintain visibility and engagement with our followers without overwhelming them. We also post content such as educational blogs and infographics to demonstrate our expertise in the field. We also make sure to use relevant hashtags and optimize our posts for visibility, helping to increase our reach and engagement. By using LinkedIn, we can reach more people and establish our brand as a leader in the industry,” Robinson says.
And some companies, like Kent Lewis from Deksia suggest posting multiple times a day from both company and personal profiles.
“I’ve found the optimal posting frequency for LinkedIn (organic posts) is one to two times daily on a company profile. Personally, I post 12 to 20 times daily during the work week to maximize visibility, top-of-mind awareness, and thought leadership positioning.”
Kent Lewis
CMO at Deksia
Lewis’s answer highlights the importance of ongoing employee advocacy in a LinkedIn strategy. When we consulted experts about their LinkedIn promotion habits recently, many of them mentioned working with employees’ personal accounts to draw traffic to their company pages. You can read the full report here.
When we investigated the bare minimum that you should post on LinkedIn, respondents still had varied answers.
Text Request’s Jessica York advises you to stick to a manageable minimum. “I would argue that eight a month (or two a week) is a good minimum. That way you’re still putting yourself out there, but at a rate where you can make sure those two posts are as impactful as possible,” York says. York adds some tips on the best posting days: “Monday and Friday, in my experience, tend to be slower days for brand-related content on LinkedIn anyways, so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday naturally make the most sense for your business to focus on.”
Perry Nalevka of Penguin Strategies offers different recommendations for minimum and optimal posting schedules. “At a minimum, it should be three to four times a month. I think there needs to be a stream of content on your company page so I recommend two to three times a week, but if your employees are not posting, your content is not going to be seen, as that is what drives traffic to company pages.”
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Our Facebook Page Benchmarks for SMBs benchmark group data, pulled from 574 sources, shows that small businesses posted a median of 10 posts per month in January 2023. This indicates companies post about 2 times a week on Facebook.
To compare your performance on Facebook against other SMBs, join the group for free here.
Like the advice we received on LinkedIn posting frequency, the responses we had regarding Facebook posting schedules varied quite a bit. Each business has a different philosophy depending on its strategy and experience with Facebook – from posting on a daily basis to just monthly.
Sadaka Law’s Mark Sadaka considers a daily posting schedule optimal. “Posting daily is beneficial for businesses. It increases their brand awareness, leading to better conversion rates. We also sensed how frequent sharing took us to new heights of success,” Sadaka tells us.
At On Demand Pest Control, Vincent Luca takes a minimalist approach to Facebook posting due to the nature of the company’s work. “Some businesses are less exciting than others. Some companies solve burning problems but are not fun to be around when someone has no related issues. We don’t even expect our satisfied clients to follow us on social media as that would remind them of the problem we solved for them.,” Luca says.
What does this mean for the company’s posting strategy? “So we don’t need and don’t want to appear on people’s radars constantly. At the same time, we know that many would start searching for services like ours on social media. We make 2-3 posts per month just as proof of existence—so that people know we’re open and can be reached via social media if they prefer,” Luca concludes.
Luca’s strategy shows how much your ideal posting schedule can rely on your industry and audience. Consider how you want to expose your business to your followers and how often would be ideal.
When we consulted Matt Bigach of We Buy Houses 4 Cash about the minimum times a business should post on Facebook every month, Bigach said, “According to my personal experience, a company should not post less than a minimum of four posts every month. Otherwise, your audience will lose interest in your brand and move on to a competitor that appears more on their feeds.”
On the other hand, Christa Reed from Job Searcher recommended a minimum of two to four times a week while discouraging extra high frequencies like twice a day.
Recommended Reading: Facebook Ads Frequency Guide: How Companies Determine the Optimal Frequency Caps to Maximize Results on Each Retargeting Campaign
The median number of posts the 389 small businesses in our Instagram Business Page Benchmarks for SMBs benchmark group posted in January 2023 was 11. If you’ve been paying attention, the numbers for each platform haven’t been radically different. Each platform’s benchmark group median equaled a posting frequency of about two to three times a week.
Viewing benchmark data can be enlightening, but seeing where your company’s efforts rank against those benchmarks can be game-changing.
Browse Databox’s open Benchmark Groups and join ones relevant to your business to get free and instant performance benchmarks.
Businesses that answered our survey questions on idea posting schedules and minimums also had a wide spectrum of answers, but they mainly valued consistency and quality.
Captolia Eaton of Captolia Online focuses on value over a specific schedule, and that approach resonates with her followers. “I recommend taking up lots of space on Instagram – and trusting that your dream customers LOVE to hear from you. You are someone’s favorite account to follow, and each post is a blessing to their feed. Creating for the folks who love your brand and business and showing up for them as much as you like, with content that is genuinely valuable, is more meaningful, and has better results than worrying about the exact right amount of posts. Human over algorithms always. Some days I post five times a day, sometimes I skip a day or a week. I show up with value when I feel I have something to share, and my audience loves and engages with everything I post!”
Milkwhale’s Andre Oentoro has a similar viewpoint on quality with a more relaxed idea of frequency: “I think three to five times a week is enough. Instagram’s algorithm doesn’t rely on how much your post anymore. In fact, it relies more on user engagement. So, instead of focusing on quantity, try to focus more on your followers and how they can interact more with your posts. When you have increased engagement, the chances of you appearing on feeds are much higher.”
When it comes to a minimum posting schedule, Rhys Charles of Mower On the Lawn suggests a daily cadence. “As a general guideline, small businesses should aim to post at least once per day, or at least 30 times per month on Instagram. Posting once per day helps to keep your brand top of mind and increase engagement with your followers. It also helps to increase the visibility of your posts, as the Instagram algorithm favors accounts that post regularly. Additionally, posting at least 30 times per month allows small businesses to share more of their products and services, which can help to attract new customers and increase sales,” Charles says.
At Diamond Real Estate Group, Matthew Martinez sets a posting minimum based on consistency: “I believe that a minimum of at least two to three posts per week is necessary for a company on the platform. This frequency ensures that the company stays visible and top of mind to their followers, while also providing value and consistent engagement. Consistency is crucial in building a following and engagement on Instagram. A company that posts two to three times a week is more likely to be seen by its target audience and to be seen as a reliable and active brand.”
Martinez continues, “Additionally, by posting on a regular basis, a company can foster engagement with its followers and build relationships with its target audience. In my experience, I have found that posting at least two to three times per week has been a minimum requirement for my business to maintain a steady engagement and growth. Furthermore, having a regular posting schedule will help your business to have a better plan on how to distribute its content and also to be more efficient by having a plan for the week.”
Recommended Reading: Ideal Post Frequency on Instagram: 20+ Expert Tips on How to Generate Engagement and Growth
The answer to the question “how often should I post on social media?” comes with data and time. Consider the advice you read today carefully, then set a manageable schedule based on our benchmarks. A few months later, look for changes in your engagement statistics and adjust your schedule to maintain a positive trend.
Databox is a great tool for this strategy. It collects data from your social media platforms in one place so you can analyze trends over time. Our dashboard templates help you set up your analytics and understand how different analytics work together. And our Benchmark Groups enable you to see where you stand against others and set goals according to standards within your industry.
We recommend getting started by immediately comparing your social media marketing performance in the following Benchmark Groups (for free):
Then proceed to set the goals you want to reach in a Databox dashboard. Sounds like too much work? Reach out to our Customer Success team via chat and we will set everything up for you, at no cost.
Sign up today to see how easy it is to track performance (from anywhere), identify growth opportunities, develop effective competitive strategies, and much more within just one tool!
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Melissa King is a freelance writer who helps B2B SaaS companies spread the word about their products through engaging content. Outside of the content marketing world, she writes about video games. Check out her work at melissakingfreelance.com.
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