It’s commonly known that a strong social media presence can be a make-or-break part of entrepreneurial ventures these days. However, even us savvy entrepreneurs aren’t born knowing the rules of Facebook for business!

Trying to find out how often you should post on Facebook using trial and error is likely to take you on a path down the rabbit hole — or at the very least, be an exercise in unnecessary time consumption.

So we thought we’d cover the topic in our blog, giving you everything you need in a quick five minute read. Easy as that!

Why You Should Post

As a small business, social media is invaluable. It’s a great way to build brand awareness, increase your customer base and interact with current customers. This last one is super important — remember that the cost of acquiring a customer is as much as five times that of retaining one.

Ultimately this means you should do what you can to interact with past or current customers!

Small businesses have a great advantage on social media. More often than not, they’re community or individual focused. Facebook is an ideal tool — although it’s used far and wide, Facebook adverts can be designed to draw the attention of those in your local area.

However, there’s little point in posting Facebook adverts aimed at your local community — or at anyone, for that matter — if you can’t back it up with a consistent Facebook presence.

Let’s Cut to the Chase…

Too sporadic and you’ll miss out on the attention of potential customers or clients. Too much and you’ll run the risk of seeming spammy. And let’s be honest — maintaining the online presence of your business takes time and effort. Posting a million times a day is likely to leave you frustrated and burned out!

Generally, an average of one post per day on Facebook is really the absolute maximum you should bother with as an entrepreneur or local business with under 10,000 followers on the social media site. At the very minimum, we’d recommend five posts per month.

And Now — The Maths…

So what’s the logic behind this? We’re not just making it up! As this interesting collection of data from Hubspot shows, the more you post on Facebook the less impact each of those posts has.

You can see that for businesses with less than 10,000 followers, once you start posting more than five times per month, the amount that people click those posts starts falling.

Note that the Y-axis shows clicks per post rather than total clicks — therefore, we shouldn’t assume that 1–5 posts are the optimal amount of posts. Instead, if you posted five times per month, you might expect 500 clicks for your time. If you post ten times per month, you would expect fewer clicks per post (around 85 average) but might reasonably hope for 850 total clicks in total.

Nevertheless, as the amount of posts goes up, the return on your effort diminishes. Not only does posting three or four times a day risk seeming spammy or annoying — it’s also not a smart way to spend your precious time! On the other hand, using an app like Buffer to queue a post every other day for the following month shouldn’t take too long and will get you a worthy return for your efforts.

Ten Thousand Strong

The exception to this is once your follower base exceeds 10,000 people. Once this happens, bigger is better — which is to say that you can maximize the clicks per post and the total number of clicks by posting much more often.

This makes the 10,000 followers mark a suitable milestone for beginning to invest in your social media strategy. Perhaps this is the stage where you consider outsourcing to a freelancer — after all, creating and queuing an excess of 60 posts a month is likely to take up a considerable amount of your time!

However, if you’ve managed to reach the dizzying heights of 10,000 followers, a little investment will be worth it. The proof is in the pudding, as they say — if people are interested in your business and interacting with your posts then you must be doing something right!

But I’m Scared of Spamming!

Whether you choose to post once a day to your five hundred followers or three times a day to ten-thousand-five-hundred followers, you shouldn’t be afraid of spamming.

This is because not every follower will see every post. Instead, you can think of posting frequently as a way of making sure that no-one slips through the net and misses all of your posts. Chances are, each potential customer or client will see your brand a few times a month — not so many times that it’s annoying, but enough that they’re aware of your brand.

That’s a happy medium — and you should definitely be pleased that you’re maximizing your return on effort! Consistency is the name of the game. A social media strategy shouldn’t feel like rocket science — if you can keep a constant flow of relevant posts, you’ll soon build a solid foundation of followers for your business.

Doesn’t take a digital marketing guru to conquer Facebook for business after all!