Blog #39 The Art of Scheduling

How to get more likes/shares/followers on social media: consistency.

The truth is in, folks—consistent posting on social media is the key to better engagement.

Are you consistent?

Let’s look at the data first, here’s a study on the topic (found here: https://buffer.com/resources/consistent-posting-study/):

“We arrived at three groups of users ranging from inconsistent posting habits to consistent posting habits:

• Inconsistent users posted 4 weeks or less out of the last 26 weeks

• Consistent users posted 5-19 weeks out of the last 26 weeks

• Highly consistent users posted 20+ weeks out of the last 26 weeks“

For the study, they broke users down into three groups, as mentioned above. Then, they poured throught the results, which should surprise no-one:

“The pattern was crystal clear: The highly consistent posters saw more than 5 times the engagement per post compared to those who posted sporadically.

Let’s put that into perspective with some percentages:

• The highly consistent group saw an impressive 450% more engagement per post than the inconsistent group and 26% more engagement than the consistent group.

• The consistent group saw 340% more engagement per post than the inconsistent group.“

Are you starting to understand yet…?

To be consistent, you have to schedule—no ifs, ands or buts. But how often should you schedule?

Well. it’s a personal decision. You’ve got to decide how much time you want to dedicate to your content. For me, this year I’ve decided to aim for once a week on my Youtube/Tiktok channels. To do this, I will need to make 52 videos, which I can do easily because I’m not going to make them every week. In fact, I’m not even going to make them most weeks. I’m only going to work on videos 32 weeks a year.

How? Easy—by making roughly 2 a week, and then scheduling them to release once a week. It will be broken down into 46 short form videos and 6 long form videos (2 shorts a week, and 1 long-form video every second month), which means I’ll be in the most consistent group in the study.

Visual graph from the study

That’s it—the secret.

Naturally, that’s a lot of time. Especially considering there are no guarantees your content will lead anywhere. That’s the hardest part—the uncertainty. How much time will you put into your content? Will you stay motivated? Can you wait 5 years to hit your targets?

The great thing about my target is: it’s sustainable. Some weeks you’ll feel like making content every day, and others you’ll want a break. By giving yourself a 23 week break in the year to focus on other projects, you’ll find it a breeze to hit your target of weekly posting.

There’s also the benefit of strategy. If you look ahead by a year, you can plan for a series over 12 months. Series are known to increase engagment, because once someone watches the first episode, they may go all the way to the last episode—giving you engagement across multiple posts. That is an exponential growth factor!

Then, it’s up to you to track performace and iterate over time. I’ve found all my platforms growing, due to consistent posting: Youtube/Tiktok/this website. People want to check in every week and see what’s new. Give them something to click on.

Those are my thoughts. I find this stuff fascinating, and I hope you found something useful too.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve any comments, let me know down below.

Good luck out there.

-D.C.