How often should you be posting on social media? That is the million dollar question every brand, marketer, and creator are asking themselves. And while there are many unknowns in the social media landscape there is one simple rule to follow when it comes to your content strategy, and that’s that posting consistently matters.
In this TikTok Guide, we uncover through a TikTok posting challenge how your posting cadence can affect your TikTok content’s performance and how you can make posting consistently to TikTok possible. Follow along as we analyze our results from our TikTok experiment and how you can apply these learnings to your TikTok content strategy moving forward. Let’s get started!
To better understand how consistent posting can improve your TikTok content performance, it’s best you understand how the TikTok algorithm prioritizes content. We won’t divulge too much but here are some basics to keep in mind while we share our TikTok posting challenge learnings.
The FYP is TikTok’s content feed and it’s unique to each user. TikTok’s algorithm curates each user’s FYP based on a recommendation system.
The TikTok recommendation system based on the following three factors:
1. User Information: This refers to the video's caption, sounds, and hashtags used when shared.
2. User Interaction: How a user engages with their feed, such as liking, sharing, commenting, and the accounts they follow, and what kinds of videos they post.
3. Device and Account Settings: Takes into account language preference, location settings, and device type. It helps ensure content performance optimization
To go more in depth on the TikTok algorithm, read our TikTok guide dedicated to explaining the TikTok algorithm and a few tips to make your TikTok content more discoverable - “Getting to Know the TikTok Algorithm.”
There’s no doubt that posting consistently on social media has its perks. However, how important are those benefits and how do they affect your content strategy. Here are the top 3 benefits of posting consistently on social media.
Active accounts are accounts that follow a regular posting cadence. Whether that be posting everyday or more than once a day, that’s what many accounts are trying to figure out to unlock higher content performance.
Algorithms prioritizing content based on how often accounts post are universal across every social media platform. It’s how these algorithm’s rank content to ensure their goal of providing the most valuable content in their user’s feed.
As a result of the algorithm prioritizing your content based on your account’s activeness, more people will be shown your content leading to more engagement and impressions than if you weren’t posting.
The TikTok algorithm awards active accounts and celebrates account milestones like first 1,000 followers, first 50 videos, etc. The more milestones you reach the increased likelihood of someone seeing your content.
The goal of this experiment was to put this consistent posting theory to the test. In this experiment we are comparing the TikTok performance of inactive or low activity accounts and how their performance changed after posting 10 days straight to TikTok.
To capture this experiment’s results, 4 members from the PLANOLY marketing team posted to their personal or side hustle/ secondary accounts for 10 days straight. Each account recorded their TikTok account metrics from the 10 day period prior to the challenge to show a direct comparison to the 10 Day challenge.
TikTok Challenge dates included: 3/06/23- 3/15/23.) However, you must note that only one account completed the 10 day challenge. The other account’s performance metrics reflect the number of days they completed in the challenge.
After the 10 day posting challenge, we are able to report that each account increased their performance. Not only did they increase their follower counts, but they also increased their engagement and discoverability just from posting everyday. Account #1 and Account #2 showed the most improvement due to them having little or no previous posting activity. Account #3 and #4 Increased their performance. Account #4 had the most consistent improvement compared to all three accounts. Account #3 had a more varied performance, however this was expected due to their already existing content strategy and consistent posting schedule.
The challenge proved that posting consistently to social media, more specifically TikTok improves your content performance. However, that’s not to say you won’t have low performing content days on TikTok even if you are posting consistently. High-performing content relies heavily on your audience, industry, and your content mix.
From the challenge we were able to see that the TikTok content involving trending audios, video trends, and templates like CapCut had the most virality out of all the content that was posted during the challenge. This is due to the fact that this content had a higher likelihood of increased visibility and exposure because trending social media content is often displayed more often than other content. However, trending content isn’t always the most valuable and doesn’t always lead to follower growth, increased engagement, or traffic and conversions. That’s why it’s important to develop a content strategy with content pillars that are unique and useful to your target audience.