What’s the Right Blog Post Launch Frequency?

Blog posts allow you to provide patients with updates regarding services, best practices, office announcements, and more. It’s important for the contents of your blog to align with your practice and the services you provide while keeping your patients in mind.

When it comes to how often your practice should be launching new blog posts, there are many factors at play. There isn’t a “one size fits all” number. In fact, it’s up to your practice to determine what works best for you and your audience. 

That said, in this blog post I will highlight four important questions that your practice needs to consider to help determine how often you should be posting. Keep in mind that this varies from practice to practice and what might work for one, may not work for another. 

Who is your audience? 

When it comes to blog posts, it’s important to think about your audience. If you’re unsure who your target audience is, figure that out before proceeding. For most practices, their audience tends to be current patients as well as prospective patients. How often will they be able to read your content? And what kind of content will they be interested in reading about? 

What is the intention behind your blog? 

After your audience, the next big question is “what is the intention behind maintaining a blog?” Is your intention to provide a steady stream of updates to your current patients? Are you looking to expand your reach to create a bigger following and bring in new patients? Or are you looking to provide an occasional update about your practice? Your answer to these questions will help determine the frequency in which you should be launching blog posts – whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly. 

The rule of thumb is if you are looking to expand your reach and create a bigger following, the more posts the better. In this scenario, you may consider posting multiple times a week. This kind of consistency will allow your posts to be seen more frequently and help boost traffic from search results. 

If you have a dedicated base of patients and want to provide them with a steady stream of updates, your practice might be more inclined to post weekly. If you aren’t as concerned with posting regularly, don’t have the resources to do so, or only want to post information as needed, then monthly blogs may be right for you. 

How much time can you commit to posting regularly? 

When it comes to posting on social media, the key is consistency. By creating a consistent posting schedule, patients are more likely to see your content which can help generate more traffic to your website. Before you start deciding on a posting schedule, it’s important to consider whether or not it’s manageable for your practice. 

If you are working with a small staff and don’t have a dedicated team to work on blog posts, it may be hard to set the expectation to publish multiple times a week. Doing so could quickly lead to burnout and lower-quality content, which will obviously not benefit your practice. In this case, it may be best that your practice aims to post once or twice a week or bi-weekly. 

In the event you have a larger team, posting multiple times a week may be a more realistic expectation. Just make sure you stay consistent with your posting schedule and keep your audience in mind. If you find that you have the resources to post more, but don’t have enough blog-worthy content to go out multiple times a week, then your practice may not require as much posting. 

Instead, you might consider using the extra time you have to update old posts from weeks, months, or years ago. By updating the content and keywords in older blog posts, you can help them gain visibility in search results even after they’ve already been posted. 

Would you risk quality over quantity? 

According to HubSpot, the suggested frequency for publishing posts is 3 to 5 per week in order to maximize your organic traffic. However, if your practice finds it hard to achieve consistency while maintaining quality posts, posting weekly or even less often is likely the right path for you. 

One of the benefits of posting more frequently is that you can gain increased traffic to your website. That being said, it’s important that you maintain the same high-quality content while doing so. If you find that you’re struggling to keep up with your posting schedule, your practice should consider reviewing your posting schedule. As we’ve said before, your posting schedule is unique to your practice and what may work for one, may not work for another. 

If your practice does opt for a lighter posting schedule, that doesn’t mean that traffic will totally drop. Instead, your practice will have the ability to create more high-quality content within fewer posts, rather than maintaining an overloaded posting schedule which could risk losing your audience’s interest. If it comes down to quality vs. quantity, we always opt for less frequency and higher-quality content. 

Recap

So, what is the magic number? Well, when it comes to blog posts, it’s up to your practice to decide.  While it’s best to maintain a consistent posting schedule with your blog, consistency can look different from practice to practice. You may find that posting daily, multiple times a week, weekly, or even monthly works best for you. To help determine what your optimal posting schedule should be, consider your audience, resources, and goals. Happy blogging! 

If you are a Sesame Social service Member and/or are interested in learning how you can utilize blogs to your practice’s advantage, be sure to give the Social Team a call at (866) 856-2050 ext. 1. Our team would be happy to speak with you about your current efforts to help your practice achieve your blogging goals. 

 

—Nicole Gamble, Social Media Specialist, Sesame Communications