How Often Should Artists Post? Finding a Sustainable Content Frequency

Somewhere along the way, artists were told that the answer to "how often should I post" is "more". Three posts a day. Ten stories a day. One video every day, forever. LP Lucas, who teaches Social Media for Artists on Twotap and has built an audience of hundreds of thousands across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, thinks that advice has broken more artists than it has built, and he is specific about why.

Advice from the platform is not neutral advice

A lot of posting guidance traces back to the companies whose apps you are posting into, and Lucas points at the obvious conflict of interest.

"Sometimes tips come from the platform. Someone that works at these companies comes up and says, we think a good frequency should be ten stories every day and one video every day, and your reach will increase a lot. Of course they tell you to do that because they want you on their platforms as much time as possible."
LP Lucas, in the lesson Finding Your Frequency from Social Media for Artists

The other bad source is comparison. You watch someone posting daily and doing well, and conclude the daily posting caused the doing well. As he puts it, the danger is that person does not have the same life as you.

Consistency is a pattern, not a volume

This is the reframe the whole lesson turns on. Consistency does not mean posting every day, and it does not mean posting whenever you happen to have something. It means a repeating shape somebody could predict.

Lucas publishes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and has kept that going for years. He also knows creators whose consistency is one extremely well-produced long video a month, or every two months, and it works for them. Both are consistent. Neither is more correct.

"The idea of consistency depends on the person, not on the platform. Remember that, otherwise you will burn out."
LP Lucas, in the lesson Finding Your Frequency

The test he applies to any schedule is whether it is feasible on your worst week, not your best one. If you want to post daily, the whole creative process has to fit that: something good, ready, in about three hours. If it cannot, the schedule is fiction and you will fail it publicly.

What a working artist's week actually looks like

He walks through his own calendar, with the explicit warning not to copy it:

• Monday. Emails, invoices, planning the week.
• Tuesday. Publish a video around noon in his time zone. Edit in the afternoon.
• Wednesday. Write scripts, generate ideas, record.
• Thursday. Publish a short form video at noon. Edit.
• Friday. More scripts, and recording for the weekend or the following week.
• Saturday. A morning of work, publishing long form when he has it.
• Sunday. Plan the week, if he feels like it. If not, Monday morning.

Two details in there are worth more than the grid itself. He picked Tuesday because it suited his audience and his own schedule, not because Tuesday is a good day, and he notes other creators who simply post whenever a video is finished and do fine. And he keeps a reserve: years of unused footage, process clips and offcuts that become a compilation on a Saturday when nothing new is ready. Editing work, but no recording work, on the week that got away from him.

Recording is a fifth of the job

Artists who feel behind often feel that way because they are counting the wrong hours.

"If we compare the time I spend recording videos, I spend just a percentage of my week recording, I believe it's like 20 percent, because most of your time working is having ideas."
LP Lucas, in the lesson Finding Your Frequency

He is direct about how uncomfortable that used to be: sometimes five hours thinking about an illustration and one hour drawing it, and years of worrying that this meant he was not working enough. His conclusion is that the thinking time is the work, and a posting schedule that leaves no room for it starves the thing it is supposed to promote.

You are comparing yourself to teams

Channels that post far more than he does usually have editors and staff, and he names it plainly: it is dangerous to compare yourself to huge creators because they have people working for them. Consistency is much easier to maintain when three people maintain it.

His own path is a useful correction to overnight-success framing. He spent about three years running art alongside a full-time public relations job, going part-time on the old work step by step, and only quit once art earned more. Then the first year on his own was awful, his artistic life effectively crumbled, and he nearly went back. It picked up after roughly eighteen months. That is the timescale a sustainable schedule has to survive.

Leave room for the unplanned, and for input

Lucas plans about a month ahead and deliberately keeps slack in the week, because extra work always appears and a fully packed schedule cannot absorb it. He also protects time that produces nothing directly:

"I also have to leave space to read books, to watch films, to appreciate art, because when you stop being inspired by culture, other artists, your work becomes less and less interesting."
LP Lucas, in the lesson Finding Your Frequency

His own consumption is capped at around two hours a day across every platform combined, partly to rest from screens, and he deliberately avoids watching creators working in his own lane so their solutions do not leak into his.

Post and ghost

The last habit is about what happens after the post goes up. He publishes, answers the first few comments in the first five or ten minutes, and then leaves.

He used to refresh the page, and stopped. The reason he gives is partly emotional, that it keeps you from getting too attached to your own work and is better for your anxiety, and partly practical: the hours lost watching a post perform are hours not spent making the next one.

Choosing your own frequency

• Decide what you can produce on a bad week, not a good one
• Pick fixed slots and repeat them, however few
• Count thinking and editing time as work when you size the schedule
• Build a reserve of unused footage or sketches for the weeks you miss
• Do not benchmark against creators with editors
• Protect input time: books, films, exhibitions
• Post, answer the first comments, then close the app

LP Lucas breaks down his full weekly system, and the analytics behind why he posts when he posts, in Social Media for Artists on Twotap.