When is the best time to post on Facebook?

As well as thinking about the time to post, a couple of key things to consider are CONSISTENCY and RELEVANCY. It doesn't matter what time you post if your target audience aren't engaging with the content because it's not relevant to them. And if you did 2 posts a day for 3 weeks, and then didn't post anything for the 2 weeks following, your posts might struggle to appear on people's feeds because of Facebook's algorithms.

If you think about when you browse social media, you'll get a general idea of when good times might be to post. Do you look at Facebook as soon as you wake up, or have breakfast, or have your first coffee break at work? All of the above? Are you a serial browser? Sporadic? Minimal?

Thinking about your target audience, you might be able to map out key times of the day they too might browse social media. This would be a good start if you haven't got much of a following yet.

Ideally, adding content 2 times a day is ideal. It could be a post plus a story. Obviously, this is quite a lot of time and effort, or money, so not everyone can do this. Please remember; quality not quantity.

Once you're up and running, here's how you find actual numbers on people interacting with your Facebook content:

If you're on your personal page, click on the menu at the top right of your page. You'll see your business page profile under Your Pages. Click on that to get to your business' Page

Click on Insights from the top menu bar. You'll land on an overview page. This is a good page to use for benchmarking your success. You want the percentages to show up as green. So reference this as you trial and adjust your content efforts.

Don't be afraid to experiment.

As more time, action, and engagement happens, you'll get more information and be able to make more informed decisions.

To see WHEN people are seeing your content on Facebook, click on Posts in the left menu.

You'll see a row of Days. The numbers above each block are the number of people seeing your content. eg Monday 413 people.

Below this is a graph showing the times people are seeing your content.

In this example, the audience is evenly spread over all days of the week, with the highest volume at 8pm each day on average. So time is the main determining factor as to WHEN this business would post.

If you click on one of the days, the graph will then show a line which represents the audience specifically on that day. (The solid block colour is the average over the entire week.)

This is useful if you were going to choose specific days of the week (the days with the highest volume of people) to post, as opposed to all of them. You can decide what times to post on those specific days.

You want to post content as the audience is on the rise to the peak volume so you have the best chance of engagement.

In this example, Monday and Friday at 7am and 6pm would be the best times to post, giving each post 1-2 hours of prime opportunity.

As you build up your audience, these numbers will evolve and you'll adjust as necessary.

In short - Use the analytics tools to see when people are on social media and viewing your content. Regularly check these and make adjustments.

Make sure your content is relevant to your audience. Engagement is the goal.

However often you decide to post content, make sure you keep it regular so you can consistently build up your audience.

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