You will be able to set a posting frequency based on your capacity and learn whether it works.
Most small business accounts post in bursts. A new idea or a quiet week brings a post every day for a fortnight. Then the busy season arrives, the account goes silent for six weeks, and it comes back with a slightly apologetic "we're back" post before the next burst. If you have run an account before, you may recognise this.
The problem is rarely effort. It is planning for more than a normal week can hold. This lesson shows you how to choose a rhythm you can keep, and how to use your own data to set it.
Consistency helps in two ways. Your audience learns to expect you. Someone who sees a useful video from you every Tuesday and Friday starts to look for it, and an account that disappears for weeks gives people a reason to stop paying attention.
The feed also gets something to work with. As lesson 1.1 explained, every post is tested on a small group first. A steady rhythm gives the platform a regular stream of posts to test and gives you a regular stream of results to learn from. A burst of fourteen posts followed by nothing teaches you very little, because you cannot tell which changes made a difference.
If you took Content and copywriting, lesson 9.2, Publish less, more consistently, made the same argument for blogs and email. Social media follows the same logic, only faster.
Here is the rule that matters: choose a frequency you could keep up in your busiest month of the year, because the quiet months will look after themselves. For Mei Ling, that is the weeks before the school holidays and the festive season, when orders pile up. For Priya, it is the run-up to exams. For Farah, it is the weeks before Hari Raya.
Then estimate your time. Lesson 1.3 had you count your weekly hours. Use the same number, adjusted for the busy month. If you have about four hours a week in a normal month and two in your busiest, plan for two.
How many posts that buys depends on how long each takes you, and that depends heavily on batching, which is the last part of this lesson. A frequency that feels small is fine. One good video a week, every week for six months, gives your account far more to build on than seven a week for three weeks.
Once you have chosen, hold it. Do not add extra posts on a good week, because it creates an expectation you then fail to meet on a bad one. Put the extra ideas in the backlog.
You will find many articles claiming the best time to post on each platform. Treat them as a starting guess at best, because they are usually averages across many accounts or the result of one study at one time, and your followers are not average. Parents of primary school children might scroll after nine at night, and office workers at lunch or on the evening commute.
Most platforms show you when your own followers are active, usually by hour and day, once your account is set up as a business or creator account and has some followers. The exact name of this report and where it sits in the app vary. Find it and use it.
If you are new and do not have enough data, pick a sensible starting schedule from what you know about your buyers. Write it down, keep it steady for a month, and look at the results. Then try a different time slot for a few posts and compare. Change only the time and keep the type of post the same, so you know what caused any difference.
Making one video at a time means setting up the light, the phone and the space every time. Most of the effort goes into getting started. Batching means doing one stage for several videos at once. You might script three on Sunday evening, film all three on Monday morning and edit them on Tuesday.
Here is how Priya worked it out, as an example. Making one video from scratch, setup included, took her about two hours. Batching three, she spent about half an hour setting up once and about an hour on each video, three and a half hours in all, where three separate videos would have taken six. Her figures are an example; time your own.
Batching also protects you from the bad week. When three videos are already finished, a week where you cannot film does not stop your posting. You simply post what is ready, and catch up when things calm down.
In the activity you will check when your followers are active, or, if you are starting out, write down a starting schedule and how you will test it.
Look at your audience activity data or, if you are new, pick a starting schedule and write down how you will test it.
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