Building a big following on Instagram is a balancing act: You need to post often enough to keep your followers' attention but not so often that they feel spammed and block you.
That's the conventional assumption, anyway. But it's not true, according to new data gathered by the social analytics firm Union Metrics. In fact, for brands, at least, there doesn't appear to be any downside to high-frequency posting -- within reason, anyway.
The firm looked at the activity of 55 brands over a period of several months, during which time the average brand posted 1.5 times per day. That's a good rate for most brands, especially the ones that have conditioned their followers to expect that rate of output or that would have trouble generating enough content to sustain a higher one.
But for the ones that can, the post-fatigue effect turns out to be imaginary, according to a Union Metrics white paper:
Our initial assumption about those high-frequency posters was that the more often a brand posts, the lower their engagement rates would be on the subsequent posts. But that does not seem to be true. So far, we haven't seen any relationship between the amount of content a brand posts each day and the engagement rates those posts receive, and definitely not a negative one. We’ve monitored accounts that post once an hour, all day long, and they see above-average engagement rates on almost all their content, no matter when it occurs in the one-post-an-hour sequence. Later posts do not decline in engagement.
If there's a compelling reason not to post as often as you possibly can, it's that once you start, you have to keep it up. Accounts that abruptly decrease their post frequency lose followers quickly. Here's the follower data for a TV show that took a break from Instagram after its season concluded:
Union Metrics also looked at activity around paid content -- ie. advertising -- on Instagram, and found that it's remarkably effective as a tool for driving follower acquisition and engagement. One big brand saw a 32% increase in followers after a 30-day paid campaign, translating into tens of thousands of new followers, plus a corresponding 25% increase in engagements on organic, non-paid posts. That suggests that followers obtained through paid promotion are as valuable as or more valuable than those acquired for free -- another reversal of conventional wisdom, if it holds up on a wider scale.
