Why people unfollow your Instagram?

A recent Nielsen Norman study reviews that posting too frequently was the most common reason cited for unfollowing a company on social media.

Users often said:

1. “There were a couple of companies that posted too much. Every time I opened my feed it was like 5 or 6 posts.”
2. “At first, I thought their tweets and responses were very funny but then they got annoying, and I saw too many of their tweets on my page, so I unfollowed them.”
3. “I like [Starbucks] but I don’t want to hear every single hour what happened in their company. They post too much, like once an hour. That’s too much.”

So how often you should post on social media?

For most companies, posting 5 to 8 times per week is appropriate. Here are some considerations to help you decide the frequency of your posts:

1. Consider how quickly the information in your industry is changing.
2. Use analytics to inform your posting strategy.
3. Different platforms have different expectations for posting frequency:

Stick with the once-a-day rule for feed content on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

You can post at most 6–8 times in 24 hours on ephemeral channels like Instagram Stories and Snapchat.

On Twitter, it’s okay to tweet between 2–6 times a day, with live tweeting during an event having upwards of 15–20 tweets.

Reference: Alita Joyce, 2021