How to Hack the Algorithm and Grow Brand Awareness Through Post Timing and Frequency
Ever heard someone blame “the algorithm” for their social media posts’ poor performance? They might just be right.
Social media platforms like to incentivise certain behaviours and types of content. This means the time and frequency of your posts can have a major impact on their visibility.
Unfortunately, these social media platforms don’t hand out how-to guides that guarantee a massive following and engagement rate, in the same way that Google does not tell you how to get your website to rank number 1 organically. That kind of knowhow only comes from experience.
Thankfully, we’ve had our fair share of trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Could the algorithm be responsible for your lagging social media profiles? Here’s what you can do to give your posts the best chance of being seen.
Why the Algorithm Exists and How it Actually Benefits Your Brand
Despite how it might feel, social media platforms don’t design their algorithms to make things harder for brands. Rather, they observe what kind of posts users tend to like and engage with and prioritise that content.
This means users are seeing more of what they like, encouraging them to spend more time on social media.
“No data is more powerful than the data that gets you results.”
As frustrating as this might be to keep up with, mastering the algorithm will help to increase your engagement and in turn, brand awareness.
You don’t want your carefully curated social media content to fall on deaf ears.
Nevertheless, it can be frustrating figuring out what content your audience is more likely to respond to if you’re not sure if they’re even seeing it in their feed.
This is where the importance of post timing and frequency comes in.
When you post can be just as important as what you post. Better yet, it might just be a strategy to help you get around the algorithm and boost your posts’ visibility.
Timing
Knowing the best days and times to post on social media is all about knowing when your audience is online.
CoSchedule analysed 25 different studies to find the patterns across each social media platform. To keep things simple, let’s discuss the three most common platforms we manage: Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
- The best day to post on Instagram is Friday.
- The best days to post on Facebook are Thursday to Sunday.
- The best day to post on LinkedIn is Wednesday.
While this data is certainly helpful, what’s even more interesting is that there were also quite a few discrepancies.
Nowhere was this more obvious than across different industries, and this is hardly surprising. For instance, the best times to post on Instagram for B2C businesses are 8am, 1pm, and 9pm, but the best times to post for B2B businesses are 12-1pm, 5-6pm and 8-9pm.
Think about it: You can’t expect a tween fashion brand’s followers to have the same schedule or habits as that of a corporate consulting brand. When are your followers most likely to be on social media?
This is why it’s important to test different posting times against each other to see what your audience responds to. No data is more powerful than the data that gets you results.
Dubai SimsFrequency
You might have read the above study and figured you can make one Instagram post each Friday and be totally fine. While you might see better engagement with a post on that particular day than others, posting once a week isn’t going to do your brand any favours.
Posting frequently is even more important than finding the perfect time to share content. The key is striking the balance between too much and not enough.
Posting irregularly or infrequently isn’t going to help the algorithm work for you, and neither will flooding people’s feeds too often.
“You don’t want your carefully curated social media content to fall on deaf ears.”
In our experience, we recommend posting at least every second day to make sure you’re still showing up in your followers’ feeds.
The best way to make sure your posting frequency is on point is to schedule everything ahead of time. Or to make things even more streamlined and effective, get one of our social media managers to curate and manage your entire monthly social media schedule for you.
Have a lot of content you want to share? That’s great! But to avoid over-posting, save any extras for your Instagram stories. Since it’s up to the user to click on those, you won’t risk clogging up anyone’s feed.
The Algorithm Isn’t Everything
It’s easy to blame the algorithm when you’re ignoring comments, posting once a week and your feed is a total mess.
Maybe the reason you’re struggling to gain and retain followers has less to do with the algorithm and more to do with your content and general account management.
The thing is, running a social media account — let alone a successful one — is time-consuming. Sourcing and creating content, pairing it with entertaining captions, responding to comments and messages, monitoring engagement— there’s so much to consider.
It’s a lot to manage on top of everything else that comes with running a brand.
This is why letting professionals manage your social media can be a total gamechanger. Not only will your accounts be optimised for the best possible engagement and brand awareness, but it frees up your time to focus on other things in life (and business).