Episode 2: How Often Should you Post to Social Media

It's hard to know how much is too much and how little is too little when it comes to social media frequency. I wish there was a perfect formula to determine how often you should be posting to social media. There just isn't, because all businesses are different. There are a number of things to consider. In this episode, I talk about those things so you can figure out what works best for you and your business. 

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Full Transcript of this Episode:

Welcome back! If you are just now tuning in, I'm so glad you're here. This is the intro series of this brand new podcast that I am launching all about helping you do your own marketing. Today, I'm answering a question in my own special way. And the question is, “how often should I be posting to social media?” I get this question all the time. And here's the deal — my answer? — probably going to leave you a little pissed off. Because it depends! I say this all the time! So much about marketing, social media…  is very, very, very much circumstantial and it's unique, based on you, your business, your audience. There is no perfect formula. And this question is, like, one of the perfect ones where that answer totally fits. But before you jump off this podcast, thinking you're not going to get anything, I'm going to help you answer this question for yourself. 

Okay, so as I said, it depends. And that is because, again, there are just too many factors that come into play. Now, I'm going to give you some pretty decent, you know, rule of thumb guidelines. But really, I need to make sure you understand first, two very important requirements that come into play with answering this question. The first requirement is that you have to approach your social media with a mindset that you are not going to post just to post. And what I mean by that is, you know, you've gotten there, and you're like, “Oh, my gosh, I haven't posted anything in like, four weeks or three weeks,” or “Oh, my gosh, I haven't, I haven't been doing anything!” And all of a sudden, you rush around, and you just start creating content, you start, you know, making posts just to make posts. Or, you're just kind of following, you know, you're seeing what other people are doing, and you're just posting out there, you know, aimlessly with no real strategy, your goal just because you're just trying to keep your content flooded. Do not post just to post. I want every single one of your posts on social media to have a reason. There needs to be a reason that it exists. Like, if you can't answer that question, then you shouldn't post it. Like, I always tell people, one of the, like, good questions to ask yourself before you hit publish is “why does anyone care about this?” And if you really can't come up with anything at all, then you shouldn't post it, period. Now, here's the deal. I want you to remember that your posts need to always offer value, okay? So, again, this goes into, don't just post to post because we need to make sure there's an objective, but we also want to be offering value. And when we're just aimlessly, randomly posting crap all the time, it's not valuable. And people can usually see through that you're just creating noise in the social media feed. We don't want to create noise in the social media feed, we want to create value. And so think of it this way, one easy way to make sure you're doing this correctly is that 80 percent, at least 80 percent, of your content MUST offer value in some way, shape, or form without selling anything. You cannot promote anything, you can't be talking about your services or your products. You need to be offering value. And so you need to be helpful. So thinking about what your audience cares about, what they, you know, need help with... And your products and services could be a specific, you know, answer to their problems, but I need you to go about it in a more indirect way. So I want you to be educational, I want you to help them, I want you to help them uncover their challenges. You know, for example, this podcast right now, I am not selling you anything, I am helping you answer a question. I'm helping you come up with a strategy on creating some frequency targets for your social media. I don't have anything to sell you about that, okay? So I'm just here to help you because that is truly what you need and that's what I want to do. So, 80 percent of your content needs to offer this value without selling anything at all. Okay? And that is a minimum requirement. Okay. The second thing I need you to make sure that you truly understand when it comes to thinking about the frequency is that it kind of goes along with what I just said… You need to have enough frequency and enough content so that you're not, like, okay, basically, let me just say it this way — do not post only when you have something to sell or brag about, okay? This is something I see businesses do all the time, and if you've done it, and you're guilty, just do me a favor right now… raise your hand and say, “I'm guilty. I've done it.” But then also say, “I'm not going to do it anymore,” okay? Now you're good. We're good, right? Okay, let's move on. So what this means is I see businesses all the time where they are very inactive on social media, they really don't post much at all, except when they need to hire somebody, or when they have a big sale going on, or when business is down and they need to offer some sort of crazy promotion, or when they have something to brag about, like, you know, somebody got an award or who knows what, right? I do not want to go to your business page and only see you talking about yourself or only see you trying to use social media when you need something. Your social media is a way for you to offer this value and to help people. So those posts are perfectly okay, as long as you're offering consistent, regular, valuable content. So back to that 80 percent... 20 percent of your content can be kind of about you and what you need and what you want people to do, but 80 percent of it needs to have nothing to do with that stuff. Because here's what's going to happen — if I only see content from you when you're bragging about yourself, well, I mean, I don't even really need to describe how that makes me feel about you as a business. I mean, we want more from you, we need more from you in order to trust you and to want to come and maybe do business with you. So, two things: don't post just to post and, dear God, do not only post when you have something to sell or brag about, okay? You've got to have some regular content in between. Again, this podcast, I cannot wait to use this podcast to go into so much detail about helping you come up with this content strategy where you're going to be offering so much value, that you're going to be gaining followers, you're going to be getting engagement, people are going to get to know you and they're going to be able to decide whether or not they want to do business with you. You're going to feel great and empowered about the content you're putting out there. So many great episodes to come, I'm so excited to be able to use this podcast as another way to help educate you on that. 

Today, we're talking about social media frequency, because the question we're answering is, “How often should I be posting on social media?” So now we've got those kind of foundational things out of the way, and we're not going to just post to post and we're going to make sure that we have valuable content sprinkled throughout so that when we do have something to brag about, it fits where it belongs. So again, I mentioned in the beginning, there is really no formula for you to have, like, there's no like, “Hey, for Facebook, it needs to be this many posts per day, this time of day. And for Twitter, it needs to be this many posts per day. And this time, of day…” There is no formula! Okay? So, but I'm going to give you a good rule of thumb, okay? So here's what you want to try to do. Really, ideally, you need to decide what it's going to be and then you need to stick with it and be consistent. I want you to be regular with your content. And what regular means is, it could be once a week, it could be you post every Thursday, and you do a video every Thursday. Or it could be you post Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday morning. It just needs to be consistent, it needs to be somewhat regular. It could be that you just kind of post, you know, twice a week. It could be the post every single day. It could be that you post twice a day. It just needs to be regular. I don't want it to be one week, it's one post and the next week, it's eight posts, and then the next week, it's no posts, and then the next week, it's 20 posts. That does not work, okay? We need to be fairly regular. Now, you don't have to be super rigid, where you're like, well, Tuesday, this amazing thing just happened, but I've been posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and today's Tuesday. No, go ahead and post, that's fine. If you've got stuff that needs to be said or shared, I want you to share it. It's okay to have, you know, a week that might be a little bit of an outlier, especially if you have, like, an event going on, you're naturally going to be posting a little bit more. That is completely okay.  As long as you're sticking with this regular, kind of schedule, okay? So, what we're getting at here is that I want you to decide how often you're going to be creating content, and then I want you to stick with it for a while. Knowing that you can break your own rule every once in a while, that's completely fine, okay? But you can't have, like, one week is, you know, like I said, hardly anything and then the next week… you just can't be all over the place. Stick with it and go for it… Create a goal and go for it. Now, how do you decide how often you're going to, you know, kind of create content? What is that goal going to be for you? There's a few things you can ask yourself to kind of come up with your own goal. So, one, you need to ask yourself how much time can you actually commit to being active on social media. And, what I mean by being active is that, you know, you're going to be creating, you're going to be planning your content, you're going to be creating visuals, you might be recording videos, you're going to need to be publishing it, and then you need to make sure that you also are keeping in mind that you need to be responding to stuff. Because when people are commenting, you need to be able to respond to that. And the next episode actually is all about how to be social on social media, so I'm going to take a deeper dive into some of that. But again, the question you need to ask yourself is how much time can you actually commit to being active on social media? Now, one way that you can save some time is by working in batches, and so this would be planning your content… So maybe you sit down on Monday morning, and you plan the entire week's content. Or it could be you sit down, you know, like for an entire day, and you plan the entire month's content. And you literally sit down, you come up with all the ideas, you create the visuals, and you just, you have it all ready to go and drafted. That's a very efficient way to come up with your content, which is actually going to allow you to come up with more content. It's going to allow you to have more time to do more. So, if you can kind of insert that into your process, like a planning process, and working in batches, well then you can be creating more content. But again, make sure your content’s always valuable. So here's the deal, I want you to think about what you can do, what you can commit to, and I want you to pick something and I want you to go for it, okay?

Do not be an overachiever here. Do not sit there and say, “I'm going to create three posts per day” like, especially if you're just kind of starting out or if you're kind of re-engaging, like, you've been very inconsistent and now you want to be consistent… Let's start fairly small, and let's work our way toward something else. Because the other thing that's going to happen is that as we create this consistency, you're going to, you know, increase your engagement, and you're going to be able to get feedback… you're going to start to understand and have a better understanding of what's working and what's not working. And then you're gonna be able to tweak. So here's what I want you to do, I want you to decide how often you're going to post to your channels. And then I want you to write that down as your goal. And I want you to do that for an entire month as a way to kind of see how it goes. At the end of this month, you're not going to pay attention to results or, you know, engagement so much...  you're going to pay more attention to your own internal process. How did that go for you? Do you think you could do more? Do you think maybe it was a little challenging? Where do you need to improve your process to make it better? Do you think that you were able to come up with valuable content in your planning processes? So then, I want you to stick with it again for another month, making some adjustments, maybe, to your process. But after that second month, I want you to start to pay attention to “Okay, what's working? What's not working? Now I might start to think about my frequency. Maybe I can increase my frequency now. Maybe, this just is really, really challenging and I need to actually reduce my frequency a little bit. So, that's how I want you to approach kind of getting into some consistency. I want you to go about this and I want you to assess every month, and I want you to think about “What's working in my process? What do I need to change so that I can make this easier and better?” And then also, “What kind of results am I getting? Am I getting engagement? Are people commenting? Are people answering the question? Am I seeing some activity here? And, if I am, what kind of posts am I seeing activity on?” And then I want you to think about how you can use that information and make adjustments to the types of content that you're creating. So, again, no simple, easy formula, you know, calculated answer. There just is no perfect, like, rule of thumb formula, because everybody's different! I just want you to decide what you're going to do, and I want you to stick with it. And then I want you to assess it, and I want you to improve it, and I want you to make it better, and I want you to strive for consistency. That is what I want you to do. And also remember the two very important rules: We're not going to post just to post. We’re always going to offer value. So we need to be methodical in our content. And then lastly, because of that, we're not going to just post only when we have something to sell or something to brag about. We're going to have value in our content at all times. And again, this podcast is going to be so much about, future episodes are going to be so much about how we do that, how we create a content strategy that works, how we offer value, how we get outside of our own little box of trying to sell something or get people to do something for us, and how we can use social media to do things for our audience and offer that guidance for them. So that's what I got. So, coming up next, we are going to talk about how to be social on social media. I hope you tune in!