How Often Should a Restaurant Post on Social?

The short version: three to five times a week, forever, beats anything else you could do with the same effort. The long version explains why the number matters less than the word forever.

Why frequency matters at all

Short-form platforms do not really have an audience in the old sense. They have a test. Every video you post gets shown to a small group, and how that group behaves decides whether it gets shown to a larger one.

That has two consequences most people miss.

First, each post is a fresh roll of the dice, largely independent of your follower count. A new account can land a video that travels. An established one can post a dud that goes nowhere. More posts means more rolls.

Second, the platform is building a model of what your account is about, and it cannot do that from a handful of videos. A steady stream of related content teaches it who to show you to. Sporadic posting keeps resetting that.

The floor is three

Below about three posts a week, two things go wrong. You are not giving the system enough signal to categorise you, and you are not giving yourself enough attempts for one to break out.

Three a week is roughly the point where an account starts compounding rather than starting over.

The ceiling is whatever you can sustain

You can post daily. Plenty of accounts do, and it works. But the ceiling is not set by the algorithm, it is set by you, and the cost of overcommitting is worse than the cost of posting less.

An account that does seven a week for a month and then nothing for six weeks performs worse than one that did three a week the whole time. The gap does the damage. You lose the momentum and you spend the next month climbing back.

So pick the number you can hold on your worst week, not your best one.

What we actually run

For restaurant clients we set a contracted number of videos per month and a fixed posting interval per platform, then we hold it. Most land between eight and sixteen posts a month across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

Two details matter more than the raw count.

The interval is fixed, not the day. We space posts evenly rather than dumping three on a Monday. Evenly spaced posting gives each video room to be tested without competing against your own other upload.

We do not catch up. If a week gets missed, the fix is to resume the schedule, not to post four videos on Friday to make the number look right. Bunching is worse than the gap you are trying to cover.

Should the same video go on every platform?

Mostly yes, with the captions rewritten. The idea that each platform needs entirely separate content is true at the top end and an expensive distraction for a restaurant.

What does need to change:

• Captions. Different lengths, different tone, different hashtag behaviour.
• Posting time. They do not peak at the same hour.
• Watermarks. Never cross-post something with another platform watermark burned into it. It gets suppressed and it looks careless.

The honest part

Almost nobody fails at this because they chose the wrong number. They fail because week seven is hard.

Service was bad, someone quit, the walk-in broke, and editing a video is the eighth most important thing that day. So it does not happen, and then it does not happen again, and the feed goes quiet for a month.

That is the entire problem. Not the strategy, which fits on a napkin. The problem is that consistency is a staffing question dressed up as a marketing question.

We solved it for our clients by owning the schedule ourselves: we shoot in batches, edit ahead, and post on the agreed interval whether or not anybody had a good week. You approve, we publish.

If your feed has gone quiet and you would rather it did not, book fifteen minutes.