Most senior living communities should post three to five times a week on Facebook, three or four times a week on Instagram, and once or twice a week on LinkedIn, with a video or two a month on YouTube.
That is our recommendation from running community feeds, not a measured industry benchmark. No reliable study sets a posting frequency for senior living. If someone quotes a precise engagement uplift from posting daily, ask where the number came from.
The rule underneath the numbers is simpler. Post as often as you can keep every post worth seeing, and never so rarely that a family checking your page would think it had been abandoned.
The recommended cadence, by platform
| Platform | Our recommended cadence | Who it mainly reaches | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 to 5 posts a week | Adult children, residents’ families, residents, the local community | Resident and staff stories, event photos afterwards, answers to tour questions | |
| 3 to 4 feed posts or Reels a week, plus Stories on most weekdays | Adult children, caregivers | Short phone video, staff spotlights, a day in the building | |
| 1 to 2 posts a week | Nurses, managers, discharge planners and other referral sources | Hiring, tenure milestones, clinical and leadership news | |
| YouTube | 1 to 2 videos a month | Families researching from a distance | Apartment walk-throughs, care-level explainers, tour videos |
| Google Business Profile | 1 to 2 posts a month | Families searching locally | Events, open houses, updates |
| TikTok | Optional; 2 to 3 a week if you commit | Mostly caregiver candidates | Recruitment video, made by a staff member who enjoys it |
| X | Optional | Local press, some professionals | Announcements only; not a priority |
Facebook comes first for a reason. Pew Research Center’s 2024 report on Americans’ social media use found YouTube and Facebook were the only platforms used by a majority of adults 65 and older. Facebook is also where many residents’ families already follow the community.
Google Business Profile posts are the lowest-return item on the list. The rest of your Google Business Profile matters far more than how often you post there.
If you can only resource one thing
Do three good Facebook posts a week and adapt them for Instagram. That is enough for a family checking your page before a tour to see a community with real people in it.
Below roughly one post a week, a page starts to look neglected. A family deciding whether to trust you with a parent will notice a feed that stopped in March.
Why more is not better
Every post should do one of three jobs: reassure a family, invite a prospect, or recruit a caregiver. We cover the three jobs a community feed has to do in a separate post. A daily post with no job teaches followers to scroll past you.
Feed algorithms rank posts partly on how people are likely to respond. A run of posts nobody reacts to does the page no favours.
Consistency beats volume. Three posts every week for a year builds a feed a family can scroll back through. Fourteen posts in the week of the summer event and then nothing for a month does not.
Make at least one post a week a short video: a Reel on Instagram and Facebook, a Short on YouTube. Fifteen to sixty seconds shot on a phone is fine. Heavily polished video reads as advertising, and an honest phone clip reads as evidence.
When to change the cadence
Opening or lease-up. Move Facebook and Instagram to near-daily for the months either side of opening, when there is genuinely new material every week.
A hiring push. Add LinkedIn and Instagram posts built around staff. In most communities social media works as a recruitment channel first, and the feed is what candidates check before they apply.
A hard week. A death in the community, an outbreak or a staffing crisis is a reason to pause the schedule. Upbeat posts that keep publishing through a difficult week are one of the clearest examples of what not to automate in senior living marketing.
Staff capacity. Only post as often as someone can answer the comments and messages. A question left unanswered for three days does more harm than a missing post.
Plan in batches, post like a person
Build the month in one sitting. A simple weekly rhythm works well:
- Monday: a staff spotlight.
- Wednesday: a resident story, or the answer to a question families ask on tours.
- Friday: a short video from the week.
Schedule these in Meta Business Suite or your scheduling tool. Then leave room for real moments, which usually outperform anything planned.
Someone has to watch comments and messages every working day. A question in the comments is an inquiry and should get a reply the same day. Families often check reviews alongside the feed, so it pays to run reviews as an ongoing operation rather than an occasional clean-up.
Consent and privacy come before cadence
A higher posting cadence means more photographs of residents, which means more consent to manage.
- Get a signed photo and video release for every resident before they appear. For residents who cannot consent for themselves, including many in memory care, follow your policy on who can consent on their behalf, and lean cautious.
- Keep a current opt-out list and share it with everyone who takes photographs. Honour withdrawals, including taking down older posts.
- Leave out health details. No diagnoses, care levels or medical information in images or captions. For a HIPAA covered entity that is a compliance issue. For any community it is a privacy and trust issue, and state privacy laws may also apply.
- Check the background. Medication carts, whiteboards, care schedules and room numbers turn up in photos more often than anyone expects.
- Ask staff too. A caregiver who did not want to appear on Instagram will remember that you put her there.
If you boost a post, it becomes an ad. Senior housing ads generally have to run in Meta’s Housing special ad category, and job posts in the Employment category. Both remove age, gender and ZIP code targeting, so plan boosted posts for broad audiences.
How to tell whether your cadence is right
- Reach per post. If average reach per post falls as you post more, you are posting more often than you can make worth seeing.
- Saves, shares, messages and comments that ask something. These signal a family or candidate taking the feed seriously. Staff likes do not.
- Tours and applications that mention social. Ask how people found you on the inquiry form and in interviews.
Change one thing at a time and give it a month. If three posts a week produce as many saves, messages and tour mentions as five, post three and spend the saved time on better ones.
The short answer to the title: three to five good posts a week on Facebook, three or four on Instagram, and a steady trickle everywhere else, kept up all year. If you want help running that, it is what our social media management for senior living is built around.