How often should a business post on social media?

The number we start clients on

Three to four Instagram feed posts a week, at least one of them a reel, with stories on the days between. One or two Facebook posts a week. Three TikToks a week if you are going to take it seriously and none if you are not. One or two LinkedIn posts a week for a business that sells to other businesses.

That is our working default, not a rule handed down by a platform. None of the platforms publish a recommended posting frequency for businesses. Anyone who tells you the number came from Instagram is repeating a blog post that repeated a blog post. The number above comes from what a service business can actually sustain while running a service business, which turns out to be the binding constraint far more often than the algorithm is.

If those hours do not exist in your week, the honest answer is to pick fewer platforms rather than to post worse things on all of them.

What the platforms actually publish

Instagram's head, Adam Mosseri, published a long explanation of ranking on Instagram Ranking Explained, and it is the closest thing to a primary source that exists. A few things in it matter for this question.

There is no single algorithm. Feed, Stories, Explore and Reels each rank differently. For Feed, the signals listed in rough order of importance are your activity, information about the post, information about the person who posted, and your history of interacting with them. For Reels, the most important predictions are how likely you are to reshare it, watch it through, like it, and tap the audio page.

Two lines from that page are worth more to a small business than most of the cadence advice on the internet. The first: "we try to avoid showing too many posts from the same person in a row." The second is a list of things Instagram says it makes less visible — "low-resolution or watermarked reels, reels that are muted or contain borders, reels that are majority text, or reels that have already been posted on Instagram."

TikTok publishes its own version in how TikTok recommends videos. Recommendations come from user interactions, video information and device or account settings, weighted by how strongly they signal interest. And the line every owner should read: "neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors in the recommendation system."

What that does and does not imply about frequency

Neither company publishes a frequency recommendation, so what follows is inference, and it is labelled as such.

Since TikTok says each video is ranked on its own merits rather than on the account's history, the argument for volume is a shots-on-goal argument: more attempts, more chances one connects. The argument against volume comes from the same place. If each video stands alone, four weak ones do not add up to one good one, and Instagram's stated avoidance of showing several posts from the same account in a row means the fourth post of the week is competing against your own third.

The practical read: publish as often as you can publish something you would show a customer. Past that point you are producing filler that occupies your Tuesday and nobody's attention.

What definitely is not published anywhere: that a specific weekly number lifts your account, that consistency itself is a ranking signal, or that a gap punishes you. Those claims are everywhere and sourced nowhere. The real cost of going quiet is simpler and does not require an algorithm to explain it: a customer who checks your profile in March and sees nothing since November draws a conclusion.

The constraint that actually decides your cadence

Owners plan cadence as if the limit were ideas. It is minutes. Here is where they go on one reel, done properly and not as a chore.

• Deciding what the video is about, and what the first two seconds show: 15 minutes, and skipping this is why most business reels die
• Shooting it, including the two takes you throw away: 20–30 minutes
• Cutting, captioning, checking it reads with the sound off: 45–90 minutes
• Writing the caption and posting: 10 minutes

Call it two to three hours for one reel you are not embarrassed by. Multiply by your weekly plan before you commit to it. A schedule of four reels a week is a ten-hour production job, and that is the schedule that quietly dies in week five and takes the whole account with it.

Designed posts and stories are cheaper. Stories in particular cost almost nothing when they are things that are already happening in front of you, which is why they are the first thing we add and the last thing we cut.

A two-week test that beats any recommended number

Your own Insights will answer this better than any article, including this one. The method is dull and it works.

• Fix the measure first. Views or accounts reached per post, and saves and shares. Not followers. Follower count moves too slowly to tell you anything inside a month
• Two weeks at your current pace. Write down every post, what it was, and its numbers after 72 hours. Use a notebook if a spreadsheet feels like work
• Two weeks at one step up. Add one post a week, same kinds of content, nothing else changed
• Compare medians, not totals. Totals always rise when you post more. If the median post got weaker, the extra post cost you something
• Then run it the other way. Drop back to your original pace but put the saved hours into making one post properly. This is the comparison almost nobody runs, and it is the one that usually decides the question

Four weeks of a small business's data is a small sample and will not be conclusive. It will still be more relevant to you than a study of 30,000 accounts that are not yours. Timing is worth testing the same way — there is a separate post on posting times in Canada, and the same rule applies to it: your own Insights outrank the general advice.

What to cut first when the week goes wrong

It will. Someone quits, the season turns, a bad week arrives. Cut in this order.

• Keep the reel. It is the one with reach beyond people who already follow you
• Keep stories. They cost minutes and they are the part that reads as a business with people in it
• Drop the second designed post. Quote graphics and tip cards are the cheapest thing to make and the easiest thing to scroll past
• Drop the platform you were never really committed to. An abandoned TikTok is worse than no TikTok

And do not solve a busy week by reposting a TikTok with the watermark still on it. Instagram publishes that watermarked reels are among the things it makes less visible, so that particular shortcut is documented as counterproductive rather than merely lazy. Export clean, then repost.

A pre-publish check that takes twenty seconds

Instagram's ranking page names the conditions under which it aims to make a reel less visible, which is unusually concrete for a platform document. Turn the list into a check you run before you hit share.

• Is there a watermark on it from another app? Export the clean version instead
• Is it low resolution, because it went through a messaging app on the way to you?
• Is it muted, or does it have bars down the sides from the wrong aspect ratio?
• Is it mostly text on screen with nothing happening behind it?
• Has this exact video already been posted to Instagram before?

Five questions, all answerable at a glance, and each one is a documented reason for the post to travel less far. Compare that with the amount of energy the average owner spends on choosing hashtags, which Instagram's page does not list among the important signals at all.

A week that survives contact with a real business

Monday, a designed post: an offer, a piece of advice, a new team member. Wednesday, the reel: process, transformation, or a customer moment. Friday, something human: a story from the week, a review screenshot, five seconds of the back room. Stories whenever anything actually happens.

That is three posts and a handful of stories, and in a good week it takes under three hours. Hold it for six months and you will have roughly eighty posts and a body of work. Hold it for three weeks and you will have a graveyard, which is the far more common outcome and the reason this question gets asked at all.

When holding the rhythm is not realistic

Posting is the first thing to slip when the business gets busy, and it slips precisely when things are going well, which is the worst time for the account to go quiet. That is the actual problem behind "how often should I post", and the answer to it is usually not a better calendar.

Content is inside Organic Growth, at $1,000 CAD a month: the week planned, made and published, carousels, reels, articles and the search work under them, plus your Google Business Profile, reviews and your website. You approve everything from your phone before it goes out.

Four lines, sold separately, no discount for taking more than one. Organic Growth $1,000 a month. Paid Growth $1,000 a month, with the ad budget separate and paid from your own account, roughly $1,000 a month minimum spend before a campaign learns, covering up to $10,000 a month. B2B Sales $2,000 setup then $1,000 a month. Automation from $1,500 to build then $500 a month. Prices in CAD.

The constraint, stated up front: search takes about 90 days to move, and ads are the only one of the four that changes a number inside a month. What you will see immediately is the work shipping every week.