The Best Time to Post on Facebook

As the most popular social media platform in the world, Facebook is an important marketing tool for reaching new customers and clients. What’s more, knowing the best time to post on Facebook can give you an edge over your competition.

In this article, we’ll discuss Facebook’s potential as a marking tool. Then we’ll cover several key ways to determine when you should post content on Facebook.

Let’s get to it!

Facebook as an Essential Marketing Tool

The key to marketing successfully on any social media platform is understanding the algorithm by which posts are prioritized. Facebook’s algorithm is stacked against businesses by default, unfortunately, as it’s designed to promote ‘meaningful interactions’ (rather than more traditional advertising).

On Facebook, meaningful interactions consist of commenting on, liking, and sharing posts. This is meant to improve the Facebook user experience, by promoting content from individuals and decreasing passive media consumption.

In other words, if your business’ posts aren’t garnering extensive likes, comments, and shares, they probably won’t rank highly on the Facebook algorithm. Therefore, the posts you’ve spent time and energy creating could go completely unseen by your target audience.

That being said, Facebook is anything but a fruitless marketing venture. It has two billion active users every month – more than double the number of Instagram and Twitter users. For most businesses, this pool of potential customers is too vast to ignore.

Facebook also offers access to demographics that are less reachable on other platforms. For example, it’s by far the most-used social media platform by people age 65 and over. Businesses catering to seniors will be hard-pressed to implement successful social media marketing without using Facebook.

What’s more, over 75% of Facebook users spend more than 20 minutes per day on the site. If you’re able to get your posts to rank well, Facebook provides more opportunities for your content to be seen than on many other popular platforms, where users typically only spend a few minutes per day.

How to Determine the Best Time to Post on Facebook (4 Key Techniques)

Whether or not marketing on Facebook is profitable for your business largely depends on how well you’re able to work with its algorithm. The customers are there; you just need to figure out how to reach them.

Creating posts that encourage user engagement will help, but timing your posts well is just as important. The best time to post on Facebook will vary based on your industry and target audience. However, there are a few strategies you can apply no matter who you are or where your business is located.

1. Understand Your Audience and Know When They’re Most Engaged

In order to rank well via Facebook’s algorithm, you’ll need to find ways to increase user engagement with your content. This means encouraging activities like commenting and post sharing. One of the best ways to do that is to determine exactly when your followers are most likely to be around and active.

If you have an established Facebook page, you can use Facebook Insights to analyze your existing user data. This tool will help you track your followers’ engagement patterns. That way, you can schedule posts for times when people are most likely to share and comment on your content.

If you’re new to Facebook, on the other hand, you’ll have to do your own research. Look back at posts with high volumes of comments, and see if you notice any patterns in the posting times. You can do the same for shared posts and other common types of engagement.

This process might take a while. However, the last thing you want to do is create posts that are never seen by your audience. Putting in the work required to improve your Facebook content’s visibility is likely to pay off well in the long run.

2. Consider Your Audience’s Daily Routine

As we’ve noted, there are certain times of the day when your target audience is more likely to be on Facebook, viewing and interacting with posts. Having an idea of what their daily schedule might look like can help you post content at the most highly-trafficked times.

For example, many people check social media networks such as Facebook while they’re at work. More than 41% of those users spend their lunch break on social media. In addition, 40% check their social media accounts periodically throughout the day.

Tracking when your followers are most engaged on Facebook can help give you an idea of what their particular schedules look like. You can also try posting during typical lunch hours or at regular intervals throughout the day, and watch to see if your engagement levels increase.

On the other hand, you might want to avoid posting on weekends. After all, that’s when people are more likely to be spending time with friends or family. Focus your energy on uploading content when people are looking for a distraction, instead of competing for their attention during busy periods.

3. Don’t Forget to Factor in Time Zones

Time zones can make determining the best time to post on Facebook a little more difficult. Users from around the globe will be posting on their own schedules. This can skew your data on when users are most engaged.

When you’re tracking engagement times throughout each day and week, you’ll want to pay special attention to more modest but consistent spikes in engagement. Focusing exclusively on the times with the very highest interaction rates could result in missing out on key marketing opportunities.

More specifically, slightly smaller peaks in meaningful interactions could indicate interest in your content that’s coming from other parts of the world. Therefore, look to see if a significant portion of the posts at those times result from a certain location or region.

If they do, consider staggering your posts so that some of your new content goes up during high engagement times for global followers. This can help you grow your customer base in those areas, especially through post shares and comments.

4. Continue Improving Engagement by Monitoring Your Followers

If you’re using the right Facebook marketing strategies to grow your business, you’ll hopefully attract new followers to your page over time. For this reason, keeping track of changes in your follower demographics and preferences is important.

Unfortunately, determining the best time to post on Facebook just once won’t be enough. A consistent process of re-evaluation is the only way to make sure your posts continue to reach the greatest number of users possible.

To do that, you’ll want to continue using Facebook Insights to keep track of when your followers are most engaged. If you notice a shift in optimal posting times, you can simply adapt your posting schedule in response. Increased interest from other parts of the globe could also provide a compelling reason for changing or adding to your post schedule.

In addition, it’s smart to consider monitoring activity on competitors’ pages. Taking note of when users are engaged with their content can help you predict changes in your own followers’ habits. It can also give you ideas for how to engage new customers.

Conclusion

With so many people from all around the world visiting the site every day, Facebook can’t be overlooked as a marketing opportunity. That being said, you could end up wasting a lot of time and energy on posts that are never seen, if you’re not intentional about what and when you post on Facebook.

To avoid that scenario, you can keep these strategies in mind:

1. Understand your audience and know when they’re most engaged.
2. Consider your audience’s daily routine.
3. Don’t forget to factor in time zones.
4. Continue improving engagement by monitoring your followers.

Do you have any questions about conducting social media marketing on Facebook? Ask away in the comments section below!

Image credit: Shutterstock.