Guide
How often to post on social media: the pace your worst week can hold
The right posting frequency is not the platform's maximum. It is the number you can still hit in your worst week, held for six months. This page gives working ranges per platform, the argument for why cadence beats polish, and the arithmetic that quietly ends most posting plans in week three, with the fix.
- How long a cadence must hold before judging it
- 6 mo
- The week most posting plans quietly stop
- 3
- Number that matters: posts your worst week can hold
- 1
The honest answer is a floor, not a target
Most frequency advice quotes the ceiling: what a platform rewards when a full-time team feeds it. An owner who adopts the ceiling posts daily for two weeks, misses three days, reads the gap as failure and stops entirely.
Audiences and algorithms both reward rhythm over volume. Two posts a week for a year beats daily for a month, every time it is tested by a real business with real work to do.
So the question is not how much the platform can absorb. It is what your calendar can produce in the week a big job lands, a staff member is out, or the school calls. That number is your cadence. Everything above it is bonus.
Working ranges, platform by platform
These are ranges where sustained accounts tend to sit, not laws. Every one of them moves with your niche, and the floor logic above outranks all of them.
- Instagram: two to four feed posts a week, stories as often as you like. Stories reach followers, feed posts and Reels reach strangers.
- TikTok: rewards volume more than any other feed. Three to five a week if sustainable, but one strong weekly video beats four rushed ones.
- Facebook: two to three a week for a page, plus real participation in local groups, which usually outperforms the page itself.
- LinkedIn: one to three a week. The comment you leave on someone else's post counts toward your visibility more than most people think.
- Google Business Profile: one update a week. Hardly anyone does it, and it renders directly into your search result.
- YouTube Shorts: one to three a week, and the same vertical video you made elsewhere works here unchanged.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Cadence beats polish, and the feed proves it daily
Scroll any feed and notice what actually holds attention: mostly plain footage of someone who knows their subject, saying something specific. The polished production is the exception, not the rule.
Polish costs hours per post, and those hours come out of frequency. A business that spends its weekly hour making one beautiful post loses to the one that made three plain useful ones, because reach compounds on the number of chances taken.
The audience forgives roughness. It does not forgive absence, because it never notices absence. It just stops being reminded you exist.
None of this means careless. It means the bar is clear and specific, not cinematic.
Why plans die in week three
The pattern repeats across every industry. Weeks one and two run on enthusiasm, three posts each. Week three, one post. Week four, silence.
The cause is arithmetic, not discipline. Each post has a production cost in hours, and enthusiasm subsidises that cost for exactly two weeks. Then client work reclaims the hours, as it should.
The fix is never more willpower. It is cutting the cost per post until the worst week can still pay it. Cheaper formats, batched production, and automation of the expensive steps.
Where the weekly hours actually go
Typical hands-on time for an owner posting three times a week with video in the mix. The edit is the line that breaks the budget.
- Writing and filming the posts~1 hr
- Editing video by hand~2 hrs
- Replies and comments~45 min
- Scheduling and posting~15 min
Cutting the cost per post until the floor holds
Batch the making. One sitting produces a week of material for less than five separate sittings produce, because setup and warm-up are paid once.
Let one idea render in three formats. The answer you typed in a local group is also a photo caption and a short video script. Sourcing is covered in our guide to content ideas.
Schedule everything the day you make it. A post that waits for the right moment waits forever.
Then look hard at the two-hour line in the chart above. If video is in your mix, editing is the cost that decides whether your floor holds. By hand it is an evening per video. Cutroom cuts it to about a minute: one spoken take in, and it transcribes, writes the hook, places b-roll on the right words, burns in captions and returns a finished 9:16 MP4. About 110 credits per finished 30 second video, a 100 credit batch plus export at 20 credits per finished minute. The first 3 are free in your first 7 days, with 600 credits and no card, and carry a Cutroom mark. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of those, takes the mark off, and cancels in one click. If your cadence has no video in it, you do not need it.
Questions people ask
- How often should a small business post on social media?
- Two to three times a week, held for six months, is a strong cadence for one owner. The real answer is whatever your worst week can produce, because the account that survives is the one whose floor was set honestly.
- Is it better to post every day or a few times a week?
- A few times a week, sustained, beats daily and abandoned. Daily posting only wins when production cost per post is near zero. If each post costs an hour, daily is a plan with a three-week life expectancy.
- Do gaps in posting hurt reach?
- A missed week does less damage than people fear, and short vertical video is judged mostly per post, not per account. The real cost of gaps is habit: accounts rarely return from week four of silence. Protect the floor, not the streak.
- Should I post the same amount on every platform?
- No. Pick the one platform where your customers actually are and hold your full cadence there. Everything else gets the same content re-posted natively when it is cheap to do, which for one vertical video is a few minutes per platform.
- How do I keep a posting schedule with no spare time?
- Lower the cost per post instead of raising the effort. Batch one production hour a week, reuse each idea across formats, schedule immediately, and automate the edit if video is in your mix. Cutroom does that last step for about 110 credits per finished 30 second video, with the first 3 free in your first 7 days and no card, then $19.99 a month on Lite.
Pick the number your worst week can hold, cut the cost per post until it is safe, and let six months of rhythm do what no burst of enthusiasm can.