Is there such a thing as over-posting?

One of the worst things you can do I is overwhelm your audience with information. It may feel like you’re the only one posting. But it may be because you’re the only one posting. It’s tempting to break the silence in your online community by posting — a lot. Over-posting is a mistake. Try to keep it at a steady pace. Growing your online community is a marathon, not a sprint. 

What is over-posting?

Simply stated over-posting is the practice of posting too frequently for the tolerance of your audience. It can also mean that one person in your online community posts too often. Every social media platform has a different tolerance. 

Your PeepSo community probably has a similar tolerance to Facebook Pages. For that, I’d recommend once a day per person. Test. Check your data. How often are people reading your posts? What does Google Analytics say?

The metric that should matter most for an online community, however, should be engagement. How many people are entering into conversations on those posts? What is the sentiment of the comments? That’s a bit more difficult to measure which is why having good community managers is vital. 

Why is over-posting bad?

If more is good, more is better. We obsess over more. More posts, more likes, more fans. But more can be bad while growing your online community. You need just enough. You want people to be able to read posts and take part in the conversation. 

You will lose members if you post too often, especially if the posts are not interesting to them.

Our HubSpot data also shows a negative impact from over-posting. Our client’s web traffic from Facebook is at the lowest it’s been in over two years, despite having nearly six times as many pages fans as he did two years ago.

ClearPivot

How often should I post?

How often should you post in your online community? I’d say about once a day. But, the larger the community, the bigger the tolerance. Also, ensuring community managers reply and respond to comments and threads makes a huge difference.

Sendible suggests posting online should aim for consistency rather than frequency. That’s completely fair. We agree with that statement but are always curious about what works for your community.

SocialMediaToday did a study in 2018 about Instagram posting versus engagement. High-performing brands posted 4 times a day but had over 16% in engagement.

25% of respondents cited ‘Posting too much’ as something that provokes them to unfollow a brand, however this comes well behind product relevance (44.5%) and brand interest (42%), implying that these factors take precedence over posting rate.

SocialMediaToday

Grow Your Community Your Way

Growing your community takes work. Test your frequency and consistency. You have all the tools you need to engage your community. Let us know what works best for your community in the comments. We want to learn from you, too!

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Brought to you by Bridget Willard

Marketing Consultant & Strategic Partner. Keynote Speaker. Author. CEO. I’d love to train your team how to effectively use social media.