How Often Should I Post on Social Media?

From likes to shares to how often you should be posting, social media is a numbers game. Likes and shares show that people find your content interesting, and is fairly straightforward. Your posting schedule, though, is a bit more complex, and there’s a short answer and a long answer.

The short answer: Four to five times per week, per platform.

The long answer: It depends on your resources.

If you have oodles of content and sufficient time, posting three to five times per week is easy. But if you don’t, then stressing over making enough content in the midst of a busy week can make social media more of a hassle than it needs to be.

Your goal should be to make marketing your practice as easy as possible. And that’s our goal, too! Which brings us to our guiding rule.

Prioritize consistency over frequency.

Let’s say you don’t have enough resources to post four to five times per week per platform. Here’s how you determine your true capability.

Guidelines to Determine How Often You Post

• How much content do you have?

• How much time do you have to schedule and post?

• How many platforms are you on?

How Much Content Do You Have?

If you have enough content, then it’s easy to post four to five posts each week. Now you’re likely thinking, how much is enough? If there are approximately four weeks in the month, and you’re posting four times per week, that’s 16 pieces of content.

But let’s say you only have 12 pieces of great content. For a four week month, you’ll post three times a week. This decreased frequency is better than posting five times a week for two weeks, then only twice a week for the next two weeks, because consistency is one of the most important elements of a social media strategy.

This is only one piece of determining your unique number, though. Let’s review the second.

How Much Time Do You Have to Schedule & Post?

You can have masses of incredible content, but not post it all because of another very important resource: time. When determining how much to post, you always need to consider how much time you realistically have. You’re running a practice, you have tests to review and charts to catch up on. You may not have the bandwidth to post four times a week. 

So let’s establish that bandwidth. For one week, monitor how long it takes you to post on each platform you’re on. Can you invest more time? Are you struggling to fit even that time into your busy schedule? 

Use this as a gauge when determining if you can ramp up posting or if you need to keep it as is or even decrease so you can improve the quality or include another platform. Which brings us to our third question.

How Many Platforms Are You On?

Let’s say your patients are on more than one platform. It’s more important to post consistently on each of those platforms instead of posting more frequently on only one. If this is the case, your content can be repurposed for multiple platforms, but you will need more time to schedule and post. 

This concept is called dual content and is one of the best ways to maximize your efficiency. You can use dual content to post more frequently by repurposing an Instagram post for a Facebook post, or vice versa. Just be sure to adjust the formatting as needed, which you can learn more about here.

Using these three guiding questions, you can focus on high-quality content more and stress about posting every day less. For a guided, hands-on approach to creating your ideal social media schedule, check out our Masterclass in Marketing.