What is The Best Time to Post on Facebook?

Social media marketers should know all the nitty-gritty about the leading social media platform to get maximum exposure and engagement for their brands.

As a social media manager, first, they need to understand the brand. What services the brand provides, what are the brand’s unique qualities and how it can impact users’ lives.

Then, it comes to an understanding of the users’ expectation while interacting with users through social media. Who will be the desired prospects of the brand?

What are their hopes and how to effectively communicate with the users to provide end-to-end communication?

A marketer must know the demographics of the targeted audience and when they are most active on social media. However, most importantly the marketer must know the time to post on Facebook to secure maximum engagement.

Facebook is arguably one of the dominant social media platforms to date. It owns other social media and messaging apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. The dominance of Facebook is still prevalent, and it is the biggest platform for B2C and C2C businesses.

Today, the way people access Facebook shows how much affection people for the platform and how big the platform is for marketers to promote their business.

American users use Facebook for around one hour each day. Moreover, the people who visit Facebook are not just logging in, visiting Facebook for a few minutes and leave. Average session time of a single visit is around 12 minutes.

Furthermore, the Facebook post’s engagement rate is more than 3%, and today there are 80 million SMB available on Facebook, and that means the platform is becoming competitive.

So, you must know when the best time to post on Facebook to ensure maximum success from your marketing efforts. 

Benefits of Finding the best time to post

What if you have the most engaging and helpful social media post, but there is no one to read it. What if your post has the same information that your prospects are looking for on the web and they miss your social media post when you upload.

It would be a tremendous loss for the business as the post could not be able to generate the engagement and responses because of the users could not see it.

So, to avoid such catastrophic mistakes, your post should appeal to the users at the right time and when they are looking for it on the web.

You must know when is your subscribers are online on Facebook and schedule your post around that time.

There is no discussion on why to find the best time to post on Facebook. Undoubtedly you can cover more audience, generate buzz and get your post viral if you can share it at the right time.

You will get more shares, likes, reaction, and comments on your post if you can find the proper time to share the update.

Moreover, if your post generates good impressions, the other posts of your Facebook page will also get a boost in impressions and engagement as Facebook will then show your posts often to the audience.

What is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?

Find out When The Users are Online

Understand when your followers are accessing Facebook. Today, they can have smartphone or desktop systems to log in to their Facebook profiles.

Take yourself as an example. When do you use Facebook in most cases? To make it deeper, when do you have the most frequent access to your smartphone and desktop with a decent internet connection?

In the time of leisure of festival season, when you are at home, you will find the free time to get busy reading Facebook status and comment on a group’s post.

Certainly, you are getting where I’m going at. People can find the spare time to access social media or have their phones with them whenever they are not working, have a holiday, or there is a special occasion that made them off to work.

So, even though you are observing specific user behavior during the standard days. Consider getting the different number and unique engagement on special days like Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Thanksgiving or any other special days and occasions.

To know for regular days, you can understand from the page insights about when is your audience is most active throughout the day.

So, when you land on the home screen of your Facebook page, observe that there are different tabs on the page and one of them is Insights.

Click on the Insights, and you will be redirected a whole new screen filled with analytics, numbers, graphs, etc. Now, there are a different set of parameters and insights which you can check for your research.

You will observe a few options on the left side of the screen. Click on the “Posts” option.

Then, you will be redirected to a new screen, just like shown below.

Observe that there are three tabs. The first option is what we were looking for in the first place; we will talk about it in the next points.

The second option, Post Types, will show the metrics of each post you have shared throughout the period. Like how many reaches, engagement, comments, shares, etc. You will also know if the post was an image or the video.

If you find a particular post has got higher engagement and decent reach, you can also boost that post from the same screen only.

The other option Top Posts from Pages You Watch, gives you the ability to research your competitors. You can add similar pages that have the same business and shares a similar type of posts on their Facebook page.

The panel will give you their top performing posts so you can compare how did your post perform compared to the top posts of similar Facebook pages.

In the When Your Fans are Online, you get some exciting and helpful information to decide when is the best time to post on your facebook page by knowing the time when the users are most active.

You can observe that the tool is showing the data of the recent one week period and the time is concerning the Pacific time zone.

In our example, the graph shows that between 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM, the least number of people were online on Facebook.

This will give you the rough idea of when you should post your Facebook post to get maximum positive results for your marketing activities.

Use other tools

Just like Facebook page insights; although, it gives the one week’s data, you can go for other paid tools which will tell you the right time to share your post on Facebook.

You can sign up for these tools and also utilize their other benefits to streamline your social media marketing tasks.

Mostly all the tools that give the best time to post on Facebook also give you the authority to schedule posts to share on your social media profiles. You can create a queue of the scheduled posts to ensure your Facebook page never gets out of fresh content.

Tools which provide a straightforward and straightforward layout to know the best time are Agorapulse, Buffer, Sprout Social, CoSchedule, etc.

What They Say

The industry expert has been very generous and proactive about sharing their observations and study related to what is the best time to post something on Facebook.

Hootsuite has found that Tuesday gives the least engagement on the posts and Ideal time to upload a post is in the afternoon 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

During weekends too, you will get a reasonable click-through rate if you publish the post between 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM.

On the other hand, HubSpot suggests in the two weekdays, and you will get the most success through your Facebook post. They also prefer Thursday and Friday between 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM to be the ideal time to share something on Facebook.

QuickSprout suggests avoiding posting on Facebook on Monday to Wednesday as the engagement would decrease by 3.5% on these days. They also believe that Thursday and Friday are the best days to be active on Facebook.

CoSchedule has been very keen on observing the best time to post on Facebook as per a specific niche.

They found out that B2C businesses have three different hours where they can share the posts — 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM. TrackMaven suggests sharing your Facebook posts on Thursday evening during 8:00 PM.

Everyone has a slightly different opinion, but it seems that during the end of the week or after Wednesday, you are likely to get more engagement and impressions for your Facebook posts.

How to Determine Accurate Timing?

Well, there is no rocket science or magic to find the right time to post on Facebook and get maximum engagement for your posts. You can only anticipate and judge the correct timing and publish the post.

But there is no guarantee that every time you post a Facebook update during a specific hour of the day, you will get the highest engagement.

There are specific parameters that you can take into account.

Understand Your Niche and Audience

Every industry is unique and targets different kinds of customers, so if something works for a particular niche might not work at all for another one.

For example, if you are selling sports shoes on your website, your targeted customer would be teenagers or millennials who use Facebook at different time.

On the other hand, if you are a lawyer and consulting people to win their property cases, your target customer will be altogether different people who share the different vision and interest on Facebook.

So, based on your niche, you can identify who will be the targeted group of people and when they might be using Facebook.

Understand The Event-based Posting

If you are running a contest or providing a discount on your products for a few hours, you cannot wait for the for a specific time. Here, the scenario has changed so you should post as soon as possible.

For example, if you are hosting a Christmas giveaway, and Christmas is happened to be on Thursday, you cannot wait till Thursday afternoon to make your post live because Thursday gives your higher engagement.

If you wait, you will get less time to target the event and may get lesser engagement.

The posts like a giveaway or contest alerts, they can often go viral automatically because people will proactively engage and share those posts to win something.

In such cases, relevancy plays a crucial role, and you need to share the post if the post is relevant and validity is less.

Observe Your Response You Get

To determine which is the ideal time for your posts to generate maximum engagement, you can begin sharing the posts at a particular hour of the day and observe the results.

Once you regularly post on Facebook, after some time, your Facebook page insights or other tools will get the data and let you know when is the right time to post on Facebook.

You would know when your audience is active the most, and when they are likely to respond appropriately to the post.

Conclusion

The truth is, no one can predict the ideal time for you. There are just theories and case studies that show the possibility of the time.

But to find out what works for you, you will have to evaluate yourself through experiment and research and find out the best time to get the maximum engagement for your Facebook page.

Do let us know how you do you determine the best time to post on Facebook. If you are following a specific routine and share your post during one particular time, share your experience in the comments.