When and how often should brands post on social media? Is this the final answer? #DigitalSense

There are endless articles written on this topic and so it’s fair to ask why I’m throwing another one out there - but the good news is I’m hoping this will be the last one that ever needs to be written and we can all get on with our lives, with marketing & selling products, and with tackling fundamental inequalities in our industry.

My last article was a deep dive into media frequency, this may not seem like the hot juicy topic that every social media manager should dive into yet somehow it really is. TL;DR reach is essential to effective marketing and one of the best ways of maximising reach is to minimise frequency. Avoid talking to the same people all the time and focus your efforts on making sure a much bigger audience hears from you at least some of the time.

If you’re wedded to organic social, stuck on the treadmill of regular content updates and real time postings this should be a massive red alert for you. If you think the big battle in social media is against an algorithm that stops people seeing your posts then doubly so. Whatever case you build for the stand out exceptions of earned media, or the large total impacts you can amass over a period or organic social, you cannot escape the fact that you are almost by definition driving exceptionally high frequency to a relatively small audience. You’re engaging in a battle to reach an extra couple % of your audience when the meaningful reach you need is 10,000% of them. Brands grow by reaching new light buyers.

If your media agency planned your media this way you would fire them, we do everything possible to manage frequency, maximise reach and spread on air continuity. If your marketing strategy team proposed your marketing focus was all about super high frequency, you would buy them a copy of ‘How Brands Grow’. Yet for some reason in the world of social media the decade-long response to this has been to double down on trying to cleverly beat the system: Jump on the right hashtag, post at the right time, post about the trending thing, force engagement on your content to get more people seeing it, and so the list goes on. Stop it.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not talking about customer service posts here, and I will acknowledge value in responding to your customers if/when they talk to you. This is about pushing content out there into the void and just hoping it does something for your business. You can try and carve out B2B exceptions too where there is a more interested and smaller audience, but it's still an audience you can reach more effectively with tightly controlled paid media.

Ok then, so how often do I need to post and when should I post on social media?

So... you CAN post from your Twitter account a few times a day and by adding up followers, retweets etc you can start producing some mildly decent total impression numbers (or in many cases ‘opportunities to see’ but that’s another story).

If you then look at how many tweets this reach is built across though, and the high probability that a small percentage of your followers are the most active and likely to be seeing most of it, you end up with plans which reach a moderately small number of people at an awfully high frequency. Sure, you can keep this up all year round at relatively little cost but it’s still close to the opposite of a good media plan so quite possibly a waste of everyone’s time.

It often upsets the social media industry when you start making this point, but it should be a huge weight off your shoulders. Rather than needing to churn out endless content and responsive updates you can focus on making much better and more impactful comms to share less frequently - after all any amount of frequency is pointless if the content doesn’t deliver.

But surely posting at the ‘right’ time improves my reach? I heard for Tik Tok it’s 2pm on Tuesdays?

The only way to drive guaranteed reach with controlled frequency across social channels is through paid media. Paid is not the ‘demon’ tax that was introduced to stop us speaking to our fans, it was the revolutionary opportunity to talk to millions of people across these platforms. You should shape your content based on your meaningful media approach and when YOU have something worth putting the resources behind to say. Tik Tok, like many new platforms, is having a moment where there are some opportunities for (largely cool) brands to cut through, or like any platform use influencers who do drive genuine reach, but this will probably pass. Their paid media products are scaling rapidly and already offer far more opportunity to marketers than having your own profile would in 90% of cases. Even so their unique discovery algorithm does play by different rules, which means that your reach and impact is often less immediate and much less related to when you first post.

When you run through paid media your adverts are typically served over several days and exactly when you post is entirely irrelevant, in fact you should probably set them up and get them loaded into the system days or weeks in advance. If you have a particularly timely message you can limit this and even try and focus on day parts etc, but it would be the exception to gain from that optimisation. Any article you ever read by someone telling you how to squeeze a few extra percentage points out of earned media through clever tricks, timing hacks or engagement is a pointless distraction. Stop reading them. Stop writing them!

I have some industry friends who are about to wade in here with their Burger King and other examples, but I’ve got you covered. I’m not saying ‘earned media’ doesn’t exist, I’m not saying PR isn’t a powerful thing, I'm not saying influencers aren't ways of finding some reach, I’m not even saying that a clever post couldn’t be the catalyst for all that... but I am saying that casually pushing out organic content as a regular day to day strategy is a waste of your effort, and shows that you don’t value your own time or content. We know even big hitters like Oreo paint a different picture to the one in the headlines - a great PR campaign, but not an endorsement for organic reach.

Even as a small business a £5 investment in media behind a key post will deliver more than hours of slaving on the keyboard, and honestly you are worth more than that. If you have really specifically identifable customers you can directly engage than fair enough, but if you want to 'build' a profile then promote some posts and get started at scale. Big businesses? Come on, if your consumers are on social and it fits their purchase journey then get on board with scale, if you’re doing it because you ‘have’ to give up, you don’t. So many of us get caught in the middle which tends to be a waste of time and effort.

How does that look in practice? 

Well, that usually means reach & frequency buys across broad social audiences with frequency capped at something close to 1/week over the course of the buy (aim slightly higher to deliver that). That means you’ll be landing 1-2 impressions per week on each consumer, and that should be a meaningful number of consumers to impact your business.

Make content when you have media planned to promote it and something to say NEVER because of some false urge that you must post, and people will miss you if you don’t. Don’t spend your life desperately chasing a slightly higher % of organic reach when you really need to speak to 10,000% of your follower audience.

At an absolute max you thus could produce 1-2 pieces of content a week (anything else won’t even make it in front of a consumer) but as we’re optimising to 1+ just one is probably fine. Turns out as well that just like EVERY SINGLE OTHER TOUCH POINT IN EXISTENCE sometimes it does help to show the same creative to a person a few times so that it can ‘wear in’ and they can get familiar with it.

We have this odd obsession with social content ‘wear out’ (though we rarely call it that) where we believe we always need to be posting something new and fresh or people will go mad. There’s no justification for this other than rare moments when content is highly time sensitive, or if you really hit them with high frequency.

Driving 4-5 impressions a month you’re probably fairy safe using the same piece of content, a slight risk it will get a bit annoying and repetitive so why not have two live and mix it up over 2 months? Or run one for a couple of weeks, then the other, then bring an old one back. Either way you look at a social media plan which potentially needs 6-10 pieces of content for an entire year. Perhaps that’s one or two bigger video assets but mainly some cut downs, animations or whatever else delivers your message in the <1 second you often have. I prefer to think of social as a print campaign you can animate out from, rather than a long form TVC you must try and condense.

That’s still a lot more content than you’d make TV ads but it’s shockingly low to most people’s ideas of social. It is however not that different to how many big brands run their socials if you look... many do only post once or twice a month, or maybe even less if they’re sharing this content only as promoted ‘dark’ posts. Yes, some brands post all the time and get some minor benefit from it, in some categories (e.g. fashion) it may be moderately helpful, but the reality should be eye opening. If your brand has a super close fit with a key cultural moment, then by all means respond to it but line up some paid media if you don’t just want to drown in the noise.

And it’s all wonderfully empowering! If your social media team has to make one post a month instead of two a day there’s a much bigger chance they’ll actually make something really good that captures people’s interests, grows your brand and goodness me, maybe even goes ‘viral’ (the paid media you put behind it to get it started will help a lot there).

 There is some point in considering segmentations and personalised targeting within all this, something which isn't really possible organically but certainly is with paid. Could serving slightly different creative or copy to different people deliver better results and justify making more? Quite possibly, though there are real risks in over targeting and narrowing your audience, you'll also be surprised at what people actually like - research has shown that content created for 'other' groups sometimes performs better than what you thought you were crafting especially for your audience.

If you work in performance media and can optimise rapdily to sales, pull in feeds of actual products etc then of course you might be talking about many many more executions, possibly thousands. It's a different ball game, though one where brand building still helps. One great thing about performance marketers? They're almost universally too clever to have been lured in wasting their time posting into the organic void. Learn from them.

OK, so exactly when should I post then?

Who are you and why are you in my class? By the time you have a sophisticated guaranteed reach & frequency approach to digital media the exact time you post is such a small and meaningless factor that every single article which writes at great length about it is just a giant red flag that the person has no idea how marketing even works.

NONE of this takes away the need for good content, in fact it massively amplifies it because your actual key audience is going to start seeing it now (and not just your existing fans). If you want to fight a new battle then fight to earn those consumers' attention - you can pay to get in front of them but you have to make them notice you.

Keep fighting the good fight against the algorithm monster though if you want - #SpoilerAlert it was actually Apple and the smart phone you’re reading this on which made it so hard for you to cut through organically, not any devious algorithm bait and switch.

PS - there's nothing new here I'm afraid, we were doing it wrong 4 years ago too.