The Worst Social Media Advice I Have EVER Heard.

Oh my. I met a lovely gentleman at a recent networking event, and as soon as I mentioned I work with social media, he had a question for me:

“I’ve been told that to be effective on social media, I need to post 80–90 times a day. Is that right?”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

My jaw may have hit the floor. I was genuinely both flabbergasted and actually upset to hear this terrible advice, so much so that I asked for this advisor’s name so that I could hunt them down and bitch slap some sense into them.

Posting 80 to 90 times a DAY is pure insanity, and here’s why:

It will look like spam

Can you honestly say that those 80/90 posts you’re spreading out over a daily basis are actually giving value to your customers/followers? Or are you just posting “Buy Here”, “Check out this product”, “Follow me please” style posts?

If the only thing you are posting is sales-focused content, you will lose followers and customers faster than you can tweet.

People use social media for two things: to be entertained, and to be inspired.

If your content is neither of these things, the only accomplishment these 90 posts will achieve is to lose you followers and to potentially damage your brand’s reputation.

The quality of your posts is much, much more important than the quantity.#

What’s 90 times 20? 1,800 minutes. That’s 30 hours. You literally don’t have enough hours in the day.

Your Social Media Accounts Could Get Disabled

If I see the same type of content posted again, and again, and again, I’m likely to report these posts as spam. If you rack up enough complaints against your account, Facebook/Instagram will disable your account.

It may not be permanant, but can you really afford to be offline and out of touch with your target market for days whilst you argue with the Social Gods that no, you weren’t REALLY spamming people.

You Will Squander Any Good Will

Firstly, gaining followers can be a tough business; I personally decide if I will follow someone in the space of time it takes me to glance at the first six posts in their Instagram grid. So you have about six seconds to convince me that you’re worth following, ie — that you will add value to my feed.

If you’ve managed to convince me to follow you (congratulations, by the way) that doesn’t mean that I only want to see content from you and not the other 2K or so people I follow. I’ve taken a chance on following you. I am gifting you my time.

If you clog up my feed with utter drivel that I don’t find interesting, I will not only unfollow you — I will block you. You will NEVER be able to find me again, and therefore you won’t ever be able to convert me into a paying customer.

You Honestly Don’t Have Time

90 pieces of content every day?! Most people running business accounts will spend an average of 20 minutes per post. This will include creating the graphics/animation that will be the body of your post; editing photo content to look just so, with the best filter; and writing captions is almost as important and time consuming as your actual visual content.

What’s 90 times 20? 1,800 minutes. That’s 30 hours. You literally don’t have enough hours in the day to produce 90 pieces of high quality, non repetitive content.

So, What’s The Answer?

The answer (best said in a French accent with a Gallic shrug) is “it depends.”

This is where your research of your mediums and your target audience really comes in to play. Your people are unlikely to be on every single social media platform. You need to find which is the best medium to actively engage (and that means having conversations, not just using the spray and pray “Buy this now!” method) with your target market.

Then, you need to find out when your target market are active online and on your optimum social media platform. This will be the best time for you to post — when the people you want to reach are actually there.

It sounds simple, and really it is. But you have to put a lot of work in first. You can use analytics tools to determine your best times to post, but you need to give these tools something to work with, which means testing your content.

You will need to initially take a broad approach to your social media marketing, and TEST EVERYTHING. You won’t always know what’s going to work until you try it, but I can confidentally say that posting 80–90 times a day just won’t cut it.