You will hear tons of differing opinions about the best times to post on Facebook.
Some will say you should post between 1 and 4 PM. Others will say that it doesn’t matter so much, and you can post from 9 AM to 7 PM. Contradictory information is everywhere. That’s why we decided to cut through the fog and find out what’s really going on.
Using Sotrender, we were able to analyze the data that showed us just how important posting times are on Facebook.
By analyzing approximately 10,000 Facebook pages and over 500,000 posts from different page categories and countries, we’ve gotten a clear picture about the best times to post on Facebook. Read on to find out just what we learned!
Popular beliefs about posting times
There are quite a few hypotheses floating around the web about ideal posting times. As was already mentioned, opinions can vary wildly. The only consistent agreement among industry leaders is this.Â
Facebook page administrators should post when their audience is awake.Click To Tweet This doesn’t help much, as it’s quite obvious that unconscious individuals will not be able to see your content. They only conclusion that can be made from this is that admins should post when users are awake.But is that enough? Not really.
Finding an ideal time to post for your brand is not as straightforward as you would imagine. It involves trying new things and being aware of your audiences behaviors - it’s a constant experiment. It would be easy to just assume that posting during the day when users are awake is a sufficient strategy. But to get ahead, you need to find out what specifically works for you.
Popular posting times
As part of our analysis, the first thing we knew we had to do was look at the most popular posting times. We took a look at which hours Facebook administrators published content most often during the 6 month analysis.
Have a look at the chart. To little surprise, popular posting hours revolve around the typical working. Admins start to post in the morning, post most often around noon, less so during the day, and posting steadily declines from there until the next morning. 10 AM to 12 PM are the most popular posting times, which would seem logical. Most people are eating lunch or a late breakfast around these hours, which is a great time to mess around on Facebook. Seems logical. But there’s a little more to it than that.
It’s all in the Brand
To figure out the the best posting times, we looked at the activity (posts and comments) of both admins and users on Facebook. We analyzed to different brand categories: Telecommunications and Alcohol. They are both very popular categories and provide above satisfactory customer service. but most importantly, they have differing communication needs and strategies, which helps to show the intricacies of posting times. We analyzed roughly 550 pages (177 from Telecommunications; 380 from Alcohol).
First, let’s look at telecommunication brands. Facebook fanpages are most active around 12 PM, and they continue to be active into the evening. However, this doesn’t completely match-up with their user activities. Users are more active in the evening, not at noon. You can see from the chart that admins try to take this into account, but they could still post more in the evening hours to take advantage of active users.
All in all though, theses brand are doing pretty well. Let’s have a look at a different category now.
The alcohol category is a perfect example of why you shouldn’t blindly follow the idea that you should post during working hours. Fanpages here were posting the most between 3 PM and 5 PM. However, their fans were most active in the evening hours, around 8 PM.
By assuming users were most active during working hours, these fan-pages aren’t communicating with their fans at the best times.
How can you find your best times to post on Facebook?
As we can see, posting times will be dependent on you brand and category it belongs to. Sometimes, it’s perfectly fine to post during work days. Other times, you’ll have to take advantage of posting into the later hours of the day. However, you have to figure out just what kind of strategy will work for you. And the best way to do this involves two steps: Analyzing and syncing.
The first thing is to analyze your fanpage and figure out when your audience is most active. Analyzing Facebook with a tool like Sotrender is the best way to get accurate data and analyses regarding the performance of your Facebook Page. You’ll be able to see when your users are most active, which is integral to finding the ideal time for you to post.
Then you have to match your customer service to fit their activities. By syncing up your publishing habits with your fans activities, you’ll be able to boost the engagement on your page and the amount of people who are reached by your posts. And what Facebook page admin wouldn’t want that?
Over to You
Now that you know how to determine the best times to post on Facebook, how much does this change how you're currently posting to Facebook?
Take a look at your Facebook data. Are you posting at the right times?
If you need to make adjustments, are they minor or major changes to your Facebook posting schedule?
Please feel free to leave questions, comments or feedback on Facebook posting times with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.
