What is the perfect number of Facebook posts per month

Without knowing anything more about the company in question? Two posts per month is a perfectly reasonable number of posts.

Before you choose to stone me, because you know of multiple examples where this answer is wrong, read this blog post till the end.

For example, if it’s a diner that has a different lunch special every day – of course it would make sense to post the menu every day. Or a movie theatre – every time when a new movie comes out, or old one is no longer shown, you would adjust the repertoire and post the updated version. Every company might have its own approach to posting, which depends on the content that “comes organically” on its own.

This blog post is more about the companies for which the content doesn’t come naturally. For example, a vegan burger place – because the same food on different backgrounds might only seem interesting until a point.

In general, creating new posts on a regular basis for Facebook/Instagram and other platforms is a thing that everyone does, right? Let’s take a look at any large company, whose target audience is the consumer, and there it is – a new (or even multiple) daily post on their Facebook page. The thing that not everyone thinks of – these companies usually spend less than 5% of their total marketing budget on coming up with the idea for the post, preparing it and posting it. These 5% are with a margin for error – I would like to assume that for telecommunication companies this share might even be below 1%.

At the same time, one way or another I receive requests (sometimes it’s an invite to participate in a tender, other times – simply to check the pricing) to prepare a cost estimate for a campaign set up and preparing and posting of, for example, 10 posts per month. These emails usually come from small and medium sized companies, whose total planned marketing budgets per month are around a couple thousand euros.

The goal of every company is to make money.

There are sales campaigns, brand campaigns, special offer campaigns and other types of campaigns. Social media content, in which you vote with emojis for what kind of a cookie you are, doesn’t fit in any of these campaign types. Social media “experts” will try to tell you breathlessly that finding out your cookie type actually is like merging all of the aforementioned campaigns into one, but we all know – jack of all trades, master of none.

Circling back to marketing budgets and percentages – daily content for social media for a small/medium sized company is the least effective investment in digital marketing.

Let’s imagine a small company with a monthly marketing budget of €3000. Ten posts per month created by an agency will cost around €500. In addition, each of these posts should also be boosted (so for all 10 of these posts another €500 for advertising), otherwise there is no point in making these posts if no one sees them – that’s already €1000. Agency fee probably will be another €500 or even more for managing the campaigns. How much is left for brand, sales and other campaign types that would drive traffic to website with conversions that can be monitored and accounted for? €1500 or, in other words, just 50% of the marketing budget.

The approach of ten (or fifteen – doesn’t really matter) posts per month has multiple faults – the most noticeable one being the deterioration of quality. It’s impossible to create 10 high quality posts, that would bring more value than some static noise, on a monthly basis.

From the perspective of numbers – advertising 10 posts per month for €50 each, every post will reach, let’s say, 25’000 people, but, since the audience for these post boosts won’t change much, the people reached will overlap and the posts will be mostly seen by the same people. Which means that the total reach might just be around 50’000 people.

At the same time, if we create just 2 posts and boost them for €250 each – each post can easily reach over 100’000 people. Additional benefit – since we don’t have to create the other 8 posts, we can move the resources that were not wasted to the advertising budget, or use them to make a better quality posts that will be well above “Monday motivation” level of posts.

A visualization to accentuate how epic 2 quality posts, that are being boosted, look versus 10 “so so” posts. ⬇️

*The area of the circles in the visualization is made to match the exact size of the previously mentioned audiences

One of the benefits of writing a blog – you can always learn something new. For example, today I learned that you can make GIFs, like this one, on Keynote.

Māris

EDIT 2022-10-17:

P.S. I took this picture from LinkedIn where it was used as an illustration to make a different case, but it fits perfectly to what was expressed here.