Your Band on Facebook:How many times a week should you post stuff?

You (probably) know that your band needs a Facebook page. With 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains one of the best ways to get your band out in front of the most people, and the right people, on a consistent basis. And besides. Just about everybody else is doing it. So if you don’t have a Facebook page, your people are hearing from a bunch of other bands instead of yours.

Creating a super awesome Facebook page for your band is not enough. You have to actually do stuff on it.

People will not flock to your band’s Facebook page simply because it’s there. You have to lead them there. And that means posting stuff to Facebook via your page. Which means figuring out two things: what to post, and how frequently to post it.  

How often do you need to post stuff to your band’s Facebook page?

I recently did a deep dive into the research on how frequently brands should post to Facebook. And I found something interesting, or I didn’t find it -- and that’s what’s interesting. I found no research on how frequently musicians should post to their Facebook pages.

I can show you data on how often you post to your Facebook can help (or hurt) if you’re in nonprofit, real estate, or retail. But it seems that no one has yet studied whether there’s a magic number of Facebook posts per day or week or month that benefits (or hurts) musicians.

We can use some existing marketing benchmarks to establish Facebook best practices for musicians. 

There might not be research proving what works just for musicians, but there is data we can use. There’s research proving that how often you should post has a bit to do with how many followers you have. Specifically:

For pages with fewer than 10k followers, the more frequent the posts, the fewer the clicks per post. [Source: HubSpot]

What does that mean for you, dear musician? 

It means that you’ll want to be mindful of how frequently you post to your band’s Facebook page. Because if you post too often, you’ll get fewer clicks per post. And if you get fewer clicks per post, Facebook might show your posts to even fewer fans.

Because, while some musicians might have Facebook fans in the tens of millions, it’s actually pretty rare to build your fan base up to that level, let alone 10k+. So if you don’t fall into that 10K+ category (which is quite likely), posting to your Facebook as much as twice a day can actually be too much. 

The old “two posts per day” rule…

For most businesses (and your band is a business), the old “two posts per day” rule is now actually too frequent. (The only exception is retail...apparently people love to interact with stuff on Facebook.) And even for brands with 10K+ followers, posting more than twice a day (or 61 times per month) has been found to bring no increase in engagement. 

So what should you do with your band’s Facebook page?

Because there’s no hard and fast rule for how often bands should post to Facebook, here’s what I tell my clients.

Start small.

Although the data that exists isn’t specific to musicians, we can still learn from it. And it says that more is not better. So start with just one post per day. Or three per week. See what happens.

Post consistently.

Whatever you decide about how frequently to post to your band’s Facebook page, stick to it. Decide what you can actually do consistently. Create a schedule and follow it. Sure, you might have time this week to post four times a day. But when you get busy and that falls off to zero, you’ll lose all that momentum you built with your fans and it’ll be that much harder to even get the ever-changing Facebook algorithms to even allow you to show up in their feeds.

Experiment.

Steve Martin is famous for having meticulously honed his comedy by observing what worked and what didn’t, and making adjustments. Marketing your band on Facebook is an art and a science. Watch what works, and change what doesn’t. If you see you’re getting more engagement on your posts when you post four times a day, keep doing that. Even if data from marketing wonks like me says not to do that.

Pay to play.

You’ve probably seen people talking about how Facebook page likes don’t even matter any more because such a tiny percentage of your fans will even see your stuff. And this isn’t hyperbole. It’s true. Like so much of the music world, Facebook is now a pay-to-play environment. The good news? You don’t have to pay much. Heck, check out how this band got 3,000 fans for just eight cents per fan.