How Often Should I Post on Social Media?
It’s the question I hear most often at travel industry conferences, on social media webinars and from travel advisors directly when I am either teaching or consulting.
The knee jerk reaction of so many social media gurus is to offer up some general “statistics” that typically aren’t based on real actionable data. Me? I shoot the question down entirely.
The honest truth is there is no helpful general answer to the question “How often should I post on social?”
The answer is too specific to you, your business, your ideal clients, your sales funnel, for anyone – guru or not – to provide you with useful guidance for your business.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer. In fact, the answer is pretty easy to find without a guru. For example, Facebook has some pretty solid analytics about what FB and Instagram posts are working and what drives engagement at your business page in its FB Insights tool and to a lesser degree on Instagram.
[IMPORTANT NOTE: Instagram insights are only available on the mobile app. Both Insta and FB do not provide insights for personal pages. That’s one of the few drawbacks of using your personal FB profile to generate sales prospects for your travel business. There are other tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social that can provide insights, but it’s going to cost you after the free trial ends.]
Can You Handle the Truth?
The problem for travel advisors is that only 2 out of 5 of you check your FB Insights at least monthly and more than half of you rarely or never check them. [This data is from Travel Business Mastermind’s proprietary 2020-21 survey of 381 travel advisors.]
If you do check your Insights regularly and download them into a tool like Microsoft Excel, you could figure out very quickly what frequency of posting seems to optimally create the behavior you are looking for from your prospects and clients. [This topic is a whole ‘nother blog for another day. Also, if the idea of Excel gives you hives, I can teach you the basics gradually and help you learn to love it. Email me at [email protected].]
Let’s say you are looking to get more people commenting on your posts, stating how much they want to be in the beautiful scene you have crafted in your newsfeed. We could download a significant sample of your post data, throw in some simple formulas to track comments over a statistically valid period of time [e.g. weeks or a month], and see if frequency has an impact on comments.
[My experience has been that frequency without high quality, authentic content doesn’t move the needle. You need BOTH working in tandem.]
We also could see what kind of content generates the behavior [notice I didn’t say likes, loves, laughing emojis, etc.] you need from your followers, and answer the bigger question you’re not asking yourself is “What kind of content generates the engagement I need to market and sell travel?”
Look. Social is a means to an end that is specific to every business. Some businesses have such a great sales funnel outside of social that what they post on Facebook, Instagram, etc., is only there for general awareness, social proof, and signs that you actually exist. If you’re lucky, the occasional post shared by a follower leads to a new sales prospect contacting you.
So, before you start asking the next conference social media expert “How often should I post?” consider downloading your insights and taking the hour or so you and your business deserve to empower yourself to becoming the one true guru uniquely capable of answering that question.
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