A lot of effort goes into crafting genuinely good Facebook posts: the right title, the right content, making sure it’s presented using the right medium and targeted at the right people. Another crucial piece of the puzzle is when you submit your post. If it’s not one of the primary factors you think of when making a post, read on to learn why you should.
How to time a post
Fortunately, there are several ways to schedule a post. Facebook directly supports scheduling a post and is one of the options presented to you next to the post button. Third-party social media aggregators, such as Hootsuite, also support scheduling posts and some even offer ‘smart scheduling’ that claims to automatically choose the best time for you to schedule the post. Should you use these automatic schedulers? Use analytics tools to help you decide.
When to schedule a post
Knowing when to schedule your post is key, but it’s something that will be unique to your page and impossible to provide a general answer. Fortunately, Facebook provides some very useful data to help you determine this via Page Insights.
One tab offered under Page Insights is ‘When Your Fans Are Online’. There are also third-party social analytics tools that offer similar features. This will show you a visual representation of how many of your page’s fans are online at a given time of day.
As a general rule of thumb, schedule your posts at times when the highest number of fans are online. Facebook’s post algorithm is fickle and ever-changing, so if users aren’t online when you post, they may or may not see your post when they do get online. Understand who you’re targeting and use data to back up your assertions before deciding your post schedules.
