Infographic: Timing Is Everything for Facebook Posts
There is no such thing as the perfect time of day to post on Facebook, but there are guidelines that will help page administrators fine-tune their strategies.
Social media analytics and monitoring tool Fanpage Karma shared the infographic below, along with some tips it formulated after analyzing posts from more than 5,000pages over a period of more than six months.
Fanpage Karma chief marketing officer Stephan Eyl wrote in a blog post:
Once a post is posted on Facebook, the clock starts ticking. In the first hour, a post receives the majority of its reactions from the fans. More than one-half of all likes, comments and shares will be issued in the first 60 minutes. The most likes and comments are given directly in the first 15 minutes. Shares behave a little different. The posts are most often shared with a 15-minute delay. However, after 7 p.m., shares behave unison with likes and comments: In the evening, in the first 15 minutes, posts are shared most frequently. The decline of the share rate in the subsequent period, however, is much slower. The share-behavior thus extends over a longer period.
The lifetime of a post in terms of likes, comments and shares from fans is highly dependent on the time of day. Posts that are published in the morning immediately experience a wave of reactions, which declines first strongly and then continuously until the evening hours. Posts that are published in the evening have a much shorter but more intense life. Reactions explode in the first minutes — much stronger than in the morning posts. But the activity ebbs much faster, as well. One hour after the publication. An evening-post has fewer reactions per minute than its morning equivalent, even though many users are online at this time of day.
Posts at midnight get very few responses. The first wave of reactions, as well as the flattening of the curve, is substantially lower than at other times of the day. On the next day, however, we discovered something amazing: Every morning, posts return from the dead. Between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., all posts experience a brief second spring. At this time, Facebook recycles posts of the previous day. Is it in order to reach users who were not online yesterday or because of a shortage of fresh posts? The latter seems rather unlikely, given the mass of content that is uploaded every single minute on Facebook. It is more probable that Facebook takes advantage of good content from the night before — rated with likes from a few night owls and not seen by the vast majority of users — to be able to fill the News Feed with interesting content for the early morning birds.
Readers: What did you think of the findings by Fanpage Karma?
