There are a lot of Facebook marketing strategies floating around the web nowadays. However, it’s not clear which strategies are actually beneficial and which are nothing more than hearsay. As a social media analytics company, we decided to chime in and see which ones work, and which ones don’t.
This time we’re taking a look at whether or not posting more will irritate your audience. In our previous posts, we looked at Facebook fanpage size, question posts, the frequency of posting, and posts with photos. This isn’t our last myth we’re busting either, so stay tuned to see what else we’ve got in store!
Does posting more irritate your audience?
Many guidelines on how to run a Facebook page say that you shouldn’t post too often because you risk spamming your audience with too much content. As demonstrated by Socialfresh, we can already see that it seems to depend on the type and quality of the content published. However, the myth is still quite pervasive. We analyzed over 1k Facebook pages from various countries to check whether posting a lot really increases the risk of negative feedback from users (hiding a post, hiding posts from a page, or unliking a page).
The analysis of the monthly ratio of negative feedback to the number of fans compared with the number of posts published in a given month indicates a relatively strong correlation between these two indices. This means that in the vast majority of cases, the more you post, the more often somebody expresses negative feedback towards your page.
Why? Every time you post, you increase the organic reach of your page. But very often, EdgeRank shows various pieces of content to the same people. We can see a significantly higher frequency (i.e. the number of views for one user). The result is that every post increases the risk of getting a negative reaction from the user.
But it’s not a golden rule
The issue should really be approached individually, because we can find examples of Facebook pages that published over 30 posts weekly and had much lower negative feedback, as well as pages that published 10 posts and had much higher negative feedback. We must also remember that media pages can post as much as they want without consequence as opposed to brand pages, which we discovered in our previous analysis of posting frequency.
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Methodology
We analyzed 10k Facebook pages between May 1st, 2015 & August 1st, 2015. Data was collected using Sotrender social media analytics and elaborated by Sotrender research team. In the analyses concerning interactions, we took into account data concerning visible activities under posts: likes, comments, and shares. In this case, we were operating on 10k fanpages samples. In the case of reach and other Facebook Insights indicators – the samples are slightly smaller (1, 5k of pages).
To wrap up, yes posting more content is likely to irritate your audience. However, be sure to check your page on an individual basis. This won’t always be the case and it’s a good idea to check for yourself. Be sure to check back soon for the next part in our Facebook Myths Debunked series.
Torrey Tayenaka
Marta Bongilaj
