Optimal Time to Post on Facebook

We’ve managed social media marketing for a number of our clients over the years, and we have lots of meetings about which posts are doing good and which posts are doing okay and which posts should never be posted again. That’s usually judged by the interaction and the engagement that we’re getting, and the action that users are taking when they actually see these posts.

One day I realized that there was a variable that nobody had considered yet. That was the time of day that we were actually making the post. You can have the best, most audience appropriate post that you want to put out, but if nobody sees it because you post it at the wrong time, it’s not going to work. However, you might have a post that’s somewhat mediocre but if you continue to post those kinds of posts at the right time, say every day at 3 in the afternoon, then they’re going to outperform your better posts.

We started really taking a look at what posts were doing good as we reposted the same posts over time. Luckily, Facebook now actually has something that will tell you when your audience is online. If you have a Facebook fan page for your company, then you’re able to find this out. Let’s take a look at how to do this together.

You’re going to have to be logged in as a user who has administrative privileges of the page that you want to look at. Then if you go to the page, up at the very top you’re going to see a link for insights. Then you can actually click on posts. When you do that, the top of the page is actually a chart of when your users are actually online for about the last week or so. Up top you can actually see a day by day. You can find out that people are online less on, say, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday than later in the middle of the week like Wednesday and Thursday where it looks pretty busy.

Now what I’m learning from this page is that their traffic tends to rise as the day goes on. It peaks right here around 6 or 7:00. What this tells myself is I want to get posts out in the late afternoon on most days. What’s interesting is if I look over here on, say, Saturday, then the trend it looks a little bit higher at 6PM. If I’m going to post at all on these weekend days, I’m going to definitely make sure I post right in that time. Whereas, say, in the middle of the week, all of those times in the middle of the day from about, say, 11 on to 6 or 7:00 are about the same.

I’m going to take some notes here and I’m going to try a new posting schedule for the following week. I’m going to come back and look at this every month or so because this is going to change. Your users’ behavior is not dynamic. It can actually change over time. You want to be checking back all the time, want to make some notes about what you see. You’re going to remember that posts aren’t always necessarily available the second you post them. You want to get a little bit ahead of that curve. If you want your maximum exposure around 6:00, maybe you make the post at 5. If you boost the post or you do a little advertising, don’t forget to think about some approval times as well, which is very important.

Imagine how you’re going to change your social media postings habits when you actually know when your customers are online. I hope you’re going to actually put out your content right at the times that they’re going to be online and stack the deck so that most people can actually see your content. Now I always want to encourage you to experiment because this will change over time. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. When you have the knowledge, I want you to keep taking a look at it and I want you to shape your postings habits with this information.

Juicy Results is a social media marketing agency. Contact us today to see how we do social media right for our clients.