As with email newsletters, as marketers in this day and age, we are always trying to understand when to best reach our audience. Thankfully, Facebook pages have the native ability to schedule posts to be published when you want without you having to be there. Let’s look at when you should schedule that update.
Does it matter?
First thing’s first. With email newsletters we concluded that there might not be a perfect time to schedule your email to go out on. With Facebook updates, it is quite different.
As Facebook makes their news feed algorithms even narrower, you just aren’t seeing much “old” content popping up in your feed. That means, a post you make a 9am might only be consumed between 9-12 and then hardly seen at all.
It can however be very worthwhile to still schedule your posts outside of the peak times, simply because the competition for exposure will then be much less. Think about it, Facebook must filter our news feeds in some way but in peek posting time, this will be a much fiercer competition than outside of it and could thus lead to better results, despite it from the online stats being a less than ideal time of the day.
Look at your Facebook Insights Data
If you don’t look here often, you’d be surprised at how much data about your Facebook Page that Facebook themselves throws at you.
Under the “Posts” tab, they give you a very helpful graph over “When Your Fans Are Online”. By looking at this graph you will essentially see when the probability is highest for your fans to see any posts that you make.
From this data, you need to consider your audience time zones as well. This will be for all of your fans, and all of their time zones converted into your computer’s local time zone where you are viewing the data.
The Conclusion is to test!
As always, the conclusion here is to test, test and then test some more. However, you don’t need to start blindly. By looking at the Facebook Insights data, you get a good initial feeling at when your post might reach the highest number of people.
That being said, don’t be afraid to experiment with some of the times outside of this as your end results may vary depending on your goal with the post.
For example, more people might be seeing your post at 4pm on their commute, but might not have time to interact. You could well find that conversions are better at another time of the day, even though the reach is lower.
Image: Flickr/Sean MacEntee
