The Art of Timing – Posting on Facebook

Dreamgrow

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Filed under: Case studies, Corporate Social Media, Facebook, Science, Social Media, Surveys and stats

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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Page, facebook status updates, facebook updates, posting to facebook, survey, timing facebook updates, timing status updates, timing tweets, when to post

Posting on Facebook is an art – The art on timing. Simply put, there are some periods in the week when people are more active, but you have to find the sweet spot for your business yourself. This is the time when your target group is on Facebook.

For example: if your target audience is teachers, it makes no sense to post during school hours, they just won’t be on Facebook at this time. So you are better off posting after the school day. Now you understand how important it is to know your target audience if you want to get the best results.

But what to do if you don’t know when your target audience is on Facebook?

Test and Experiment with the help of Facebook Insights.

Start by posting at various times during the week. Limit yourself to 1 post per day though(2 if you have to) so you don’t wear out your audience. Then after couple of weeks or so use Facebook Insights to analyze your data to see which times and days your posts generate the most “likes” and comments.

Here is an example of how Facebook Insights data looks like:

As you can see the first half of the week, especially Mondays work pretty good for us.

What if I’m too lazy to experiment?

Maybe you are just starting out and don’t have the time or knowledge to experiment with your Facebook posts. Luckily for you, the smart people at Vitrue analyzed data from August 10, 2007 to October 10, 2010 from more than 1,500 brand streams – more than 1.64 million posts and 7.56 million comments in all (not including shares and “likes”). They found:

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
• Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

Kissmetrics used the data from Dan Zarrella and found out that Saturday is the overall best day to post on Facebook.

Tip: Experiment and be a bit skeptical when using this data. For example sometimes I get the most engagement on Sunday which Vitrue says is the least active day in the week.

Basic rule of thumb

Engagement of your posts varies by industry. BuddyMedia found that the businesses in the entertainment industry should post on the weekend, while fashion, healthcare and beauty companies should post on Thursday for best engagement.

Always be testing to find out the perfect posting time for your business!

Posted on: November 16, 2011