How often should you post about your product

You posted about it on Monday. It's Thursday. Posting again feels like too much, so you don't, and then on Sunday somebody who's followed you for two years asks whether you still make it.

How often to promote your product is a supply question, not a tolerance question. Roughly one post in three or four should have a price and a way to buy in it, and during a launch that goes to one in two. The constraint isn't how much your audience will put up with. It's how many genuinely different things you can say about the same object. When you run out of angles you stop. Not because a rule said seven days.

Dee sells hot sauce in Chicago, $14 a bottle and $34 for a three-pack. Over twelve weeks she counted: weeks where she posted about the sauce once averaged four orders. Weeks where she posted about it three times averaged eleven. Her follower count over the same twelve weeks went from 6,812 to 6,844.

That's not a study. It's one person's twelve weeks. It's also more evidence than the feeling in your stomach.

Run the reach arithmetic yourself

Don't take a benchmark from anybody, including this article. Open your last ten posts and write down the reach next to your follower count.

Whatever number you get, it's under 100%. It's under 100% for everyone, including the people you assume are seeing everything. And that single fact is the entire argument for posting again.

From inside your head, you've talked about nothing but this product for a fortnight. From inside your follower's head, you mentioned something once, on a Tuesday, while they were on a bus, and they meant to come back to it.

The gap between those two experiences is where almost all lost creator income lives.

The ratio, and why it isn't a rule

A working default: one in four posts sells something, three in four don't.

The three that don't are not filler. They're the reason the fourth one works. Process, opinions, mistakes, answers to questions, things you're annoyed by, things you're reading. That's what makes somebody follow you, and following you is what makes the fourth post read as a friend mentioning a thing rather than an advert arriving.

During a launch week the ratio flips to one in two, and it's fine, because you've told people there's a launch and a launch has an end.

The reason this isn't a rule: the ratio measures the wrong thing. What actually decides whether a promotional post is welcome is whether it contains anything. A post that says "still available, link in bio" contains nothing, and one of those a month is too many. A post that says "somebody asked whether it's too hot for kids, so here's my seven-year-old trying it" contains something, is also a selling post, and you could do two a week.

The real limit is angles

Sit down with one product and write twelve posts about it. Most people stall at four, decide the problem is that they've got nothing to say, and go quiet.

Here are twelve angles that work on almost anything.

1. The making of it. Hands, mess, an unglamorous stage.
2. A mistake. The batch you threw away, the version that leaked.
3. A question a customer asked, answered in public, with the price mentioned in passing.
4. Somebody else's photo of it, with permission.
5. What it isn't for. Genuinely disqualifying people. This sells more than it costs.
6. The comparison. Yours next to the mass-produced thing, honestly, including where theirs wins.
7. A number. How long it takes, how many you can make in a day, what the ingredients cost.
8. The origin. Why you made the first one, once, briefly, without the origin-story voice.
9. In use. The thing being used by a real person in a real kitchen with a bad worktop.
10. The restock. "Forty done, they'll go up on Friday at 6."
11. The pack-down. Boxes, labels, a stack going out the door.
12. Straight up. "This is what I make, this is what it costs, here's where to get it." Once a month. No apology in front of it.

That's twelve. At two a week that's a six-week campaign for a single product, none of which repeats, and you've never once written "still available".

If you cannot get to twelve, that's the actual finding. It usually means the product is underspecified, not that you're out of content.

Cadence by phase

Different weeks want different densities. Here's a shape that holds up.

Phase	Selling posts per week	What they're for
Normal weeks	1 to 2	Reminding people you sell things at all
Two weeks before a launch	2, no price yet	Building the problem, gathering replies
Launch week	4 to 6, plus stories	Price, deadline, objections, proof
The day it closes	2, one of them in the evening	Deadlines are when people buy
Restock	2	Scarcity that's actually true
Quiet season	1	Staying warm, not selling hard

The line most people get wrong is the last day. If you only send one message in an entire launch, send the closing one. Deadlines move people in a way that nothing else does, and a launch that ends without anybody being told it's ending is a launch that ends with a shrug.

Where you post changes the answer

Frequency isn't one number across every surface, because the surfaces have different half-lives.

Feed posts are permanent and public, so they carry a higher standard and a lower frequency. One or two selling posts a week.

Stories expire in a day and are seen by your most engaged people. You can mention the product daily in stories without anybody minding, because that's what stories are for. Most sellers massively under-use them. Selling through Instagram stories covers the mechanics, including the fact that a story asking a question gets replies that a story asking for money never will.

Your pinned post should always be selling. It's the only slot that never expires, and it's the one people check when they've decided to buy and can't remember where the link was. If your pinned post is a nice photo from April, you're losing orders you already earned.

Your list is different again. Email or a broadcast channel tolerates far less frequency and converts far better, because it arrives one to one. Once a fortnight, and something worth opening.

That last surface matters more than the others for a reason that has nothing to do with cadence: you own it. A change to a recommendation system on a Tuesday can halve your reach with no warning, and the people who've handed you an address are the ones you can still reach in that scenario. Algorithms change, your link does not makes the case better than a frequency table can.

Worked example: Dee, Chicago

Dee makes hot sauce. 6,800 followers, mostly Chicago and the Midwest, and she sells at two markets a month plus online.

For a year she posted about the sauce roughly once every ten days, always in the same format: a bottle on a white background, "available now", link in bio. Orders ran at three or four a week and she assumed that was her ceiling.

In February she tried something different for twelve weeks. Same product, same price. She wrote twelve angles on a card and worked through them, two a week.

Week type	Selling posts	Average orders
Weeks 1 to 4, one post	1	4
Weeks 5 to 8, two posts	2	8
Weeks 9 to 12, three posts	3	11

Followers: 6,812 at the start, 6,844 at the end. Three people unfollowed in the week she posted three times, and eleven followed.

Her best post of the whole twelve weeks was a customer's photo of the sauce on scrambled eggs, reposted with a nine-word caption, taken on a phone in bad kitchen light. Nineteen orders in three days. She'd spent four hours the previous week on a video that sold two.

That pattern is so consistent that you should plan for it. Ask buyers for photos. Repost them with permission. It outperforms your best work and it costs you a message.

One practical note from her side of it: there's no Sailo app. When she's at a market and the three-pack sells out, she updates it in a browser on her phone, standing behind the table. It works and it's about ninety seconds, but it isn't an icon you tap, and if you're the kind of person who'll only do a thing that lives on a home screen, know that before you build your week around mid-day stock changes.

What over-promoting actually looks like

You'll know, and it won't look like the thing you're afraid of.

The symptoms are specific:

• Replies dry up. Not likes. Replies. Likes are a reflex, replies are a relationship.
• Your saves and shares fall while your posting rate rises. People share things that make them look interesting. Nobody shares an advert.
• Everything you write is about the product. No opinions, no process, no other humans. This is the actual failure mode, and it's a content problem, not a frequency problem.
• You're recycling captions. If you've used "last chance" twice in a month, you've run out of angles and you're padding.

Unfollows, on their own, are not a symptom. A person who unfollows because you sold something twice was never buying anything. The mute is the one worth caring about, and you can't see it, which is why the reply count is your proxy.

The follow-up problem

The other frequency question is one to one: how often to chase a specific person who said they were interested and went quiet.

Once. Three days later. With a genuine exit built into it.

Twice is the point where you become a thing they have to manage. And the second message rarely converts anyone the first didn't, because the reason people go quiet is almost never that they forgot. It's usually money, timing, or a small unspoken doubt about whether it's right for them. How to follow up without being annoying has the wording.

When the frequency isn't the problem

If you've gone from one selling post a week to three and nothing has moved, stop adjusting the dial. Three times zero is zero.

The problem is somewhere else: the price isn't visible, the link goes somewhere that isn't a shop, the people following you aren't the people who'd buy this, or the offer isn't clear enough to act on. Those are all fixable and none of them are fixed by posting more.

If the reluctance to post at all is really about not wanting to seem like you're selling, that's worth dealing with directly rather than solving with a schedule: selling without feeling like a salesperson is about the discomfort itself. And for the wider question of what a following your size can actually support, turning an audience into income does the arithmetic.

What to do this week

Get a card and write twelve angles for one product. Not twelve posts. Twelve angles, in a list, so that on a Wednesday when you have nine minutes you're picking from a list rather than inventing from nothing.

Then check your pinned post. If it doesn't have the current price and a working link on it, fix that before you post anything else. It's the slot with the longest half-life and the highest intent, and it's the one nearly everybody leaves stale.

One last thing, and it costs you nothing. Write the angle in the margin of your order book each time an order comes in and you know which post caused it. Not the platform, the angle: "the one about the courier damaging a box", "the price-drop one", "the hands-in-shot one". After thirty orders you will have a ranked list of what actually moves your product, and it almost never matches the list of posts you were proudest of. That list is worth more than any posting schedule, because a schedule tells you when and it tells you what.