How often to post on social media
Post as often as you can sustain on your worst week, not your best one. Every post is a fresh test with a fresh audience, so more posts genuinely does mean more chances. But an account that posts in bursts and then vanishes loses the habit it was building, and habit is what the whole thing runs on. Three a week forever beats seven a week for a fortnight.
Why does the right number keep changing?
Because almost every published answer is selling something. The number is different in every guide you read, it went up again this year, and nobody who prints it has ever seen your calendar.
The mechanism underneath is not in dispute though. Each post is a fresh test with a fresh small audience, so more posts means more tests, which is the honest argument for posting often. And an account that posts on a rhythm keeps an audience that expects it, which is the honest argument for posting steadily. Those two together give you the only rule that survives contact with a real week.
Pick the highest number you can hit on your worst week, then hit it every week. Not your best week. Your worst one.
What is the worst-week number?
Think about the week you had when a client blew up, somebody was ill, and the van needed work. How many posts could you still have put out that week without lying to yourself?
For most people running a business alone, the honest answer is two or three. That feels too low, because the guides all say more, and the guides are written for people whose whole job is posting.
Three a week that never stops beats seven a week for a fortnight followed by silence, and it beats it for a reason that has nothing to do with any algorithm. The person who posts three times a week for a year has made a hundred and fifty posts. The sprinter has made thirty and quit.
Burst, vanish, burst.
This is the single most common shape on a small business account, and it is worth understanding why it performs worse than the same number of posts spread out.
What the burst does
Six posts in two days compete with each other for the same small test audience. Your own followers have a limited appetite, and the second and third post of the day land on people who already watched one today. Each one gets a weaker signal than it would have got alone.
What the silence does
Three weeks later the people who followed you have been handed a thousand other things. Nothing about your account is penalised. It is simply that the habit of watching you has been replaced by a habit of watching somebody else, and habits are the whole game.
Setting a cadence you will actually hold.
Look at the last eight weeks. How many posts went out in your worst one? That number, not the average, is your real capacity.
Take one off it. A cadence you beat feels like winning. A cadence you miss feels like failing, and the feeling is what decides whether you are still doing this in March.
Name the actual days. Tuesday and Thursday is a cadence. Twice a week is a wish, and a wish gets moved to Friday and then to never.
Make them in one sitting if that suits you. Publish them on the days. Making and posting are different jobs and only one of them has to happen on a schedule.
Step four is the one that makes the other three survivable, and it is also where a scheduler earns its keep. Just do not fire the whole batch through one connection at once.
When should you post more?
When you have held the current number for two months without missing, and making the posts has stopped being the hard part. That is the only signal worth acting on.
Raise it by one. Hold that for another month. The people who go from three a week to daily in one jump are back at three a week inside a month, except now they have also decided they are bad at this.
And if a week goes badly, miss it and carry on. A missed week costs you one week. Deciding you have blown it and stopping costs you the year.
About the numbers in other guides
You will find posting frequencies published as facts, often with a decimal point on them, and they move every year. Most trace back to one company's sample of accounts that look nothing like yours, and none of them know what else is in your week.
There is no published number on this page for that reason. The mechanism is real, the number is yours, and the only one that has ever mattered is the one still happening in six months.
Do this today
- Count the posts that went out in your worst week of the last two months. That number minus one is your cadence.
- Write the actual weekday names in your calendar as a repeating event, not a note saying twice a week.
- Block one session to make a batch, and keep publishing on the fixed days rather than the day you made them.
Short answers.
Is it bad to post twice in one day?
Not bad, just less efficient than spreading them out. Two posts in a day compete for the same small test audience, and your own followers have a limited appetite, so the second one starts from a weaker position than it would have had on its own.
What happens if I miss a week?
You lose a week. Nothing is penalised and nothing resets. The damage from a missed week comes entirely from deciding you have blown it and stopping, which costs the year rather than the week.
Should I post at the same time every day?
It helps a little and it is not worth much of your attention. A fixed day is worth far more than a fixed hour, because a day is something you can actually keep.
Does posting more often hurt my reach?
Not directly. What hurts is posting more often than you can do it well, because the quality drop shows up in the test audience and every post after that starts from a worse position.
Where to check this yourself.
Rules on these platforms move, and a guide is a snapshot of the day it was written. When something here matters to a decision you are making, read it at the source first.
Every guide here is free. So is the part of Cosmoose that does it for you.
Two channels, scheduling, and an alert the moment a post fails, with no card. When you want every channel, the repair engine and the rest, it is $49 a month and the founding hundred keep that price.