How often should you post? Cadence for every platform

The honest answer to "how often should I post" is: at whatever cadence you can sustain for six months without the quality dropping. Every study agrees on the shape — consistency compounds, heroic sprints don't — and then everyone goes back to arguing about the exact number. Here are the numbers that hold up in 2026, per platform, and what they cost in practice.

The cadence that works, per platform

• LinkedIn: 2–5 posts per week. Buffer's large-scale posting study and LinkedIn's own guidance both land in this band. Daily is fine; twice a day starts cannibalizing your own reach.
• Instagram: 3–5 feed posts per week, with carousels carrying the engagement. Stories can be daily — they're a different muscle and don't fatigue the grid.
• TikTok: 3–5 per week sustainably. The "post 1–4 times a day" advice you'll read is creator-economy advice; for a brand account it's a burnout schedule that shows in the output.
• X (Twitter): 2–5 per day if you're playing the reach game, 5–7 per week if you're maintaining presence. Half-life of a post is measured in minutes, so frequency matters more here than anywhere.
• Reddit: 1–3 per week, per community, and only posts that read native. Reddit punishes cadence-for-cadence's-sake harder than any platform — one genuinely useful post beats five promotional ones that get you flagged.

When to post

Timing moves the needle less than frequency, but the bands are stable: LinkedIn rewards Tuesday–Thursday mornings (roughly 8–11am in your audience's timezone). Instagram favors mid-morning and midday on weekdays. TikTok skews evenings. X has two windows, early morning and lunch. Reddit follows US morning hours, when each community's moderators and heavy users are awake.

Treat those as starting defaults, not laws. Your audience's analytics outrank any published average within about a month of consistent posting.

What the cadence actually costs

Take the middle of each band and add it up: roughly 15 posts a week across five platforms. Each one needs an idea, a visual, a caption phrased for the platform, and a slot on the calendar. That's the real reason most feeds die — not ignorance of the optimal frequency, but the weekly invoice of producing it.

The right cadence is a budget question, not a trivia question. Most brands know the number; they can't afford it by hand.

How we make the number affordable

These bands are what flypost.ai's content calendar uses as defaults. The pipeline generates the month from your brand kit — rotating across your content pillars so fifteen posts a week doesn't mean the same idea fifteen ways — schedules each post into its platform's window, and publishes with live delivery status. The Originality Engine checks every angle against your history first, which is what makes a real cadence survivable past the first month.

You review and approve. The calendar stops being a tax and becomes a two-minute taste check — which is the only part of "how often should I post" that was ever worth your time.