How frequently Buffer shares to social media

 Before hunting down the right answer to the frequency question (if such a thing even exists), I thought it might be helpful to share the one answer I can give with 100 percent certainty: how frequently we share to social networks at Buffer.

(Our social media automation plan includes engagement outside the confines of this schedule, but in general terms, this is how often we post.)

• Twitter – 14 times per day, from midnight to 10:00 p.m. Central Time, never more than once per hour; seven times per day on weekends, from 3:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., roughly every three hours

• Facebook – 2 times per day, seven days a week, 10:08 a.m. and 3:04 p.m.
• LinkedIn – 1 time per day, 8:14 a.m., no weekends
• Google+ – 2 times per day, 9:03 a.m. and 7:04 p.m., no weekends

You’ll see some of the science behind our sharing frequency below, but also know that we have set our schedule—like almost everything at Buffer—as an experiment and are constantly iterating based on our analytics. As far as an explanation for why we tweet at 3:00 a.m., we want to connect with our global audience. Three in the morning, Central Time, is 9:00 a.m. in London. If you don’t have a global audience, you might not get the same value out of tweeting in the middle of your night.

(Or maybe 3:00 a.m. is a good time to send, if you believe the Informercial Theory. Keep reading …)

The optimal frequency for posting on social media

To ‘know’ the BEST is an impossibility. You can only predict and measure.

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I hesitate to start off this discussion with such a tepid answer to the question of posting frequency. But Dan Wilkerson of LunaMetrics is right.

Predict.

Measure.

Repeat.

There aren’t a whole lot of shortcuts here, but with the right data, we can at least gain a head start on the prediction process. Saying beyond a shadow of a doubt that X is the best number of times to post to Twitter and Y is the best number to post to Facebook would be misleading. There is well-researched data, for sure. But consider it as a jumping off point for customizing your own optimal schedule.