How to Find the Best Time to Post on Facebook Using Insights

What if you decided that this was the year you stopped making guesses about what works for Facebook marketing?

Today, you’re going to figure out what is the best time to post on Facebook to maximize the reach and engagement of your posts, as well as clicks through to your site.

The best news? Everything you find today will be totally unique to your specific Facebook fans – no averages, no guesses.

You will learn how to view post insights. So let’s start by heading over to the Page Insights section of your Facebook page. How to check post insights? You will find them in your Facebook Business Manager.

Ah, Facebook Insights – you click and are transported to a digital Wonderland of numbers and charts and colors and. . . ack! You can get very lost very quickly with just one step down the rabbit hole.

Already feeling as confused as Alice did? Not to worry – I’m going to guide you to the exact spot you need to find out when the best time to post for your business is.

Inside Page Insights, click on the tab that says “Posts.”

You Won’t Believe What a Few Averages Can Do For You

The first thing you’ll see is what days of the week your Facebook fans are online. This graph at the top tells you approximately how many of your fans are on Facebook each day of the week. You can use that information to start pinpointing which days are your best chance to get more engagement on your posts.

Then take a look at the breakdown of what time of day they’re online. Even if you look no further than this graph to determine what time to post, you’ve already got a gold mine of data to tell you when to post on Facebook.

Pro tip: hover your mouse over one of the days of the week, and you’ll see the time-of-day graph change. The main graph shows the weekly averages. If you hover your mouse over the days, it will show you the specifics of each day with the dark blue line.

Let’s draw some conclusions from the data about the best days and times to post on Facebook.

The days when more of the fans seem to be online are Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday.

The peak online time for fans here is 2pm PST on average. However, it changes depending on the day of the week, so I need to keep that in mind for my social media strategy.

Thanks to these two sets of data, you can start to plan out when is the best time to post on Facebook for your business.

You can then go to your scheduling tool and adjust the times for your posts according to the data.

The Best Time to Post on Facebook: Digging Deeper

But what if you want to figure out the best time to post your latest blog post? Or a link to your sales offer? You aren’t just after likes or shares or more visibility in people’s News Feed for those kinds of posts. Yes, those things are great, but your real goal is to drive traffic to your website.

Here’s the simple way to find out when are people are more primed to click:

• Scroll down a little to where you see All Posts Published. It’ll automatically show you the last 90 days of your Facebook page posts.

• Click on the column header “Engagement” and select “Post Clicks.”

• The column will sort your posts from the last 3 months to show the ones that got the most clicks at the top.

  (Remember, clicks don’t necessarily mean clicks to your website. As you can see, the post that got the most clicks in October was a photo, which didn’t have a link attached to it anywhere.)

  Here, you can see that I got the most clicks on my posts around 5pm or later in the evening. Initially, I was surprised by that since I always thought the most engagement happened on Facebook around lunchtime. But I can assume this has to do with the fact that I have a lot of fans who are located on the West Coast.

  Even though the East Coasters have probably left the computer for a while, people are still working and checking out Facebook on the West Coast.

  Note: the engagement that you see in the above screenshot can’t be credited 100% to the time of day I post my updates. Images tend to get more engagement for most Facebook pages, as do fun links like the Gizoogle one I posted on 11/13/2013.

  If you post cute cat images and links to BuzzFeed articles about Jennifer Lawrence every day at 4:45 pm, your Insights are going to show 4:45 pm as the best time for clicks on your page. In order to get an accurate picture of the best time to post on Facebook, you need to both vary the types of posts as well as the times you post them.

  What about you and your data digging practices?

  How often do you go into Facebook Insights to take a look at what’s working? And when you do look at that data, what kind of action do you take based on it? Do you ever tweak your posting times? Let me know in the comments, and let’s see who has a great system already put in place you can learn from (ahem, steal).