What is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?

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Facebook’s organic reach is a never-ending debate among marketers. And if you are someone who scowls at Facebook engagement metrics, then this post is just for you.

There’s still a high chance of making it to your followers’ feeds. The secret lies in zeroing in on the best time to post on Facebook for likes, comments, and shares to flood in.

Though most marketers resort to using paid ads but being uber-realistic here, none of us got too many pennies to spare to stretch daily social reach. But now, the big question looms up, how do you find the best time to post on Facebook.

Also, you need to scour if there is just one perfect timing or multiple best times to post on Facebook.

Using a few free Facebook analytics tools might help you analyze your target audience to detect their activity patterns. But you still have to delve deeper to solve this riddle.

Finding the right answer to this can be a real tricky business. So we have gathered some data-backed facts and tips to help you in your quest.

Let’s begin!

When is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?

We studied top social media apps to find the following:

And we summed up that there is no “best time” to post on Facebook either. To know why that is so, let’s first check out these stats from popular social media companies suggesting the best time to post on Facebook.

• Hubspot analyzed that 9 am is a good time when people leave for their offices. 1 pm-3 pm from Thursday to Sunday is the next peak time.
• TrackMaven suggests 8 pm EST on Thursday is the best.
• Falcon.io has put its bet on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday between noon to 4 pm.
• Hootsuite suggests posting between noon to 3 pm on weekdays.
• Unmetric favors the time between 9 am to 2 pm on Thursdays.
• The overall best day to post on Facebook is Wednesday

So, did you get the catch now? Every study done to find out the best time suggests a wide range of numbers on the clock.

Don’t dampen your spirit, though! The guidelines mentioned above are still helpful to usher marketers in the right direction, so they find their own personalized best times to post on Facebook when their audience is online.

We shall discuss how you can do the same after understanding why there can’t be a fixed best time to post on Facebook.

Why is there no Universal Time to Post on Facebook?

Your audience is different from others. The question regarding when is the best time to post on Facebook has a different answer for every marketer. If you cater to an audience whose working curriculum is flexible, not around 9 to 5, then posting at similar times will not be as effective.

An in-house study done by CoSchedule paints a clear picture of different businesses receiving engagement at different times.

You can also follow the above time-frames and check if they work for you or not.

But there’s another problem to tackle. And that’s a high surge of content on news feeds. As per the latest statistics, Facebook users have made more than 2.5 trillion posts.

According to Facebook’s business blog, on average, 1500 stories could appear in a person’s news feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and page likes, as many as 15000 potential stories could appear when they log in.

Considering that, the standard peak time to post for a particular business can be the worst time for others. Let’s say if every company adheres to the best universal time concept and starts to roll out its content in the same hour, the competition on the feed will worsen.

Hence, as much as these standard time frames can help you start, they won’t gain much engagement like the following tactics we are about to discuss.

How to Find the Best Time to Post on Facebook for You?

There may not be the ultimate “best time,” but there can be “your best” times to post on Facebook. You can use two strategies to derive the best time suitable for posting and get more reach and engagement.

Strategy 1: Facebook Analytics to Find the Best Time

Facebook Analytics provides you with multiple insights into your audiences’ engagement, behavior, and demographics.

You will see an insight button on the top of your Facebook page. Clicking on it will lead you to the dashboard showing an overview of multiple Facebook analytics.

Find When Your Fans are Most Active

Now to access the data of “when your fans are online.” Just click on the ‘Posts’ in the left-hand column.

You will see a detailed graph showing the average data of your fans being online in 24 hours across the recent week.

Now you can hover on a particular day to see its statistics compared to the average week data.

Here you can see Tuesday vs. average week data. The dark blue line represents Tuesday data against the entire week.

What are our Findings from this Data?

Being an established page ourselves, we resort to this strategy to track the attendance of our audience throughout the week. We can see a gradual increase in the number of people starting from 3 am and it reaches a peak between 6 am-9 am, 7 to be more precise, and starts declining by noon.

So considering that we regularly schedule our posts around 3 am-9 am (Pacific Time Zone) to get better traction with our audience.

You can find your most suitable time frame and the best day to post on Facebook using the same strategy and start posting in variations in those hours to find your sweet spot.

Try posting at off-peak times to see if you can get some possible hidden engagements there. I’d suggest experimenting for the first few weeks and then carving out a solid Facebook posting strategy.

Learn from Your Previous Successful Posts

The Posts section of Facebook Insights has another cool feature just below the “When Your Fans Are Online” graph.

The “All Posts Published” section has a wealth of informative sections to evaluate the performance of your individual post. You get to know about:

• Time and date of the post published
• Type of post published
• Organic and paid reach
• Engagement

You have to do some manual digging to get some insights into the best type of content you can post at specific times.

What are our Findings from this Data?

We see our posts getting more engagement and reach around the same timings as before, the 6 am-9 am (PST) time slot. Since our audience belongs to the PST timezone, it is clear they prefer to engage with our page before going to work.

But it is better to test on a large set of variables before making any conclusion on the best type, day, and time.

Strategy 2: Finding Relevant Days for Each Post

Every piece of content has its own relevant time and moment. For example, a fashion brand won’t be posting a new range of winter clothes at the start of summer. Now that was self-explanatory. But sometimes your general content has some hidden relevant times too.

Using Facebook analytics data, you can start A/B testing the same content at different times to see the most effective time to serve your audience.

Test out Best Posts Timings Using a Facebook Scheduling Tool

SocialPilot is one of the best Facebook publishing tools that gives you the ability to find your best time, schedule and publish your posts without even opening the Facebook page.

You can find the best time through the informative and eye-pleasing graphical representation of Active Fans and Individual Post with its in-built Facebook Analytics page. In addition to that, you got a wealth of information on audience growth, demographics, and engagement too.

Now that you have found your best time to post on Facebook, it is time to test your data in the real world. How to do that? By scheduling your post before time.

SocialPilot’s intuitive and user-friendly interface lets you schedule your post on the ideal timings way ahead. Let’s take a short tour of how to do that.

1. Connect your Facebook page

Go to the SocialPilot dashboard. Head straight to the column on the left side. Click on Accounts and connect your accounts.

Choose the Facebook account or page from the multiple social media platform options given on the page. Once you click on the connect button, you will be redirected to Facebook and be asked for authorization. Kindly accept all permissions to continue.

2. Setup posting schedules

Once your account gets connected, go to Accounts. Select Manage Accounts. Select the social account you want to define time slots for and start adding your ideal time.

You can select single or multiple days and pre-define their posting time. Whenever you add a post in the queue, it will be automatically scheduled as the chosen time slots.

Using this amazing feature, you can do A/B testing of the same post on different days to figure out the most effective time for a specific type of content.

Excited already? Take a free 14-day trial and get started.

Finishing it Up

Now that we have busted the myth of finding a particular best time to post on Facebook, divert focus on your experimentation. Make an in-depth study of your audience’s specific behaviors to spot the active slots.

Use the tool and other strategies discussed above to finalize a better posting strategy because nothing is more reliable than analyzing your own data. This will portray the actual scenario with real-time audience insights for better strategizing.

Additionally, leverage SocialPilot, one of the best social media scheduling tools to schedule your posts at the best times your data suggests. Managing your social handles will be super easy with rigorous testing opportunities. Schedule multiple posts on relevant days and let the data reveal the best time for you.

This is crucial because when posts reach your audience at the right time, it is more likely to gain better engagement which tells the new Facebook algorithms of your better relation with the audience, leading to better rankings of your posts.

So wait no more and start posting now!