Facebook Insights is a powerful tool for boosting reach and increasing engagement. It’s important to know how to best reach your audience now more than ever, with the platform users seeing 20 percent average decline in organic engagement in the past year.
The question is, do you know what to look for in your Facebook Insights?
The Best Time To Post on Facebook
Most are drawn to the section “When Your Fans Are Online,” and time their posts to coincide with the peak hours of their users. While it’s definitely important to not post at, say, three in the morning, this piece of information is often misused.
You’ll be forgiven for thinking you would always want to post at the peak hour of activity.
It’s no secret that Facebook curates a News Feed based on more than just when something was posted. In 2018, the top of the News Feed belongs to a user’s friends and family, and your business page is vetted based on how relevant it might be to users. This usually means engagement gives it momentum, and a post that’s performing well will likely shoot to the top.
Most users, including your fans, will make posts as soon as they log into Facebook, or shortly after that. The two occasions where people post the most are in the morning or in the early evening. Both of these times are also the start of peak hours for many pages.
As a result, when you upload a promotional video at peak activity for your audience, it has to compete with the posts a user’s friends have made, that have had hours to incubate and gain momentum. That means your post, which has no engagement yet, is probably not going to be prioritized over a user’s actual friends. Your post might exist at the same time your audience is online, but not being placed on their feed.
It’s likely more effective to post around the time your audience is coming online, and long before peak activity. For many pages, this means late morning and throughout the afternoon. Around this time, many people are browsing Facebook during a lunch break and may not be posting high-traction content. Consequently, you’re going to be able to cultivate some actual engagement before higher priority content starts showing up in the late afternoon.
Why Facebook Post Timing is Misunderstood
There are also plenty of ideas as to what’s the best time to post is if you’re going to boost it later, how long you should wait between posting and boosting, the right time of day, and even what day of the week is best.
Regardless how often it shows up in your audience’s feed, you want to make sure that it’s going to the right audience.
The time you post will certainly matter. But it’s more important to consider who is going to see it. Facebook recommends using audience targeting to have your posts show up in the right feeds. This is the concept that is going to boost your engagement and traction the most, rather than timing your posts like you are day trading.
You don’t need to try to game Facebook’s algorithm with post times, because there’s a lot more to Facebook Insights than just finding out when your fans are online. Here’s how to keep your business page on Facebook’s good side.
