Abstract
Parties decide how often to post on social media, and a common worry is that posting more spreads their audience's attention more thinly. I use 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, to ask how the engagement a page receives changes when it posts more. I compare each page with itself, holding constant what was happening in its country that month or day. 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, while in data where engagement was shuffled within the month the figure is zero. 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. Because pages may post more when they expect more interest, the estimates describe how engagement moves with volume rather than the effect of a decision to post more. They show little dilution from posting more in a month, and a clearer cost when posts are bunched within a day.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Does Posting More Pay? Posting Volume and Engagement on the Facebook Pages of European Parties and Leaders, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414560