Timing is crucial in social media. It's important to find the best time to post on Facebook, to engage a high percentage of our page followers. Fortunately, Facebook makes it easy to find out when most of our fans are online, to program our posts accordingly.
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This guide will only work for Facebook pages, not Facebook profiles or groups.
Why is it important to find the best time to post on Facebook
When browsing our Facebook news feed, we will often find posts that were posted last night, right next to posts from half an hour ago.
So, how important is it to find the best time to post on Facebook? Clearly, we just need to post anytime, and sooner or later the post will reach our fans. Right?
For better or for worse, this isn't the way it works.
You see, Wired's post from 14 hours ago has nearly 130 likes. Another post that Wired did an hour later had 50 likes.
The thing is, the second Wired post never popped up in our News Feed. We had to go to Wired's Facebook page to see it.
We need to understand that Facebook's algorithms, which decide what appears in our newsfeed and what doesn't, are complicated.
After all, our default newsfeed setting is "Top Stories" by default. And those algorithms have to decide which stories are "Top" according to specific post metrics.
One of the things the algorithms measure is how many engagements a post had from the page fans (likes, shares, comments).
But it's not just the sheer number that counts. The algorithms also take into account how fast did those likes and shares accumulate.
A post that has a hundred likes even though it was posted less than 10 minutes ago...
...will appear higher on our newsfeed than a post that took two hours to reach that number.
This is why it is critical to find the best time to post on Facebook, i.e. the time when most of our fans are online.
This way, a quality post will get many likes, shares, and comments, and it will go on to show in more of our followers' newsfeeds later in the day or even the next day.
How to find the best time to post on Facebook
We don't need to do anything complicated, like statistical analysis, to determine when most of our Facebook fans are online. Facebook has crunched the numbers for us.
We just need to go to our Facebook page, click on "Insights"...
...and then select the "Posts" tab.
This graph shows at what time our fans online presence on Facebook for the past week.
By moving the mouse cursor over the graph, we get the specifics. On average, most of our fans were online at 9:00 pm.
We can also select a particular day, to show that day's statistics.
You should note that these times are for our personal timezone, not our fans' time zones if we have an international audience.
Should I only pick the best time to post on Facebook?
By definition, the best time to post on Facebook will be one specific hour in the day, like 9:00 pm in our example.
Does this mean we should only post then, and not at any other time? Not necessarily.
If we only do a post a day, yes, picking that particular time is the best choice. If however we do multiple posts per day, we don't need to cram them all at that particular hour. We can spread them out at the busiest times of the day.
By studying the graph, we find out that 2:00 pm is also a good time...
...and so is 8:00pm.
We should avoid midnight, however, not only because of the lower number of fans online but because in the next couple of hours, many of them will log out for the night.
So, if we intend on making multiple posts, we can spread them between 2:00 pm and 10:00 pm, for optimal results.
Of course, on your Facebook page and for your audience, those times can be completely different. So, check your page's insights, and plan accordingly.
How can I find the best time to post on Twitter?
Most of us who use Facebook, also use Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn't have an integrated way to show us at which times our followers are online, and we need to use a third-party service for that.
Check out our guide:
Find The Best Time to Tweet with Tweriod
Did you see a difference posting at the best time?
Did finding out the best time to post on Facebook have an effect on your page and your audience? Leave us a comment.
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My page has no fans ;P
Step 1: Get some fans
Step 2: Find the best time to post to them
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Profit!