Two years ago I wrote this post. The theory: Brands no longer need to post 20 times a week to drive results in social media marketing.

Back in 2016, this was actually a somewhat progressive concept. A few brands were leading the way (Target, at the time, was the example I liked to use), but most were still playing by 2012 rules (volume > quality) and posting 20-30 times a month on Facebook.

Fast forward to 2018–nothing has changed. In fact, you could make a pretty solid argument that less is actually WAY MORE now. Volume no longer matters–not even a little. Charts and research like this confirm it:

Less is definitely more when it comes to social media content in 2018. Yet, I continue to see MANY brands completely ignoring that best practice.

Just one of many, many examples–I’ll pick on Home Depot. They had a whopping 39 posts in October on Facebook. My math’s never been great, but I believe that comes out to just under 10 posts per week. More than one per day!

What’s more, most of those posts average right around 250 engagements per post. That’s a 0.00005 percent engagement rate. Again, I’m not a math expert, but I don’t think that’s an admirable engagement rate–especially for a brand like Home Depot.

So, essentially we have a brand wasting it’s time and resources by posting 39 times to a social platform that no longer requires you to post that often. Of course, Home Depot most likely has a slew of paid social media campaigns on Facebook each month. But, that makes the decision to post so frequently to their wall even more confounding.

My theory: This is all about ego and protecting jobs.

It’s the only possible explanation. Creating all this content takes people-power. People-power that was obtained after years of trying to convince corporate bosses that we needed all these people to create social content. After all, volume was the play.

But, then things changed. Algorithms changed. The whole game changed. Paid took over. You no longer needed to post 20 times a week. However, we now had all these people instructed to create 20 new pieces of content each week. How do we justify those jobs if we now need just 2-3 pieces of social content a week?

How do I justify MY job to manage all these people if we now just need a handful of pieces of content each month? How do I explain that to my bosses?

This is what’s behind it. And, it’s flawed thinking.

Consider the opportunity cost of producing 39 pieces of content a month. Let’s say Home Depot was creating just 6-8 pieces of content for Facebook each month–a much more realistic number. Take the time/effort your team used to create the additional 30 pieces of content and sink that into creating 6-8 pieces of super-impactful content.

Or, use it to start experimenting with an emerging platform, like Instagram Stories.

Or, use it to help staff recruitment marketing, which is struggling to get a foot-hold.

Certainly, there is no shortage of opportunities for your team!