To stay present in the minds of your target audience, you need to keep them happy with interesting, funny or exciting posts on a regular basis. If you post too infrequently, people will forget about you and your competitors will have the opportunity to capture their interest. But how frequent is frequent enough?
We evaluated 1.5 million Facebook and 700,000 Instagram profiles to find the benchmarks for posting frequency. You can use them to rank yourself and identify whether you’re posting more or less compared to similarly sized profiles. Then you’ll know if you should stick with the same approach or optimize your content output.
Businesses Post Far More Frequently on Facebook than on Instagram
The post frequency tells you how many posts a profile publishes per day. This includes all feed posts, but not stories, live videos, reels or suchlike.
Taking a first look at the analysis, it becomes apparent that the average post frequency on both Facebook and Instagram increases with the size of the profile. While profiles with fewer than a thousand followers have a posting frequency of 0.28 posts per day on Instagram and 0.33 posts per day on Facebook, the gap between the networks widens as the number of followers increases. Profiles between a thousand and ten thousand followers post 0.42 times per day on Instagram and 0.56 on Facebook. Within the next category, there are 0.63 posts per day on Instagram and even 1.24 posts on Facebook. Profiles between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand followers publish an average of 1.0 posts per day on Instagram and 2.77 posts per day on Facebook. Profiles with over five hundred thousand followers post 5.04 posts per day on Facebook, almost four times more often than Instagram profiles of the same size, with just 1.27 posts per day.
Put Your Own Profile to the Test and Determine and Optimize Your Post Frequency
Top Profiles Post Thirteen Times a Day on Facebook
In addition to the averages, let’s look at the top 10 values, i.e. the number of posts per day made by profiles that are among the top 10% most frequent posters. It turns out that you have to post at least twice as often as the average if you want to keep up with the most diligent.
From a profile size of between ten and one hundred thousand followers at the latest, this is no longer sufficient. The top 10 value of 2.68 posts per day is more than twice as high as the average of 1.24 posts per day. For profiles with between one hundred and five hundred thousand followers, the post frequency of the top 10 percent, at 6.89 posts, is already two and a half times higher than the average. In the highest category, 13.46 posts per day are even 2.67 times more frequent than the average.
Top Profiles Post Three Times a Day on Instagram
On Instagram, the values are significantly lower than on Facebook, yet, here you also have to post twice as many posts to stand out from the average and be among the most diligent.
Put Your Own Profile to the Test and Determine and Optimize Your Post Frequency
Conclusion
On Facebook, far more posts are published per day on average than on Instagram. As the number of followers increases, this difference becomes even more substantial. The benchmarks clearly show that the posting strategy should be specifically adapted for each network. On Facebook, for example, posts are far more short-lived due to little use of hashtags than on Instagram, where they can be found via the discovery page or hashtag search long after they are published. You should counteract this rapidly dying attention by increasing post frequency. So if your goal is to permanently capture the attention of your audience on Facebook and Instagram, be sure to look at how high your post frequency is and compare it to these benchmarks. If you’re below the benchmark, you should try to increase your output of high-quality content.
Now it’s your turn!
How to determine the post frequency of your Facebook and Instagram profiles and optimize your posting strategy? Use the free Performance Test to discover the strengths and weaknesses of your Instagram and Facebook profiles and follow all the tips step by step to optimize your content and increase your output. Evaluate performance now!
