How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business

Nowadays, it is extremely rare to come across a business that does not have some sort of a social media presence. Social media can help build your brand, increase your engagement and leads, and give your business more credibility.

If you are not active on your social media accounts, potential buyers will most likely choose another business when they are looking for specific products and services. However, if you post too often, you will overwhelm your potential buyers and they will unfollow you.

So how often should you post on your social media accounts?

After an analyzation of studies conducted by numerous companies asking the same question, I am ready to give you that answer.

Facebook:

After Hubspot analyzed Facebook data from over 13,500 of their customers, they found out that only businesses with over 10,000 followers were getting an increase in engagement when posting more than one time per day.
Businesses with less than 10,000 followers received half of their usual engagement rates when posting twice per day.
Companies that post anywhere between 1-5 times a month saw their engagement double.
A good amount to post on Facebook would be either once per day or five times per week. That way you are still getting the necessary information out to your audience, but without overwhelming them.

Twitter:

When you compare Twitter to any other social media site, you will come to realize that it is a “whole other ball game,” so to speak, in terms of how often you should post.
The average lifetime of a tweet is 18 minutes. After that, your followers will have received so many new tweets in their feed that yours will probably get pushed to the very bottom of the feed and fade away into oblivion.
Studies show that in order to increase your Twitter engagement, you should post between 1 and 5 tweets per day. If you want more engagement in general, feel free to tweet as much as you may please.

Instagram:

With Instagram, consistency matters much more than frequency.
If you are posting two pictures per day, your audience will come to expect two posts per day and may engage with you less if you only start posting one post per day.
Smaller businesses normally share one post per day (two at the most), while businesses with a following of 1,000 followers or more can post around three or four times a day without seeing any decrease in regards to their engagement.
Even so, many of the top brands on Instagram only post once per day.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn recommends sharing 20 posts per month.
Bear in mind that LinkedIn is a professional networking site, so the type of content you are posting matters much more than the amount of content you are posting.
My advice would be to make sure all of your posts are business-related and do not post more than once to twice per day.

These nuggets of advice are all derived from research done by big companies; however, just because something works for someone else’s business, it does not always mean it is the best thing for yours. I personally suggest testing many differens tactics and techniques on your business’ social media accounts and using those results to determine what works best for you, but that’s just my two cents.