We have received a lot of questions on what’s the best time to post on Facebook?
The question has been raised many times, even you may find infographics which shows the key times that people are more active online, the times they’re most responsive, the time they buy more, etc.
But the truth is there is no ultimate answer as to when is the best time to post on Facebook. It all connected with your Page’s audience and when your Page fans are active online. You also have to consider what competition your posts are up against at any given time and how Facebook’s news feed algorithm works?
Here’s the easy way – go into your Facebook Page Insights, click on ‘Posts’ from the left-hand side menu and look at the chart to see when the majority of your audience is online.
Facebook Insights: when your audience is online
You can go through this chart, locate the time when the majority of your audience is online and post when the maximum amount of your audience is active makes sense. Right?
Not exactly․
Recently Facebook shared on how their News Feed works, and deriving from that posting at maximum traffic times may actually reduce your reach. Why? Because your post will be in competition with all the other posts that each user could potentially be shown at that time, and content from people with which they have a personal relationship, or interact with more often, will rank higher.
When posts are published to Facebook, the News Feed algorithm ranks them relative to each individual user’s affinity with that post – this is based on the users’ past interactions with the creator's content, when it was posted, the type of content it is and various other considerations. From this, Facebook gives each post a score, relative to each user’s connection with the post, and that score determines which stories are shown in their News Feed.
So if you post at a time when the majority of users are posting personal updates, the chances of your Page content ranking higher than an update from a friend or family member is probably not that high, unless you have a really strong affinity with your fans. Of course, if your post is extremely popular, that changes the game.
Recently analysed more than a billion Facebook posts to measure the best ways to improve engagement. They actually found that posting between 10pm and midnight saw brands garnering higher levels of engagement.
Buzzsumo analysis
This means that posting late at night, when there’s less competition from personal updates, increases the probability that your brand posts will make it to the top of the list for more users.
So does that mean you should be looking to post at these times? Maybe.
When You just started your page, it makes sense that you'd want to generate more response in order to boost your Page rank and response, as doing so increases the brand affinity of your Page with your audience, which will then boost the reach of your posts. So you can begin with posting late at night to increase engagement, then you can progressively move your schedule back and start posting at more high-traffic times as your response rates increase․
The key here is that there’s a level of human understanding required beyond the stats and data alone. For example, Facebook recently released data showing that new parents in the U.S. are more active on Facebook in the early hours, when they’ve been woken up by an unsettled baby and are looking for something to do. In fact, Facebook found that 56% of new parents have visited Facebook on their mobile device by 7am. That makes sense, as parents fear to waking the sleeping child, so they pickup their mobile devices for something to do. This means that if you promote products specific to parents and kids that could be the best time to post on Facebook.
The critical part of maximizing your Facebook reach and connecting with your audience is understanding them, understanding the common behaviors. If you can maximize the use of tools like Audience Insights and your own understanding of what’s happening with your audience at different times, that’s will help you to determine the best time to post on Facebook Page.
