More content is not a strategy

Here’s the uncomfortable part first. Posting more works.

Buffer looked at 9.6 million Instagram posts from more than 200,000 accounts between January 2024 and December 2025. Its finding was that the more often an account posts, the higher the reach per post. It put the sweet spot at three to five posts a week. I don’t have a reason to argue with that, and I’m not going to pretend the people who post every day are fools.

What I’d argue with is what everybody does next. They read “more posts, more reach” and turn it into a plan. Then the plan becomes a calendar, and the calendar becomes the strategy.

That’s the mistake. Reach is a number about how many people saw something. It says nothing about whether any of them could tell you who made it a week later.

What does posting more actually buy you?

It buys you more chances. That’s real, and for an artist nobody’s heard of yet, chances matter.

But a chance isn’t the same as a relationship. Followers aren’t fans. Views aren’t people who’d drive two hours to a show. A viral song proves a song traveled, not that anyone knows who sang it. I think a lot of release plans quietly treat those as the same thing, because the first one shows up in a report on Monday and the second one doesn’t.

I’ve been Creative Director for Luke Combs since 2020, and I run Black Label Creative, which does album and tour campaigns. I’m not going to walk through specific campaigns here. This is an opinion, and it’s the one I hold most firmly about the work: the posts people remember are the ones that could only have come from that artist. Everything else is filler that happens to have their name on it.

What are the apps telling you?

The services that reward frequency are also getting stricter about what they’ll pass along to new people.

Instagram’s own guidance for creators, from 2023, says it’s “less likely to recommend reposts of a reel that’s already on Instagram, content with noticeable watermarks, or accounts that regularly collect and reshare others’ content.” In April 2026, Digital Music News reported that Instagram extended that thinking. Accounts that regularly repost content they didn’t create would no longer be eligible for recommendations.

I read that as a hint about direction. The apps want volume, but they’re filtering harder for content that came from somebody. Sameness is getting cheaper to make and easier to filter out at the same time. That isn’t a great combination for a plan built on more of it.

Reach is a number about how many people saw something. It says nothing about whether they could tell you who made it a week later.

Why is forgettable work so expensive?

Most of the research on this comes from advertising, not artist content, so I’d hold it loosely.

System1, working with the strategy firm eatbigfish and the effectiveness researcher Peter Field, measured how people react to ads. They found 47% of responses to US TV ads were neutral. People felt nothing. They estimated that dull work costs US advertisers an extra $189 billion in media spend to get the same results as work people actually react to. That’s a vendor’s estimate built on its own ad-testing database, and it’s about TV ads. But the direction matches what common sense says. If nobody feels anything, you have to pay to be seen more times.

There’s an honest counterweight too. Nielsen wrote in 2017 that creative “remains the undisputed champ” among sales drivers. It also found media’s share of the effect had grown from 15% to 36% over 11 years. So where and how often something runs does matter more than it used to. I’m not saying ignore distribution. I’m saying distribution multiplies whatever you hand it, and it multiplies nothing just as efficiently.

What is a point of view, in practice?

People say “point of view” like it’s a mood. I think it’s more concrete than that.

My read is that a point of view is a set of decisions you’d make the same way twice. How the artist talks. What they’d never post. Where the camera goes. What gets cut. Whether a joke lands as them or as somebody’s social team doing an impression of them.

A useful test: cover the name. If you hid the handle on a post, could a fan tell whose it was? If the honest answer is no, posting it three more times a week won’t fix that. It just makes more of something nobody will attach to a person.

Those decisions are worth writing down, so a new team member or an AI tool can make them the same way. I built a free brand file builder for artists that does exactly that.

That’s also why I don’t think AI changes the argument much, except to sharpen it. A team can now make thirty versions of a caption or a clip in a few minutes. That makes the making cheap. It makes the choosing more valuable. Somebody still has to know which version sounds like the artist and which nine should never leave the folder.

So how much should you post?

As much as you can without making things you wouldn’t defend.

That’s a less satisfying answer than “three to five a week,” but I think it’s the right order of operations. Start with what the artist actually has to say and how they’d say it. Then figure out how often you can say it well. Then post that often. If the calendar says Tuesday and there’s nothing worth saying on Tuesday, I’d rather skip Tuesday.

What I don’t know is where the line sits for any given artist. Some can post constantly and every post still sounds like them. Some can’t. The data won’t tell you which one you are. Your audience will, slowly, by remembering or not.

Here’s the question I’d ask any team that’s proud of its output. If you stopped posting for two weeks, what specifically would your audience miss? If the answer is “nothing in particular,” the problem was never frequency.