As we work with Facebook we often end up in a discussion on how much should we post? We often see articles by Facebook gurus claiming that we should wait 3 hours between posts. This stems from the metric that the average life of a post to gathering likes, comments and shares is around 3 hours. Frequency of posts is also an etiquette consideration. Just like a person who 'talks too much' in a conversation you don't want to come off as dominating in the relationship with the 'friends/fans.' You also have to ride the balance of selling and building your brand on Facebook and engaging the audience without coming off with too much 'hype.'
Considering the etiquette, hype factor and the post life there is also another huge factor that we have to consider that that's the traffic level. The average user posts around 1.1 times a day or 36 times a month. So if you have 500 friends and maybe 20 fan pages you end up with 500-600 posts a day. That's probably around 30 posts an hour or one very 2 minutes. Take the peak hours from 7a-10p and you are way above 30 per hour.
I have around 400 people on my personal page and I checked the posts on my news feed in mid-day and there were over 75 posts that were around an hour old. Add 8-10 'sponsored posts' in the feed and then another 20-30 posts that were older (but still seeing enough action in likes, comments, shares and views to push themselves back into the feed) and you can see that even in 1 hour you can find your post is 1 of 100.
Also consider that if you check in on Facebook 6 times a day - every 3 hours your news feed could have 250 to 300 posts on it. Given those facts it would see that only posting every 3 hours is probably not enough for your brand or station to really have any impact unless your posts are all super engaging.
Think about like this. Let's say you have around 250 commercials on your station from 6a-7p would you expect a client who only runs 1 commercial a day to have any impact with their message? Probably not - no one on your sales team would suggest such an schedule because it won't produce any impact. The same frequency issues are there in Facebook posts also.
Facebook is getting more crowded every day. Maybe not with more users but with all the revenue activity on it now that there are stockholders to keep happy there is a lot more on any news feed than there was a few years ago. In the end if you want to have an impact for your brand or personality you have to engage more to keep up.
Of course you have to balance it out. Having a post every hour that 'another 20 minute music marathon is starting now' is a waste and probably won't make news feed anyway, but just getting in 4 posts from 6a-8p will only work if all those posts are 'killers.' You have to have both - a healthy quantity of posts and also have very engaging posts that catch the eyes and interaction with your fans.
Considering the etiquette, hype factor and the post life there is also another huge factor that we have to consider that that's the traffic level. The average user posts around 1.1 times a day or 36 times a month. So if you have 500 friends and maybe 20 fan pages you end up with 500-600 posts a day. That's probably around 30 posts an hour or one very 2 minutes. Take the peak hours from 7a-10p and you are way above 30 per hour.
Also consider that if you check in on Facebook 6 times a day - every 3 hours your news feed could have 250 to 300 posts on it. Given those facts it would see that only posting every 3 hours is probably not enough for your brand or station to really have any impact unless your posts are all super engaging.
Think about like this. Let's say you have around 250 commercials on your station from 6a-7p would you expect a client who only runs 1 commercial a day to have any impact with their message? Probably not - no one on your sales team would suggest such an schedule because it won't produce any impact. The same frequency issues are there in Facebook posts also.
Facebook is getting more crowded every day. Maybe not with more users but with all the revenue activity on it now that there are stockholders to keep happy there is a lot more on any news feed than there was a few years ago. In the end if you want to have an impact for your brand or personality you have to engage more to keep up.
Of course you have to balance it out. Having a post every hour that 'another 20 minute music marathon is starting now' is a waste and probably won't make news feed anyway, but just getting in 4 posts from 6a-8p will only work if all those posts are 'killers.' You have to have both - a healthy quantity of posts and also have very engaging posts that catch the eyes and interaction with your fans.
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