Why posting on your social media every day might actually be costing you followers

Contrary to popular belief, posting constantly on your social media pages isn’t always a good thing. While this tactic may work for some people, the reality is that it often doesn’t work for most of us — unless you’re paying for your interaction.

But chances are if you landed here you probably don’t have a budget to do that, so you’re working your butt off to try and grow your online presence organically, which I say is way more rewarding, anyway. Anyone can buy followers, but it takes true talent to be able to gain and continually maintain (and entertain) your audience.

Plus, we have all seen those pages with 1million+ followers and only 200 likes on their posts; that, my friends, is a perfect example of why buying followers doesn’t work — but, that’s also a story for another time.

So you have decided that you want to grow organically (good choice), but how do you find balance in knowing how often and when you should post?

That’s the million-dollar question, and there’s no one correct answer. But there are some guidelines you can use to help figure it out.

When I’m coaching people on how to improve their social media presence, I often tell them that posting inconsistently is a bad thing, and so is posting too often.

While they aren’t surprised to hear the former, they often question me as to why it wouldn’t be beneficial to post more often.

I break it down for them with four simple reasons:

1. You’re not giving your previous posts enough time to gain traction and attention, and generally, the more organic traction it gets the higher it gets bumped by algorithms (win/win).
2. You’re clogging up your follower’s newsfeeds.
3. You’re reminding your followers that you exist, and therefore there’s a higher likelihood they will decide they’re tired of your content and it’s time to #unfollow.
4. The more you post, the more you have to get “wrong.”

It’s important to understand that your follower count will always fluctuate up and down, and there’s no stopping that, but there are several ways you can minimize the down.

Consistency is key.

Being consistent with your posting doesn’t necessarily have to mean scheduling a post every day specifically at 3p.m. It means posting the things you know your followers expect to see from you within a reasonable amount of time, and truth be told, it will take some experimenting with your audience to know what’s going to work best for you personally.

For example, I personally try to post every other day because I have learned that if I post every day, it doesn’t give my previous posts enough time to perform. Additionally, if I post less than every other day, then I lose out on gaining potential new followers because I am being inconsistent and not staying relevant.

Think of it this way, if you sell mugs and you have the top-performing mug post of the day, would you post another photo right after that, potentially pushing it down? What’s that old saying — if it’s not broken don’t break it? Yeah, that. On the flip side, if you have the top post from today and you let it perform for as long as possible before someone else comes in to take your spot, you now have a good excuse to post new content to make yourself relevant again.

Another thing I see way too often from people who are complaining about losing followers is inconsistent types of content.

Let’s go back to the paragraph above. If you are known by the majority of your followers as a mug crafter, when you start posting content about how much you love snuggle time with your bae, your audience is probably going to be confused about 1. why you’re posting this and 2. why they’re still following you — and rightfully so since they likely didn’t follow you to hear about your personal love life.

That doesn’t mean you can’t ever post about your S/O, but maybe add a mug or something relevant into the post before doing so.

Consistency is a two-part problem that must be solved in unison before you can maximize the impact of your content, and thankfully there are so many helpful tools on both Instagram and Facebook (and third-party apps) that you can utilize which will show you when your statistically highest reaction date and times are, which is a great start on knowing when it’s time.

But remember that timing is only half of the solution; think of your audience before you post and you’ll be less likely to lose their attention!

Ask me your marketing questions on IG @datcassdoeee