How Often Should You Post on Social Media?

How often to post on various social media platforms is a complicated topic that comes with a lot of debate and opinions. Most experts agree that as long as you are posting quality content that has value for your followers, how often you post is up to you. There is, however, a range of posts you should fall within, including a minimum to ensure you are maintaining engagement with your audience and a maximum to avoid audience burn-out. Finding the right posting frequency that works for your personal brand will yield better results, not just in your following but also in your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Keeping a close watch on your comments, likes, shares, and overall follower growth are good indicators of how your posting frequency is resonating with your audience. You might also experience fluctuations based on the time of day you post.  Any brand you work with on an affiliate marketing campaign might set their own requirements for when and how often to post content so there’s a lot to consider.

Here are some ideas that might help you develop your own social media posting strategy:

Not every post should be affiliated with a brand or product

Think about the beginnings of your creator journey and how you accumulated followers as you built and refined your channels. In those early stages, affiliate marketing or monetizing your channels were probably not your primary concerns.  The focus was on creating quality content and engaging with your audience to give them more of what they wanted from you. That’s a good philosophy to carry into your affiliate marketing efforts. The most successful campaigns will seamlessly integrate into your posts and should feel almost identical to the content you are known for. Affiliate marketing efforts should not dominate your posts. One post a day, at the right time, is enough to get results so long as it follows the formula of your other content.

Create a content calendar

If you post on several different platforms, it might be smart to create a content calendar so you can see how much you are posting and when. You can use a simple table or spreadsheet with categories for the platform (TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, etc.), date of posts, and a general description of the content to identify if it is an affiliate marketing post or not. This can be very helpful to plan your affiliate marketing posts and will also give you insight about which platform might need more posts and which ones need less.

Pay attention to likes, shares, and comments

Having access to detailed metrics and data is great but you can learn a lot by just watching your account and tracking the engagement in the form of likes, shares, and comments. If you see the likes going down during the day from post to post, it might be a good indicator that you are over-posting. If you are seeing lots of comments and shares, that could mean your followers are hungry for more content. These indicators are easy to track and will give you common-sense guidance to modify your posting frequency.

Different platforms have different algorithms

Each platform is different depending on their algorithm and how they push posts to user’s feeds. For example, TikTok uses the #ForYou feed as a constant source of new content so posting several times a day can keep you near the top. Your success will vary depending on the size of your following as well. On Instagram, Creators with under 1,000 followers should post up to 14 times a week to maximize reach and engagement whereas Creators with over 250k followers might only have to post once a week to get the same impact. This is where a content calendar can be helpful to ensure your posting frequency is optimized by platform.

So how often should you post on social media?

That really depends on you and your ability to create quality content that fits your personal brand. Since no two brands are alike, it comes down to experimentation to find what frequency works best for your social media accounts.

Signing up to be a Creator with Captiv8 will give you access to insights and resources that will help guide you in your research. You can see examples of how frequently other Creators post or you can find in-depth analysis of your own accounts to see who you are reaching, where they are, and when they are most likely to engage with your content.

Captiv8 is the premier creator marketing platform that harnesses the power of AI to connect creators to their favorite brands and allows you to take ownership of your career. With a diverse suite of tools, the creator dashboard helps you construct a unique profile based on your social media background, interests, and past affiliate marketing experience to help you get discovered. Using the creator dashboard’s intuitive workflow, you can join campaigns, manage offers and deadlines, track payments, and streamline the brand approval process. Through the dashboard’s audience insights, you get all the metrics and data necessary to elevate your personal brand and maximize your earning potential.