I get asked this question a lot: what’s the lifespan of a tweet? Of a Facebook post?
It’s a good question, because understanding how long your social media posts last for can inform how often you should be posting.
Twitter, for example, moves the fastest of all the social networks. The average lifespan of a tweet? Just around 15 minutes. That’s why you’ll see some folks posting a lot on twitter every day–you really can get away with it there.
You may also see people posting the same tweet to their Twitter feed at different times of the day. This is maybe the one place where it’s okay to do that. I often will schedule up a bunch of tweets; reusing basically the same tweet 3-5 times, just on different days, at different times of the day. Truthfully, you will likely have a different audience each time.
Facebook is the next quickest kind of post to expire. It’ll only last for about 6 hours. That means you can easily post 2-3 times per day to your Facebook page, and you’ll likely not drive people away for overposting. I do know pages that post 9 times a day, and their following is so big, they get away with it. However, that means you’d have to come up with 9 pieces of content per day! That’s a lot. For most people, I think posting 1-3 times daily is enough. Just make sure that not all of those posts are about you. Make 1 out of 3 about you, and make the rest value-adds, how-tos, questions to your fans, or humour.
Instagram and LinkedIn both last about 24 hours. I try to post daily to my Instagram, but if I do post more than once per day, I make sure to spread it out over the course of the day. You don’t want to bleed the feed. I post less than once a day to LinkedIn; usually around 3 times per week, but that’s just my guideline.
Finally, we get into some long-tail content. YouTube, Pinterest and blogs have the longest lifespan. Assuming your content is evergreen, you can repurpose this content over and over again. For example, my most popular posts on this blog are from March, 2015, November, 2015, and May of 2013! My most popular YouTube video (closing in on 100,000 vies) was uploaded in January, 2013.
What’s great about blog and YouTube content is that you can share it over and over, again and again.
Here’s today’s Infographic: What’s the Lifespan of a Social Media Post?
Infographic courtesy of socialmediaonlineclasses.com