One of the questions I’ve heard clients ask the most is how often they should post on social media. It was interesting to me to hear the answer explained as being related to the lifespan of a social media post.

It’s something that I hadn’t considered before.  

Whenever something is posted, there is a period of time before it gets lost in the masses of content uploaded every minute. I believe it is very important to have an understanding of how long this period of time is. Having this knowledge could make or break your social media account – as posting too much can make your audience grow bored and unfollow, but posting too little means that your posts don’t get a high reach, making it harder to grow your following.

Lifespan of a Facebook post

When it comes to Facebook, a post has an average life span of 6 hours, but 75% of the impressions happen in the first 2 hours and 30 minutes – meaning it’s worth posting more than once a day as it’s the best way to connect with your audience. But, posting too often can overload your audience making them less likely to interact with your content or even unlike your page. A safe bet is to post between two and four times a day, but make sure you post a good mix of different content.

Lifespan of an Instagram post

It’s very different on Instagram, as a standard Instagram post has the average life span of 48 hours. This means that you should keep an eye on your Instagram posts for a few days after publishing them to see if they get any comments and reply as soon as possible. (Comments on an Instagram post can boost your presence on the explore page as Instagram sees posts with lots of comments as having the potential to become viral. So, on Instagram, posting at least once a day makes sense – but don’t forget to post your stories too!

Lifespan of a Tweet

Twitter is a funny thing as a post only has an average life span of 18 minutes! The recommendation is to post multiple times through the day, at a very basic level try and plan two tweets per day and schedule them ahead. It sounds crazy but tweeting 6-8 times a day makes sense in order to reach as much of your audience as possible!

Lifespan of a LinkedIn post

LinkedIn is similar to Instagram in that (as a general rule) a LinkedIn post also has the average life span of 48 hours. However, don’t be surprised if you see conversations starting to appear in the form of comments on your post a week or so after you have published them! For LinkedIn, to make sure you stay in touch with your connections it’s best to post once a day, every working day.

How can you extend the life of your content?

There are some platforms out there that are built around more long-term engagement. These platforms tend to be used more like search engines. For example Pinterest, rather than short-lived posts, once you have Pinned something, it can be re-pinned by other users and re-discovered days, weeks, months or even years later again, and again.

YouTube is another example of a platform that is used as a search engine and on which content has a longer lifespan. It is slightly different than other social media platforms in that the content has to keep the attention of its audience for longer. The average life span of a YouTube video is around a month, but the best way to keep your audience coming back for more is to post at least once a week.

In order to extend the life of your content – think of a way to repurpose it. Repurposing content is a great way to make sure you have enough varied content to share across all of your social media platforms.

This blog was all about me sharing something I’ve learnt as an apprentice in the Green Umbrella office, and trying to share that knowledge with you. So now that you know the basic life spans of your content, go out there and get posting!

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