At the end of each week Tom and I review the unused goodies that have piled up in our mailboxes from our RSS feeds, Google Alerts and our global network of Agitator correspondents. Then, after saving the gems, we hit the delete button.

Last night, in the course of this ritual, I came across a piece from Target Marketing titled What’s the Secret Mix for Social Media Success?. I removed my finger from the ‘delete’ button and decided to turn it into a post.

Why? Because out there in Nonprofit Land this Friday I’m sure in some meeting, lunch room or pub there’s a mini-debate raging on the question: “How many posts should we make next week on Facebook and Twitter?”

In the scholastic ‘how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin’ nonprofit debates that so often substitute for truly meaningful and fundamental discussion about truly important issues like retention and fixing donor experiences, the Target Marketing piece at least adds some interesting data and facts on the issue of posting frequency.

Seems as though Hubspot, the marketing and sales software provider, has actually compiled a quite detailed and free 2015 Social Benchmark Report covering the posting practices of 7,000 plus commercial and nonprofit organizations.

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To the question: How often should we post?

Here are the study’s key takeaways:

• There’s no correlation between a large number of posts and a high number of consumer/donor interactions. In fact, as the Hubspot report notes, “If anything, there’s a very slight negative correlation between the two, as the two industries that post the least — consumer goods/retail/e-commerce and manufacturing — have two of the highest interactions per post average. But then again, the industry with the highest interaction per post average — nonprofit/education — has a post frequency that’s right in the middle of the pack.”

• The size of your following is a better predictor of engagement than the frequency of your posts. Among all the sectors measured, the nonprofit and education sectors were the most popular and had the highest amount of engagement. Eric Devany, the report’s author, says this result seems to underscore that quality and active followers are the most desirable when it comes to social media.

• Many factors influence social engagement. While this may sound like the typical consultant’s cop-out, it’s really not. The report makes clear that there is such a thing as an ‘ideal balance’ and the report contains sector and organizational size data that should prove helpful.

Again, you can download the full report here.

Of course, we’re not calling attention to all of this with the intention of encouraging organizations to falsely count on social media for bringing in new donors. You can see how we feel about that in our earlier post on acquisition: Social Media is Bullshit.

Rather we hope the Hubspot study will put an end to the time-wasting debates on frequency and enable your social media folks to get back to serious business.

Are you discussing the ‘fundamentals’ as this week ends?

Roger