When is the best time to post to Facebook?

One question I am regularly asked about Facebook is "What is the best time to post to Facebook?"     It depends on your community. When are most of your followers online? When do they really respond to your posts?
Facebook analytics offers incredible insights for businesses. The insights help us understand if the posts we are sharing create engagement, where our page likes happen and the demographics of our community and so much more.

Go to the Insights on your Facebook Business page and click Posts to see when your fans are online.

Below you can see a screenshot of  my Facebook Business Page  and it shows us the data for a recent one week period. As you can see, more and more people are online in the morning and at around 9am, it is more stable. We see a little decrease in the afternoon and then it goes up again in the evening.

There are a lot of articles on the internet that tells you which days and what times you should post. Some suggest you should post early in the morning as everyone checks their Facebook feed when they wake up. Others think lunch time is a good time and then there are others who argue 8pm-9pm posts are the best as people hang out on their phone in front of the TV in the evening.

This is why you really need to observe your community and find what time of the day works best for you. When you are first starting out, think of your ideal client. When do you think they will be online? Also, remember that people don't always see the most recent posts on their news feed. So even if they are online, they might see posts from yesterday or the day before.Try different times of the day and test what works best for your community. Some scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Buffer suggest you what time you should publish your content. If you are using one of these tools, see if these times work for you.

​Facebook also gives you in depth data as to how each individual post perform. Unless your post is time sensitive, your content is a much more important factor that determines the success of your Facebook post. 

​If you click on the Post Types then you can see which posts performed well and which did not. Now this data shows me the types of posts, the dates and what time of the day I shared these on Facebook.

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By carefully studying and reflecting on this data, I need to work out what works best for me. As you can see, I sent out posts at different times throughout the week: Some posts are published around 8 am, some around lunch time and one of them is published at 8:30pm. What really makes the difference is the content I am putting out there. If I know what type of content my audience likes and if I can create more of that, then my Facebook page will be more successful. 

Of course, this is not set in stone and it might change as my page grows or as the algorithm changes. It's really important to get into the habit of checking the insights weekly and reflect on what works.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and if you need any help, don't hesitate to get in touch.