Parties decide how often to post, and a common worry is that posting more spreads their audience’s attention more thinly. So does posting more pay?

The paper
Does Posting More Pay? Posting Volume and Engagement on the Facebook Pages of European Parties and Leaders, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I used 856,699 posts from 112 party pages and 74 party leaders’ pages in 20 European countries, posted between January 2010 and September 2020 and exported from CrowdTangle (Meta’s former tool for tracking public pages). I compared each page with itself, holding constant what was happening in its country that month or day.

What I found

Across months, engagement rose nearly in proportion to the number of posts: a month with twice as many posts brought roughly 1.9 to 2 times the interactions. Engagement per post did not fall in the basic comparison, and fell by about 5% for each doubling once each page’s long-run trend is allowed for.

Within the month the picture is sharper. On days when a page posted more than it usually did that month, each post drew about 13% less for each doubling. Posts made within an hour of the page’s previous post drew about 12% less. The monthly pattern held across the decade, for large and small pages, campaign and other months, and populist and other parties, and was stronger for leaders’ pages than for party pages.

There is little dilution from posting more in a month, and a clearer cost when posts are bunched within a day.

Caveats

Pages may post more when they expect more interest, so these estimates describe how engagement moves with volume, not the effect of a decision to post more. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

The views in this post and the paper are my own.