Today I read two articles that claimed to be able to tell me, via data and studies, what the best day and time to post to Facebook is. One told me Monday was the worst day as not as many users were online, the other told me Monday was the best day to post as posts on Mondays got the best interaction.
I guess this contradiction proves that there is no right answer to this question. And that kinda makes me happy as that’s what I’ve been telling clients for ages!
There are good times and bad times to post to Facebook but these are individual to each page and your goals as the page admin. It depends on a lot of factors, who your page likers are, how they use Facebook, when they look at Facebook, how they interact with Facebook and what you want them to do with your Facebook posts.
For example looking at my web stats Facebook performs well as a link referer. I get a lot of traffic from it. I have noticed however that people accessing my page from a computer stay on the site much longer and visit more pages, those accessing from mobile don’t stay long. So for me I have to consider the premium time to hit users when they will be in front of a laptop or desktop. It makes sense to me that this will be during the working day so I tend to post with this in mind.
The good news is for those of you that have the new Facebook insights, you can now see some personalised information about when it’s best for you to post depending on when most of your Likes are online.
Here’s how to find it:
Click on ‘posts’ at the top of the page
Click ‘when are your fans online’
Here you will see data on what day of the week and what time of the day people who like your page saw any posts on Facebook.
I was surprised that 9pm was a good time for me, I shall have to give it a go.
Be Cautious
Even this data isn’t scientific, just because people are online it doesn’t mean they are paying attention and it doesn’t account for the competition on newsfeeds at those times of day. In my case, as I mentioned above I want to hit people when they are in front of a PC as I get a better click through rate and the people who do click through hang around. So my 9pm posts will have to be more frivolous, non click through posts where as my blog posts and links should be targeted during the working day.
There is no better way of discovering what time of day to post on Facebook than trial and measurement but at least these stats give you a starting point.
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