How often should you be posting to Facebook?

Facebook is in decline.

While the company itself is doing quite well, its user base has shrunk by 15 million in the US since 2017, according to Edison Research. Users 12-years-old to 34-years old saw the biggest decline, with usage down 17% in just two years. Instead, these audiences seem to be migrating toward Instagram and Reddit.

Perhaps as a response, Facebook recently changed their algorithm so that promoted content and “click-bait” are less likely to show up in your feed. Instead, they are hoping to prioritize posts that “spark conversations and meaningful interactions.” They’ve publicly stated that “total time” on Facebook is no longer important to them — what they really care about is “time well spent.”

With all this taken into account, is it still worth posting to Facebook? The answer is yes, of course — Facebook still has 2.41 billion monthly active users worldwide. Still, with a user base that is becoming increasingly older (over the age of 55, specifically), and an average time spent on site becoming shorter, it may be necessary to alter your strategy.

What does that mean? First off, clickbait posts with flashy titles that have garnered lots of likes in the past are less likely to appear in an individual’s news feed. Instead, Facebook prioritizes shares and comments from close friends as the main indicators for how likely a post will appear. Businesses that focus on higher interaction-per-post will likely see a larger reach in their content.

Though it may come as no surprise, Facebook videos generally achieve 65% more interactions per post than images, while images see 105% more interactions than text posts, according to a study based on 105 million Facebook posts. Status posts and links saw the least amount of interactions.

Additionally, to maximize Facebook users’ interactions with their content, the number of times a page should post depends largely on the number of followers they have. Pages with less than 10,000 followers saw a significant decrease in clicks-per-post when posting over a measly 5x a month, with their average clicks-per-post becoming less and less the more often they posted.

For those pages with more than 10,000 followers, they found that users would click on their posts more often when they posted around either 6-15 times a month (once every 2-3 days) or 31-60 times a month (1-2 times a day). Strangely, these numbers decreased significantly when they posted either 16-30 times a month or 61+ times a month.

The message to take away from this data is that content quality is now far more important rather than content quantity: “The goal is no longer to spray and pray — it’s to get as much interaction from a single post as possible.” Average a post around once a day, ask interesting questions, provide real information, or inspire people to take action. If you want your business’s content to show up in more users’ feeds, you need users to comment on it or share it to their own page.

There are strategies to entice this, of course — you could always ask them to share your posts or offer them special services for doing so (39% of Facebook users say that they follow Facebook Business Pages because they want to receive special offers). From personal experience, users tend to share things that seem important or timely, and are more likely to comment on posts from within Facebook Groups.

And if you’re not using Instagram or Reddit, maybe it’s time to start.

Yuki Soga is a Creative Partner at Rung-UP, where he has produced countless videos that have been viewed millions of times.