How Often Should Your Business Publish on Facebook?

You’ve just created your Facebook Business page, and you’ve got a lot to tell the world.

Before you jump into publishing every hour, proceed with caution. We’ve all been bombarded with information overload from one page or another, and you don’t want that to be yours — especially since “unfollow” is an action that Facebook users take without hesitation.

Here are some tips to help you decide how often to publish on your Facebook page.

Get Started with Square Point of Sale.

Point-of-sale software designed to grow with you.

Get started

Decide how much time you can dedicate to managing your Facebook page.

Whether you’re a new business or a seasoned one, you’re likely spread pretty thin already. Thoughtfully designate how much time per week you and your team (if you have help) can afford to spend on the action items that come with publishing and managing your Facebook page posts.

Creating and posting content: As a conservative estimate, this takes one to three hours per post, inclusive of copywriting, editing, and publishing.
Managing post comments, feedback, and messages: You need to monitor responses after publishing posts (especially in the first 72 hours that they’re live) to ensure you’re answering any user questions or comments transparently. Estimate that you’ll collectively spend 5 to 10 hours a week here, depending on post frequency and your follower count.

Base post frequency on each of your content goals.

When you created your page, you set clear goals for what you want it to achieve with all your published content. (If you didn’t, no sweat. It’s not too late to do so with inspiration from the guidelines here to build your Facebook missions and KPIs.) Here’s how each unique goal can correspond to how often you post.

Drive awareness and consideration: If this is your main focus, you want to post content that actively educates users about all the different aspects of your brand. Create two to four quality sets of content pieces per week that each spotlight a different part of what your brand has to offer. Whether or not your followers see all of these posts, they’re learning new things about your business and becoming loyal followers.
Engage your existing Facebook community: Your Facebook followers are already a captive audience, so you have the unique opportunity to engage them to build “brand love” — and get creative with Facebook’s tools while doing so. Two to five times a week, you should publish posts that give brand updates, survey followers with polls about their preferences, share promotions and sweepstakes, or show them behind-the-scenes peeks at your business. If it’s useful to them, they’ll appreciate it and engage with it.
Earn page likes and follows: If your goal is to grow and attract more page followers, you should optimize your organic (non-paid) content for Facebook shares so that users feel compelled to digitally spread the word to their friends, earning more reach for your brand. For this goal, it’s all about quality over quantity when it comes to posts. Aim to create two to three of these posts each month in the form of video, photos, and/or graphics that are hyperfocused on the goal of engaging new potential community members.

If you’re publishing more than you’d post on your personal Facebook page, consider dialing back your frequency.

This seems to be an unspoken golden rule for brand social page managers. It’s not a great user experience if you’re bombarding users with posts. Whether it’s a long-lost high school acquaintance posting every three hours on their personal Facebook page, or a brand page that consistently pushes unwelcome promotional messages, the same rules apply. Reflect on what you think is right for your brand and decide how often is too often for you. Sometimes, less is more.