How often to post, and for how long

Four weeks out of twenty-six. In the largest published dataset on posting consistency, that is what the bottom group looks like: a burst, then months of silence, then a quiet account.

You set your own rate tonight and change it whenever you like. There is no schedule to apply for and no minimum to clear before you are allowed to begin.

Before you pick a rate. Reach on this subject arrives with abuse attached, and your rate decides how much of it arrives per week. Work through what is findable about you first, and read answering hostile replies before you go anywhere near daily.

Two a week, and one reply a day

Two posts of your own a week, on two fixed days, plus one useful reply under somebody else’s post on five days. That is about two hours a week, and it is the rate this page recommends to somebody doing this on top of a job.

Two people can split it and each hold half. One person cannot hold four times it for a year, whatever this month feels like.

What the two rests on

The head of Instagram tells creators to aim at about two feed posts a week. That is the platform’s own number, it is lower than anything an agency will sell you, and the company makes money when you post more.

YouTube’s guidance on upload schedules gives no number at all. It asks whether your frequency is sustainable over the long term, and it names your well-being in the same sentence as your audience. Read that as what the people with the data think matters.

Then the measurement. Across more than 100,000 accounts over six months, those posting in twenty weeks or more got about five times the median engagement per post of those posting in four weeks or fewer. It counts weeks you turned up, not posts you made in a week, and two makes a week count. The fence goes with the fact wherever it travels: that sample is people who use scheduling software, the accounts that gave up entirely are absent from it, and it is correlation. The direction is sound. Treat the size loosely.

And what cannot honestly be said here. How any platform ranks anything. YouTube publishes the categories of signal it uses and no weights and no formula, and it is the most open of the four in platform by platform. Anybody offering you an optimal frequency with a decimal point in it has guessed. The rate above is tuned to a person with a job, and to nothing else.

The first ninety days

Thirteen weeks. About twenty-six posts and sixty-five replies, and that is the whole of what you can control.

Weeks one to four are the easy ones, because it is new and your first hundred followers are people who already know you. The mechanics of that are in how a small account gets seen.

Then it goes flat, and it stays flat far longer than anybody warns you. Most people who stop, stop somewhere in the second month, which is our own observation rather than a measurement. Nothing has gone wrong at that point. That is what the middle of this looks like from the inside.

Habits set slower than the internet claims. In the one study that modelled it in real lives, the time to reach near automatic ran from 18 days to 254. At day ninety some people are running on rails and some are still forcing it every Tuesday, and both of those are ordinary.

Keep one benchmark in front of you for the boring weeks. YouTube’s own bar for a channel it treats as having arrived is a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours in the previous twelve months. The window is twelve months. The company is telling you the timescale, and it is not ninety days.

The week the subject is moving

Hold the rate.

Everybody posts more in those weeks, supply rises faster than attention does, and going to six a day buys little while costing you the fortnight afterwards, when you are finished and the story is still running.

Three things to do with that week instead. Spend the extra time on being right, because posting into a moving story before the facts settle is how a careful person becomes the story. Reply into threads that already have readers rather than starting cold ones. And spend the two or three finished things you were holding back, which is what making something capable of spreading asks you to keep in reserve.

Ordinary weeks are what make a moving week possible. The flat fortnight is when you build the thing you spend.

Where this backfires: an account that never lifts its rate for anything reads as automated, and in a week when your own community is under attack, silence from you is noticed. Judge the week. This is your ordinary maximum, not a vow.

When to stop, and how to come back

The research treats activist burnout as leaving, or cutting back against your own wishes, and it names a culture of martyrdom inside organisations as one of the things that speeds it up. So the person telling you to post through it is describing the mechanism rather than the cure.

Take a scheduled break when two of these are true.

1. You feel dread before you feel anything else when you open the app.
2. You are posting to prove you are still there rather than because you have something.
3. An abusive reply is following you into the rest of your day.
4. Somebody at home has mentioned it twice.
5. Work you owe other people is slipping.

How to go, and this part is the difference between a break and an ending. Leave on a date. Three weeks, with the return day written in the diary before you stop. Say one line publicly and go. Then come back on the same two days, and post something ordinary rather than a post about the gap.

Missing a single day is not a break and needs no announcement. In that habit study, missing one opportunity did not materially affect the process.

Stopping for three weeks is allowed, and it is not a failure. Somebody who takes three weeks comes back. Somebody who goes until they cannot does not, and that is the loss that actually costs this side something.

Five sentences to have ready

“I post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is the whole commitment, and I can keep it in a bad month.”

“Nothing has moved for two months. That’s the normal shape of this, and I’m not quitting in week nine.”

“I’m not raising my rate because the news did. I’ll still be here when everyone posting hourly has gone.”

“Taking three weeks off this. Back on the 22nd.”

“I missed Thursday. The run isn’t broken and I’m not starting again from zero.”

Put it in the diary tonight

Fill in the blanks199 words

Thirty minutes. Open a diary, pick two days, and write them into every week for the next twelve. Write one more date three months out, and beside it: is this rate still holdable?

If it is Sunday evening, then I will spend thirty minutes making the two things for Tuesday and Thursday and leave them ready to post.

If it is a weekday morning and I have ten minutes, then I will leave one useful reply under somebody else’s post and close the app.

If Tuesday comes and I have nothing prepared, then I will post the one thing I looked up this week and had wrong beforehand, rather than skip the day.

If I have posted nothing for a fortnight, then I will restart on the next Tuesday without counting how long the gap was.

The obstacle to expect is the ninth week, when you have done everything on this page and the numbers look identical to week one. It stops far more people than abuse does. If that is where I stall, then I will read back my own last ten posts, pick the one I would still defend in a room, and post on Tuesday anyway.