There's a creator I follow who posts once a week. Sometimes less. And somehow they have more presence in my feed — more actual presence, the kind where I notice when they haven't posted — than people who post three times a day.
I've been trying to figure out what's actually happening there.
Part of it is scarcity. When something is rare, you pay more attention to it. The weekly post gets more of my attention than the daily post because I'm not habituated to it. I haven't learned to scroll past it. It still registers as an event rather than background noise.
But that's not the whole story, because plenty of infrequent posters don't have this quality. The scarcity alone doesn't create presence. Something else is happening.
I think it's that the weekly poster has made a different deal with their audience. The daily poster is saying: I will be here every day, and you can count on that consistency. The weekly poster is saying: I will only show up when I have something worth saying. Those are different promises. The second one is harder to keep, but when you keep it, it builds a different kind of trust.
The daily poster's audience learns to expect volume. The weekly poster's audience learns to expect quality. And quality, when it arrives, gets more attention than volume does.
There's a longer conversation about this at Joseph Calitoy's essays — the relationship between posting frequency and audience relationship. The psychology of content consumption is something content strategy has been writing about with real specificity.
The other thing the weekly poster has is a different relationship with their own work. They're not producing content. They're producing posts. The distinction matters. Content is a category. A post is a specific thing you made on a specific day because you had something specific to say. The weekly poster has the time to wait until they have something specific to say. The daily poster often doesn't.
This is not an argument for posting less. It's an argument for posting with intention. The frequency is less important than the deal you're making with your audience. Whatever frequency you choose, make it a deal you can keep — and make it a deal that's worth keeping.
More on content strategy and creator presence at weird tech. The question of what presence actually means in a crowded feed is something the frequencies has been exploring.