In case you were thinking simply increasing the frequency of your social media posts would get you more followers, a study is out from Clickable to prove you wrong. Granted, the study looks at major brands as opposed or medium-sized small businesses.

They looked at major brands across various industries and came to the same conclusion throughout: posting more often does not translate to more fans.

Here’s what they found for major fast food restaurants on Instagram. Taco Bell and McDonald’s have way more followers than the rest, yet Pizza Hut posts way more often, and Taco Bell posted the fewest of all of them.

Here’s what it looks like for the pre-owned car industry on Facebook, with AutoTrader having many more fans than CarMax, but CarMax having way more posts.

They also looked at the food industry.

“What we learned, was that user engagement, posts by users on a brand’s Facebook page, appears to have a high correlation to the number of fans that the brand has on Facebook,” the report says. “For example, by far, Coca-Cola has more user engagement based on Clickable data. And even though Pepsi has a lot more posts by the admin on their Facebook page, the number of posts by users and admins on the Coca-Cola page is higher than the number of Pepsi admin posts. Coca-Cola has almost 3 times the number of Facebook fans as Pepsi. So, user engagement appears to be key.”

They found similar results for TV networks on Instagram. with MTV having the most followers by far and VH1 having the most posts by far. They saw similar outcomes for consumer brands and banks.

“For consumer brands: When it comes to Facebook or Instagram, posting more often on these platforms doesn’t necessarily mean an uptick in fans,” the report says. “We looked at a lot of the posts that brands are posting, and while there are some good ones that get a lot of fan engagement, those posts didn’t necessarily lead to more fans on Facebook or Instagram.”

There’s a good chance this study isn’t telling you anything you didn’t already know or at least suspect, but seeing such data is always helpful if for nothing else than for validating your beliefs. Post frequency is nothing compared to posting engaging content.

H/T: Bill Hartzer

Images via Clickable