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It all comes down to your unique audience, to when you’re Page fans are active online. It goes even deeper than that – you have to consider how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm works and what competition your posts are up against at any given time, there are a lot of elements to factor in, and they’re all relative to your audience behaviours and habits.
To help with this, here are some ways on how to locate the best times to post on Facebook, specifically. It can take some work, but these processes will get on you track to locating the optimum response zones for your Facebook content.
The advice on when to post to Facebook is always going to change and you are best to review on a weekly basis what is working and what is not working so you can change your content and times you are posting, you need to make sure you are reaching the maximum reach when your fans are online.
Here’s the easy way – go into your Facebook Page Insights, click on ‘Posts’ from the left-hand side menu and look at the chart to see when the majority of your audience is online.
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Go through the chart, locate the time/s when the majority of your audience is online, and there you are – posting when the maximum amount of your audience is active makes sense because you boost your chance of reach and response through volume. Right? Wrong!
Facebook have recently changed how their News Feed works, posting at maximum traffic times may actually reduce your reach. Why? Because you’ll be in competition with all the other posts that each user could potentially be shown at that time, and content from people with which they have a personal relationship, or interact with more often, will rank higher.
In simple terms: It works like this, when your posts are published to Facebook, the News Feed algorithm ranks them relative to each individual user’s affinity with that post – this is based on the users’ past interactions with the creator’s content, when it was posted, the type of content it is and various other considerations. From this, Facebook gives each post a score, relative to each user’s connection with the post, and that score determines which stories are shown in their News Feed.
With this information when you post at optimum activity times, you’re likely competing against a heap of posts with which your audience will have stronger connection too – if you post at a time when the majority of users are posting personal updates, the chances of your Page content ranking higher than an update from a friend or family member is probably not that high, unless you have a really strong affinity with your fans.
If your post is extremely popular, that changes the equation, as interactions on each post can also weight the algorithm, but you can’t necessarily bank on post popularity – and if you’re just starting out on Facebook and looking to boost your reach, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to create a viral post that generates a heap of attention.
Posting late at night, when there’s less competition from personal updates, increases the probability that your brand posts will make it to the top of the list for more users.
But the real answer as to the best times to post comes down to your audience understanding – and really, who you’re targeting. And not just who you’re targeting in general, but who you’re trying to reach with each individual post.
Read your insights get to know your audience, who they are where they live. Engage with your users, when they comment, comment back!
You can go through your Facebook Page Insights and find out the demographic details of your most engaged fans under the ‘People Engaged’ tab. These are the fans you likely want to focus on as they’re the ones actually responding to your posts by Liking, sharing, commenting, etc. Those are the actions that drive better reach, so catering to these people will likely help boost your messaging, as this is obviously the audience within which your content is resonating.
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