For this purpose we looked at how the number of posts a page publishes impacts the reach, engagement and negative feedback of the page. We looked at more than 600 Facebook pages with more than 250 million page likes combined for this study. Let’s take a look at the findings.
Social Performance Measurement For Agencies
How Facebook Page Posting Frequency Impacts Reach, Engagement And Negative Feedback
Tina Ahmed posted on 29 April 2015
With the decrease in organic reach of Facebook page posts some community managers are trying to combat the algorithmic changes by posting more frequently. “Will posting more often get my content in front of more of my page likes?”, is the question we wanted to answer in this brief study.
How frequently did the pages post?
31% of pages we looked at posted two to four times per week. This was the most common posting frequency. 25% of pages posted once a day while 18% posted once a week. There were some extreme instances observed with 3% of pages posting between 5 and 9 times a day and 4% of pages posting more than 10 times a day.
Whose posts reached the most of page likes organically?
Pages that posted once a week or fewer reached on average 15% of their page likes per post. Pages that posted two to four times a week reached almost 10% of their audience, while pages that posted once a day reached 8.42%. The organic reach dropped with the increased number of posts, so pages that posted more than 10 times a day only reached 6.51% of their audience on average per post.
Which pages got the most engagement?
Pages that posted one to four times a week achieved engagement from 12% of people that they reached. Pages that posted even less than once a week got 10.30% engagement. Pages that posted once a day got 10.84% engagement. Again the trend was similar as the more posts that the page published the less engagement the posts achieved in general. Pages that posted twice a day achieved 8.86% engagement, pages that posted three to four times per day achieved 6.21% while those that posted five to nine times per day achieved 5.89%. Pages that posted more than ten times a day didn’t follow this trend and engaged 7.66% of people that they reached.
Who got the most negative feedback?
Interestingly enough pages that posted two or more posts a day all got less than 1% negative feedback out of all the people that interacted with them. Pages that posted once a day got 1.27% negative feedback, while pages that posted between one and four times a week got 2%. Pages that posted even less frequently got 1.82% negative feedback as a percentage of all the interactions.
| Posting Frequency | % of Pages | Reach % | Engagement % | Negative % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10+ posts a day | 4% | 6.51% | 7.66% | 0.54% |
| 5-9 posts a day | 3% | 7.88% | 5.89% | 0.44% |
| 3-4 posts a day | 3% | 7.99% | 6.21% | 0.81% |
| 2 posts a day | 7% | 8.58% | 8.86% | 0.99% |
| 1 post a day | 25% | 8.42% | 10.84% | 1.27% |
| 2-4 posts a week | 31% | 9.66% | 12.36% | 2.04% |
| 1 post a week | 18% | 15.88% | 12.86% | 2.00% |
| Less | 9% | 15.15% | 10.30% | 1.82% |
Is less more on Facebook?
The trend we see in this study is that less is more when running a Facebook page and relying on organic reach.
If you post once a week or less you get a decent increase in your organic reach compared to a more frequent posting schedule. It is worth considering how much is too much in terms of the volume of content that you post. Do you actually need to post every promo message that your company has, or should you be more strategic about it and focus on well-planned and engaging content pieces only? If you post more than once a day the engagement seems to be declining as the page likes become indifferent to your brand messages the more they hear from you.
Your Twitter profile could be a place where you post more frequently,
or you could use the interest targeting functionality on your Facebook page in order to post the message to a smaller (but more interested) segment of your audience. Your global Facebook page could focus on the most promising content pieces only. Posting and boosting engaging posts only will also help get more out of your advertising budget, as posts with higher engagement tend to cost less on Facebook advertising.
The alternative is that you could mix up your posting schedule and post more frequently
but pick different days and times of the day in order to reach different segments of your audience. Not everyone from your audience visits Facebook every day and not everyone lives in the same time zone so you could reach a higher number of your total page likes organically overall even though you may see a decreased reach for individual posts. In “Optimise” section of your Locowise Facebook report you can get more insights into the expected reach and engagement depending on day of the week and time of the day you want to post. if you don’t have an account yet, do sign up for a free trial to test it out.
It’s worth looking a bit deeper into these factors. Consider how your posting frequency impacts your stats to figure out if there is something you can do to optimise your activities.
