Search this and you will be told five times a week. Or daily. Or twice a day on one platform and three times on another.
Those numbers come from studies of accounts that are nothing like yours, and they are all missing the thing that decides the answer.
The right frequency is the one you can hold for a year.
Why does consistency matter more than volume?
Because almost every business account that fails does so by stopping, not by posting too little.
The usual pattern is familiar. Someone decides to take social seriously. They post daily for three weeks. Work gets busy. They miss a few days, feel guilty, and the guilt makes opening the app unpleasant. Two months later the last post is from March and the account is doing active harm, because a prospect who finds it concludes the business has gone quiet.
Three posts a week for a year beats daily for a month and then nothing, and it is not close. The audience does not reward intensity. It rewards being there when they eventually look.
So what is the actual answer?
Start at two a week and only increase when two feels easy.
Two is low enough that a bad week does not break it, and high enough that the account looks alive. It is roughly one post that says something and one that shows something, which is a rhythm most businesses can sustain without a dedicated person.
If you get to a point where two a week takes no effort and you have more to say, go to three. Then four. Increase from comfort rather than ambition.
The businesses I have seen do best on social are almost never the ones posting most. They are the ones that have posted every week for two years.
Does the algorithm punish posting less?
Less than people think, and not in the way they fear.
The platforms reward posts that hold attention, and they reward accounts that post regularly enough to be predictable. They do not have a minimum quota you fall below. An account posting twice a week with posts people watch will outperform one posting daily with posts people scroll past.
What genuinely hurts is a gap. Weeks of silence and then a burst tends to perform poorly, because the account has stopped being familiar to the people who follow it.
Regular beats frequent. Predictable beats regular.
What if I have nothing to say twice a week?
Then the problem is not frequency, it is that nobody has decided what the account is for.
An account with no defined purpose feels empty every week, because every post has to be invented from nothing. An account with three or four recurring formats never runs dry, because the question stops being what do I post and becomes which of these is it this week.
Decide the formats once. Work in progress. A question customers ask. Something finished. Something you have an opinion about. Then Monday morning is a choice between four things rather than a blank page.
Does the frequency differ by platform?
Yes, and this is where most schedules go wrong.
Instagram and Facebook tolerate a few posts a week comfortably. LinkedIn rewards two or three and punishes more, because the feed moves slowly and repeated posts from one person start to grate. Short video platforms want volume and forgive misses. A newsletter wants a rhythm people can predict and is damaged badly by irregularity.
The mistake is deciding one number and applying it everywhere, usually by scheduling the same post to every platform on the same day. That is not a strategy, it is a broadcast, and it performs worse than picking one platform and doing it properly.
How do I keep going when it stops feeling worth it?
Accept in advance that most posts do nothing, and judge the account rather than the post.
Individual posts are extremely variable. One will do ten times the numbers of the one before it for reasons nobody can explain. If you judge week by week you will conclude it is not working, roughly every third week, and eventually you will act on that conclusion.
Look at it quarterly. Ask whether more of the right people know who you are, and whether anyone has mentioned a post in a sales conversation. That second one is worth more than any engagement figure, and it happens far more often than the numbers suggest.
What would I do in your first month?
Pick one platform. Pick two days. Pick four recurring formats.
Post twice a week for twelve weeks without changing anything, then look at it.
Almost everyone wants to skip to optimising. The twelve weeks are the part that works.
We set up posting systems people can actually keep up with, because a plan that collapses in month two costs more than it saved. Tell us what you are working on.
