Are you posting too much content? Too little content? Are you confused about how frequently/infrequently to post your content in social media? You’re not alone, as the data indicates.

Marketing managers tread the razor’s edge between sending followers too much content and sending them too little.

Here’s research from Exact Target and CoTweet:

The most frequently cited (44%) reason Facebook users give for “unliking” a brand is that it posts too frequently.

Oops, marketing managers. Better not post too often. It looks like nagging or chest-thumping, and that’s not what we want to see on Facebook.

On the other hand – and we should always be thankful we have one of those – is research from Hubspot on the Science of Email Marketing. It draws conclusions from 9.5 billion (with a “b”) email messages sent in campaigns worldwide:

• The click-through rate at one send per month is 6%, and the click-through rate for everything from 2 to 30 sends per month varies from 5% down to 2%. Not much of a penalty for sending a lot of email. (Slide 40)
• If you send 1-5 email messages per month, your unsubscribe rate will be between .7% and .2%. Any more frequently than that and it drops as low as .1%. This fairly encourages more contact. (Slide 41)

Hubspot’s takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to send too much email.

And, when it comes to blogging, the decisions you make about posting frequency are much more subtle, depending on whether you’re after influence, traffic, comments, pagerank or reader engagement.

Of course, this assumes you’re not posting/sending the same content over and over. If that’s your strategy for wooing followers, you’d better try X instead.

So, don’t worry if you and your marketing team are having doubts as to how much content marketing volume to publish, because each channel marches to the beat of its own drum. And even then, it’s as much art as science.

If you wanted hard-and-fast rules, you should have gone into engineering.

This is marketing, and that’s why we call it that.

photo credit: Serge Melki