How Often Should You Post on Facebook? [New Benchmark Data]

How often should you post to your business' Facebook Page?

"It depends." Hmph. Not the definitive answer most people want. 

Truth is, this response isn't wrong, as frustrating as it is. It does depend -- on your followers' age range, interests, Facebook habits, and so on. But that doesn't mean we can't glean some valuable insights on how post frequency affects clickthrough rate.

This frequency discussion becomes all the more important when you look at the current state of competition on the News Feed. When your followers log in to Facebook, they're getting hit with a ton of content. According to Facebook Engineering Manager Lars Backstrom, 1,500 possible stories from friends and Pages like are filtered per day on an average Facebook user's News Feed. And most people don't spend enough time scrolling through to see them all.

So, does that mean posting more frequently will help you reach more people? To help answer this question, we pulled some Facebook data from HubSpot's 13,500+ customers. Let's take a quick look at how the number of monthly Facebook posts our customers published impacted clicks per post. This will give you a frame of reference for how your Facebook posts should perform based on how often you're publishing.

How Does Posting Frequency Affect Clicks Per Post?

The chart below shows how the number of Facebook posts our customers published every month affected the number of indexed clicks on each post. The data is organized by the number of followers a business Page has. When reading this graph, keep in mind that the Y-axis represents clicks per post, not clicks in total.

We found that organizations with more Facebook followers tend to get more interaction with each of their posts. Pages with over 10,000 followers were the only ones for whom posting more often increased the number of clicks per post. For business Pages with 10,001+ followers, clicks per post peaked at between 31 - 60 posts per month. When these companies posted more than 61 times per month, clicks per post didn't increase significantly from when they were posting 1 - 5 times per month. 

For organizations with fewer than 10,000 followers, however, the more often they posted to Facebook, the fewer clicks per post they received. Companies with less than 10,000 followers that post more than 60 times a month receive 60% fewer clicks per post than those companies that post 5 or fewer times a month. There was one, small exception: Pages with between 1 - 200 followers saw a small increase in clicks per post when they posted 61+ times per month compared to the 31 - 60 post bracket. But this is nowhere near the engagement as the 1 - 5 monthly post group.

Takeaways for Marketers

Why does this happen? As the amount of content coming from Pages has increased, so has the competition to appear on consumers' News Feeds. In other words, Facebook posts coming from Pages are becoming less and less visible in that competitive News Feed. The result? A decline in organic reach that leads to fewer clicks per post.

The biggest takeaway here is this: Don't overwhelm your customers with content on Facebook, and be selective about what you're publishing. Rethink your Facebook marketing strategy. Spend more time crafting better Facebook posts, and less time crafting a lot of Facebook posts.

You'll also want to target your content to a specific audience (and maybe even experiment with Facebook's targeting options). People are more likely to click on posts that are relevant to their interests and needs. As my colleague Shannon Johnson wrote, "The goal is no longer to spray and pray -- it's to get as much interaction from a single post as possible."

Have you experimented with the impact of Facebook posting frequency on engagement rate? What have you found? Share with us in the comments below.