You know what drives me insane? I can’t handle searching for answers to a question, only to be met with some vague response, like it depends. One such question is “When is the best time to post on Facebook?” If you’ve also been bouncing from article to article trying to find something less evasive, then it’s your lucky day…
Let me start with an obnoxious, evasive answer: it depends. Yeah, yeah, I said I wouldn’t do that, but honestly, it’s true. Fortunately, though, I can tell you what it depends on. Finally, I’ll show you exactly how to find the best time to post on your own Facebook page. Once you know the ideal posting time for your own Facebook page, you can start scheduling your posts for optimal traffic times!
What Does it Depend On?
Good question. Think about it this way: my Facebook page represents my blog, a blog about something relevant worldwide. If your page is about, say, your coffee shop in Des Moines, then it’s mostly just going to be relevant to people in Des Moines. Why does that matter? Well, my peak traffic might not be as dependent on where I live, but yours is probably pretty specific to Des Moines.
How to Find the Best Posting Time for Your Page
This is super easy, but since I’m a visual learner, I’m going to walk you through the process step-by-step with screen grabs.
Once you’re logged into Facebook, go to your own page. You should see a menu bar at the top, above your cover photo. See where I’m pointing with the cursor in the image above? Click that — Insights.
Once you’re in the Insights dashboard, click on Posts. There’s lots of great information to glean from the various Insights panels, but we’re going to focus on peak traffic times for now. You should a graph like in the image above. The bar graph under “DAYS” indicates visits per day of the week, so can see when your highest traffic day is. Mine’s Thursday, as you can see, but it’s actually fairly evenly distributed from day-to-day. The line graph below under “TIMES” shows you how many people were on your page at any given time for the past week. As you can see, I don’t have a whole lotta’ foot traffic between midnight and 6:00 AM, so I obviously wouldn’t want to waste time posting then. On the other hand, my traffic is pretty steady between 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM. Anywhere in that range is going to be better for me to post. But we can get even more specific!
Let’s say you want to post something on a Saturday, but you think people are using Facebook differently since it’s the weekend. To find out if Saturday, differs from the week’s overall traffic patterns, just hover over Saturday on the bar graph. When you do, a dark line will appear on the line graph, like you see in the above image. As you can see — and probably not surprisingly, since people like to sleep in on the weekends — there are fewer early morning visitors to my page on Saturday, but more people than usual are on there later at night.
If you want to get even more specific, you can hover over individual times on the line graph to see exactly how many visitors your page averages at any given time of day.
Now, like I said, you can go ahead and schedule out posts to go live during peak traffic times for your page, since you know when your own visitors are on Facebook!
What else would you like to know about how to succeed in blogging and social media?
