1. If I post too much, I'll drown out my fans

Every social network has an AI whose role, among others, is to distribute posts to its users.

The AI will test each post with different users and continue to publish it as long as its content is engaging. A post that engages will thus experience a snowball effect - unfortunately not all content goes viral, and the median number of impressions per post is quite low.

For example, the percentage of "reach" for a post on Facebook is typically 6% of your fans.

So, a fan will only see several posts from your page after the publication of at least 17 posts (100% ÷ 6%) - assuming they log in to their Facebook account all day and see your post on their feed.

This implies that by deciding to post only once a day, you will only be seen by each of your fans every 17 days - less than twice a month...

Two things must also be taken into account:

• Facebook also distributes your content to users who do not follow you in the form of recommendations, which increases the fan base of pages that generate engagement.
• the average time a user spends on each post in their news feed - if they only spend a few seconds scrolling through it quickly, the attention paid to your content will be directly affected.

2. The more I post, the more I risk losing fans

Analyzing data from billions of posts, we have found that it is true that the more you post in a day, the more fans you lose.

What is also true is that the more you post, the more you gain - and this in proportions greater than the quantity of fans lost.

So ultimately, the more I post, the more fans I gain!

Furthermore, are the fans we lose in the process really interested in my company/brand/offer? Or are they people who would not have engaged with my content and therefore would not have contributed to the popularity of my page or converted their interest into a purchase in the long term?

In short, when we post more, we improve our fan base while increasing it.

3. To post, I have to create content

The difficulty we face when we want to post is creating content and the little time we have to devote to it.

However, there are simple solutions to post without starting from scratch:

• repost your own content: after a certain amount of time, content will no longer be printed and you should take advantage of this available content to repost, especially on topics that have previously engaged.
• reuse content - same content but different format

For example: a long video in one post, then an excerpt of that video in a subsequent post, then a quote and an image taken from that video in another post...

• your sites: all images and descriptions of your products, services, and promotional offers are potentially engaging content - your fans know who you are and often follow you for what you do, so take advantage of it!

A widespread misconception is that if I show products or promotions to my fans, they will stop following me.

However, the very reason they follow you is what you do - if I am an online store for musical instruments, am I following it for its tutorials teaching how to play a particular instrument or use a particular software? Or is it because I want to be kept informed of its promotional offers and new products/brands it has in store?

(We discuss this topic in more detail in OUR ARTICLE "Revenue growth through organic Social Media: what we can learn from the Media")

• repost other users' content: engaging content posted by someone else will have a significant potential with your own audience - and these other users will often tend to share your content in the future.

A win-win strategy!

This strategy can be adopted by the company itself, but it can be particularly effective when applied by its employees, who not only make the company's content more visible but also benefit the company from their personal brand.

• Document your daily work: communicate how you generate value for your audience - photos, short videos - this type of content can be particularly effective for communication on your employer brand.
• Your existing corporate content: photos of your teams, your offices, your events...

4. My fans visit my page

We are mostly social media users. How many of us follow Facebook pages? And how many of those visit the pages they follow once they become fans?

From the user's point of view, following a page can have various meanings:

• Marking my support for the company/brand
• Getting advance information on new products
• Staying informed about news (whatever its nature: political, social, local, from an industry, from an interest center...)
• Being informed of discounts - especially during big promotions!
• For fun/distraction: receiving content shared by the page because it is funny or original
• The brand positioning is positive or corresponds to my values

Your fans mostly follow you so they don't have to go to your page - and if you post more often, they will have more content from you in their feed (and take into account the "reach"!).

5. I target better with ads than organic posting

This brings us back to the question of social media AI.

When you post, the AI will test your post and print it natively to your fans, targeting people with profiles, interests, and behaviors similar to those who engage.

When you target with advertising, you will direct the AI to print to matching profiles... and test your ad to publish it to types of people similar to those who engage.

So, we target differently at the start, but in the end, the social media network's AI will take care of the print - and the engaging ad costs money, not the posts.

When using a solution that centralizes accounts to post, the costs per click (CPC) per post are at least 2.5X lower than ads - a proportion that increases with the number of posts since the cost is fixed, not variable.

6. The more I post in a day, the less I engage

A widespread idea would have it that beyond the first post, each post published in a day engages less than the previous ones.

Statistical analyses based on billions of publications show that there is no truth to this.

Indeed, the 15th content of the day may have an impact on fans and become viral, just as the 60th may find a stronger echo than the sum of the first 59.

The factors are too varied to draw conclusions on this subject: what is the format of the shared content? What share of the audience has it reached ("reach")? What is the title? The message? Is there a description? An image? What's in the image? Are there faces? How many? What is the environment? Urban? Bucolic?

Different contents with different audiences will systematically have different results and logically, different engagements...

7. I must post when my fans are connected

Posts are distributed whether or not users are connected. When users connect, they mostly look at their feed, where posts that have been published by the social network in their absence may appear - and an old post can very well be printed on a user's feed by the social network after a very recent post.

It is noted that the amount of engagement on a post depends on the page that published it, its fans, and the content posted.

8. If my posts are too close together, they will cannibalize each other

Two elements must be taken into account here:

1. the time between two publications
2. the distribution of content by the social network

In the case of Facebook, our studies have so far shown that the timing factor only has an impact on engagement when publications are very close together, i.e., less than a minute. For publications separated by more than half an hour, there was no noticeable difference.

Engagement is different for different social networks, but currently the frequency of publication is low enough, including on Twitter, not to cause this type of problem.

As for the second point, it is important to recall the role of "reach": our published content is only printed to a fairly small percentage of our fan base.

Considering the "reach" and taking into account that the AI distributes your content intelligently, your posts published with short time gaps will have an infinitesimal probability of being printed one after the other on a user's feed (unless you have a very small and highly engaged fan base).

The engagement for each of the two posts will therefore not have a negative impact due to the proximity of their publication time, since the audience for these two posts will be different.

9. There are days/hours of publication when posts engage more

There are many theories about publication days and hours, and some days and hours are presented as examples of good practices and the opposite for others.

These theories, however, disregard two elements we have previously covered: AI (with the deferred print it generates) and content relevance.

It happens that certain business pages in the same industry get the best engagement per post on their posts published at night or on the weekend, while their competitors engage more during the week and day.

And some have similarly engaged throughout the week - regardless of publication days/hours.

There is no truth from this point of view...

Moreover, if we followed this theory and everyone posted at the same time on the same days, would not the other time slots be an opportunity to seize?

Finally, suppose you identify a publication schedule that produces more engagement with your audience. In that case, it does not mean that you should only post at those times - you must obviously maximize these time slots without neglecting the others.

10. Videos engage more than other types of content

The question of content type is directly related to your social media strategy. What are your goals? Make your brand known? Improve or sustain its image? Promote your employer brand? Use social media as a growth lever? A moderation or customer support tool?

Videos engage a lot, it's true. They generate reactions, shares, we click on them to launch the video if the social network doesn't do it for us...

However, there are other types of posts that engage a lot: those that have value for your audience.

And when we analyze engagement figures excluding normalized clicks (by putting all pages on an equal footing at 1 million fans), the type of post that engages the most is the photo type.

It engages more than the link type, but when we look at total engagement including clicks, the link type surpasses the photo type by far.

In order of normalized engagement on Facebook, the following post types are on the podium:

1. Photo type
2. Video type
3. Link type

Paradoxically, the link type post is very little used or not at all by many pages.

Conclusion

To generate engagement, you have to post often - and to post often, you don't need to create an industrial amount of additional content - Nonli helps you post more and generate content from your existing content or content on social media.

What is important is to post content that has value for your audience to keep them engaged - and publish enough so that they see your content.