How often should you post on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook?

The short answer: as often as you can sustain something worth reading, and no more than that. For most small businesses that lands between two and five times a week per platform. For a brand-new account, start at once a day or less and build up.

The longer answer is that anyone giving you a single number is guessing. Posting frequency interacts with your niche, your account's age, how much you have to say and what format you post in — and no published figure accounts for any of that. What follows is how to work out your own number.

Why the usual advice is unreliable

"Post 3–5 times a week" gets repeated because it sounds reasonable, not because it was measured on an account like yours. The studies behind these numbers are almost always aggregates across wildly different accounts, and the aggregate of a fitness influencer and a regional plumber describes neither.

Worse, frequency advice tends to be given without the constraint that actually binds: how much you can produce before the quality drops. Doubling your output and halving the value of each post is a net loss, and it's the most common way these recommendations go wrong.

The rule that does hold

Consistency beats volume. An account posting twice a week for a year outperforms one posting daily for six weeks and then stopping — not marginally, but by a wide margin, because the second account spends most of the year looking abandoned to anyone who checks it.

So the right question isn't "what's optimal?" It's "what can I still be doing in twelve months?" Answer that honestly and then treat it as a floor rather than a target.

New accounts are a different question

If the account is less than a month old, ignore the numbers above and start lower. An account with no history suddenly producing six posts a day looks like exactly what it looks like, and the practical failure is worse: six posts into an audience of forty people produces six posts with no engagement, which is the signal the feed actually reads.

One a day in week one, adding one per week, is a sensible ramp — covered properly here.

Does it differ by platform?

Less than people assume, with one real exception.

• Instagram — feed posts have a long tail. Two to four times a week is plenty for most businesses, and posting daily rarely doubles anything.
• TikTok — the one genuine exception. Reach depends less on your follower count, so more attempts genuinely does mean more chances, and higher frequency is defensible if you can sustain it. Photo mode makes that cheaper than video.
• Facebook — for a local business, this is mostly a shop window people check rather than a feed they scroll. Recency matters more than cadence; going quiet for three months is the only real mistake.

Spread them out

Rate is only half of it. Four posts published between 7am and 10am is a different signal from four spread across the day, even though the daily total is identical. If you're using a scheduler, check what it does with a queue — plenty will happily fire the whole day's posts inside an hour.

A workable answer

1. Pick the number you could still hit on your busiest week. That's your floor.
2. Hold it for a month without missing.
3. Only then add one per week, and only if you have something worth posting.
4. Stop increasing when the quality starts slipping — that ceiling is real and personal.

The step most people skip is the second one. Volume is easy to increase and consistency is the thing that actually compounds.

If the constraint is production rather than ideas — SlideBuddy generates and publishes the posts daily, with a warm-up ramp so a new account doesn't start at full rate, and posts spread across the day rather than fired off in a block.