The Optimal Rate of Exposure: Posting Frequency, Habituation, and Tedium in Social Media Engagement

For content creators, posting more frequently appears to be a natural strategy for maintaining audience attention. There is, however, likely a point at which posting more stops being beneficial and begins to actively erode engagement. This study extends Berlyne's two-factor theory of habituation and tedium to a naturalistic social media setting, treating the creator rather than the individual post as the repeated stimulus, and disentangling source-level from content-level repetition as two parallel processes that jointly determine where familiarity tips into fatigue. We hypothesise an inverted U-shaped relationship between posting frequency and audience engagement, moderated by parasocial tie strength, content complexity, topic diversity, emotional intensity, and advertising intensity. Drawing on data accessed through the Meta Research API alongside complementary public APIs, this study tests these relationships across a broad sample of content creators on multiple major social media platforms.