REPORT: How Many Posts per Week Should Facebook Pages Average?

How many times should Facebook pages post in a given week? There is no right answer, but social analytics and reporting firm Locowise did some digging on the subject.

Locowise studied more than 600 pages with a total of more than 250 million likes, and its findings included:

• 31 percent of pages studied posted two to four times per week.
• 25 percent posted once per day.
• 18 percent posted once per week.
• 4 percent posted more than 10 times daily.
• 3 percent posted five to nine times per day.
• Pages that posted once per week or less frequently reached an average of 15 percent of users who liked their pages with each post.
• Those that posted two to four times per week reached nearly 10 percent of their audience.
• Those that posted once daily reached 8.42 percent of their audience.
• Those that posted more than 10 times per day reached only 6.51 percent of their audience.
• Pages that posted one to four times per week saw engagement from 12 percent of users that they reached.
• Those that posted less than once per week saw 10.3 percent engagement.
• Those that posted once per day registered 10.84 percent engagement.

Locowise said in a blog post discussing the results:

The trend we see in this study is that less is more when running a Facebook page and relying on organic reach. If you post once per week or less, you get a decent increase in your organic reach compared with a more frequent posting schedule. It is worth considering how much is too much in terms of the volume of content that you post. Do you actually need to post every promo message that your company has, or should you be more strategic about it and focus on well-planned and engaging content pieces only? If you post more than once per day, the engagement seems to be declining as the page likes become indifferent to your brand messages the more they hear from you.

Your Twitter profile could be a place where you post more frequently, or you could use the interest targeting functionality on your Facebook page in order to post the message to a smaller (but more interested) segment of your audience. Your global Facebook page could focus on the most promising content pieces only. Posting and boosting engaging posts only will also help get more out of your advertising budget, as posts with higher engagement tend to cost less on Facebook advertising.

The alternative is that you could mix up your posting schedule and post more frequently but pick different days and times of the day in order to reach different segments of your audience. Not everyone from your audience visits Facebook every day and not everyone lives in the same time zone, so you could reach a higher number of your total page likes organically overall even though you may see a decreased reach for individual posts.

Page administrators: How many posts do your pages average per week?