It used to be that the more often you post on the social web, the more likes, followers, and engagement you would get.
But with over 1.1 billion pieces of content being published a day on social media, social networks don’t lack content.
They lack quality content.
To give you context, when we analyzed 5,204,391 social media posts over a 30-day period, 59.41% of them had no engagement.
Now if that percentage carries through at the same rate, that means if 1.1 billion pieces of content are being published daily, over 653 million of them got no likes, no comments, no shares… in essence no engagement.
So just posting content in mass quantity doesn’t help anymore.
Assuming you have quality content, what’s the ideal posting frequency? Or even the length of your content?
Let’s start with content length.
Ideal content length
Before I break down the ideal length, keep in mind it was based on a sample size of 2,384,083 pieces of content.
X
If the content is motivational you should keep your text around 14 to 21 words. But if your content is focused on entertainment, 9 to 35 words performed the best.
For educational content, 173 words long on average performed the best.
Also, I know X says it is a video-first platform, but text on average performed better from the sample we analyzed.
When publishing reels, assuming their focus is entertainment, 11 to 17-second-long videos performed the best.
For educational ones, users preferred videos that were 38 to 51 seconds long.
Now if you are publishing carousels, they should be 7 to 10 slides long. But the key is to use a hook on slide 1 AND slide 2. Just having a hook on slide 1 isn’t enough… the engagement won’t be as high.
Short-form videos should be 40 to 46 seconds long. And along with the short-form video consider using a sentence or two of text-based content that contains a hook.
Long-from videos should be 3 to 4 minutes long. You can go up to 10 minutes long on LinkedIn, but videos that were 3 to 4 minutes long performed better than those that were longer.
As for text, it should be 20 to 38 words long if motivational. But if you are focusing on educational content, 291 words long on average performed the best.
TikTok
If you are making entertaining videos, 18 to 31 seconds long creates the most engagement.
But if your focus is educational content, videos that were 42 to 54 seconds long generated more engagement.
YouTube
Shorts should be 28 to 33 seconds long if entertaining. And 41 to 57 seconds long if educational.
Long-form videos performed the best if they were on average 7 minutes and 9 seconds long.
You can create longer-form videos but we didn’t see engagement go up by much… there were diminishing returns when creating content that is over 20 minutes.
This is the part you won’t like.
We tried looking for patterns on Facebook… we probably would find them if we analyzed a much bigger pool of content… let’s say 10 or 20 million… but on Facebook we didn’t see any real patterns.
It didn’t matter if the content was short, or long… we just couldn’t find a certain length helping drive more engagement.
In general, on Facebook, most content wasn’t getting engagement. It was one of the worst-performing networks (for organic reach).
Now let’s look at posting frequency.
Posting frequency
To figure out the ideal posting frequency we looked at 332,490 social media accounts in the last 30 days.
The results were interesting per network.
X
You should ideally post at least 3 times a day.
See, X is different than most platforms.
Whether your content is amazing or terrible, posting more often doesn’t hurt your overall account’s reach.
So if you post 3 or 4 times a day if not even more… assuming you have the time… you can quickly tell what works on social media and what doesn’t. In other words, you are using X as a testing bed for your content.
You can then use your hits and post them on the remaining social networks as they are a bit more pick on posting frequency.
So when you post on the remaining networks in the list below you’ll want to post only your good stuff.
Post/Reels – 1 to 2 times a day.
Stories – 2 to 4 a day.
Live – at least once a week… ideally 2 or 3 times.
With Instagram, we noticed that if someone posts more than 2 times a day, their reach is affected for the previous content that they published.
The last thing you want to do is not give your content a fair chance.
Post – 1 a day
LinkedIn is similar to Instagram. If you post too often it can hurt the reach of your previously posted content.
For that reason, you should only post once a day.
If you want to post more than once, it’s fine, but try to keep your posts at least 7 hours apart.
TikTok
TikTok wants you to post content, ideally 1 to 3 times a day, but closer to the 3 mark than the 1 mark.
If you don’t have too much time to post on TikTok it hurts your account.
For example, if you post once a week it takes longer for your account to build up momentum and it doesn’t help with your future reach, even if your content is amazing.
But if you post good content a few times a day, not only does it help build up the authority of your account, but you’ll find that your content will generate more views compared to spreading the same content out over larger time windows.
YouTube
You should ideally post 1 short-form video a day (YouTube shorts) and 1 long form a day.
But make sure you don’t post them back-to-back… spread them out by at least 5 hours.
If you can’t post a long-form video each day, it isn’t as big of a deal… try to publish at least once a week worst case.
But for short-form videos, you should try and post one a day.
Similar to the study we did on content length, we couldn’t find a pattern in posting frequency on Facebook.
When someone posted a lot or a little, we didn’t see patterns change much at all in engagement.
I do think there are patterns for Facebook, we just need to analyze more accounts to find them.
Conclusion
Use the above data as a guide.
You don’t have to follow it exactly but use it as a rule of thumb.
And if your content is truly amazing like Mr Beast, it doesn’t matter if you post less frequently or more frequently… the platforms reward you either way.
Amazing content trumps all.
But that is tough for many of us to create, especially if you are creating B2B content.
How often do you post on social media?
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