We’ve all been there: you log into Instagram, start scrolling, and realize your entire feed is dominated with posts by the same person or business, clogging up your ability to see updates from the other people you follow and care about.

On the flip side, we’ve all probably noticed when a person or brand appears to rarely, if ever, post on their social media, and when they do, it comes as a bit of a surprise.

As a social media and marketing consultant for wineries and restaurants, one of the most frequent questions I’m asked about social media is: how often should you post?

Businesses like wineries, wine shops, and restaurants should aim for a happy medium between overwhelming your followers on a daily basis and posting so sporadically that followers and potential customers don’t know what to expect.

I’m not here to give you a hard and fast prescription for how many posts you must share per day or week. You can Google and find those benchmarks – but they are extreme generalizations and therefore may not be helpful to YOUR specific business.

Instead, I’ll share some helpful guidelines below for how to determine the best posting frequency on different social platforms for your unique business and followers based on my experience managing social media for wineries.

First, we’ll start with some very general best practices by platform. This is a baseline for you to use to think about how your audience (and potential customers) might react to a similar posting schedule.

General Social Media Posting Frequency Recommendations

• On Instagram: daily posts are very common and often expected for businesses
  • Any more than this should be saved for when you have REALLY important content to share, as the nature of scrolling through the Instagram app makes it easy to become overwhelmed by too many updates from one account
  • Consistency on Instagram is key because the more regularly you post, the more regularly your community can like and comment on your posts, which the algorithm sees as positive interactions, making it more likely to surface your posts higher in your followers’ feeds the next time they log in.
  • In that vein, posting less than 3 times per week can decrease your overall engagement, making it less likely that your followers will see your posts in their feeds right away when you DO post.
• On Facebook: daily or sometimes 2-3 times daily is very common
  • Daily updates help keep people engaging with your page, and unlike on Instagram, people won’t get annoyed as easily by an extra post here and there per day.
• On Twitter: many Tweets per day are very common (think, up to 10)
  • Twitter is a very fast-moving, conversational platform. If your followers are active on this platform, it’s completely acceptable to post multiple times per day as news and conversations develop.
• On Pinterest: a few times per day is very common
  • Pinning consistently will get your content in front of Pinterest searchers regularly. Since Pinterest is less of a timeline and more of a search tool, you want to make sure that you are consistently creating helpful content for searchers to connect them to your business (hello, wedding venue wineries!)
  • Infrequent pinning will have a harder time gaining traction when people search for keywords related to your business.

Side note: Does this amount of content creation sound intimidating? Wondering what in the world you’re supposed to post about every day? Stay tuned for a future post on this topic, tailored for the wine industry!

So how do you adapt the general rules above for YOUR business?

Factors to Consider When Deciding How Often to Post on Social Media:

• What’s your capacity to create content for social media? How much time do you have to take photos and videos, write captions, and post regularly?
• Which platforms are your potential customers using most? Are they primarily on Facebook? Do your customers spend a lot of time on Instagram? Is it worth your time to Tweet regularly if your ideal customers aren’t using Twitter?
• Do your followers look forward to engaging with your posts? Are they excited to see your updates? Would they be sensitive to daily or more frequent posts?

If you have the time to dedicate to your winery, wine shop, or restaurant’s social media, or the budget to hire someone who does, I recommend posting approximately daily on the platforms that your active followers and potential customers are using most. That doesn’t mean you should never post on other platforms – just that you can devote less time to them and post less frequently!

For my winery clients, this means we’re posting daily on Instagram and Facebook – both super visual platforms that allow us to share our latest wines, dishes, and sales while encouraging engagement from our followers. But we’re less focused on Twitter – because our community spends less time there than other platforms!

This in in stark contrast to the social media accounts I ran in my former nonprofit jobs – where constant conversation and news updates on Twitter were paramount, but Instagram didn’t really help us reach our target audience.

In short: posting frequency is all about knowing your capacity and your audience.

Meaghan Webster is an experienced photographer, marketing manager, and senior communications consultant in Washington, DC. She helps brands, nonprofits, and government clients with everything from social media, to email marketing, websites, and content creation. Learn more about her work at meaghanwebster.com or see her latest updates at instagram.com/meaghanwmarketing.