When is the best time of the day/week to post on my Facebook page?

This is the million dollar question that everyone wants to know, and yet the answer is not as simple as stating a day and time, other factors come into play, namely:

• Who your Facebook audience are, eg. their age, where they live (time zone), if they work.
• What your page is about, eg. professional service, consumer product, consumer service, etc.
• What you actually post up, eg. text, video, photos, etc.

Research by Virtue recently found that from the 100 pages (and over 32,000 posts) they surveyed, made up of quick server restaurants and consumer goods, that Friday was the best day of the week to post for fan engagement over the two industries. However, for the consumer goods industry the best day was Thursday and for the quick serve restaurants it was Wednesday. So if you were going with the average (Friday) it wouldn’t be the best for either industry.

Then it comes to time of day – the research found that on average the best time to post was before noon with 65% more fan engagement, however the quick serve restaurants got better engagement in the afternoon – probably because people are thinking about dinner, what they will have, and they are in the right frame of mind to engage.

I know for my Mocks Facebook page the best time for us to post is between 5pm and 8pm, this is partly due to the fact that we have people from Australia, US and UK engaging and so this works for time zones, but also because we have a lot of teens who use Facebook after school.

So how do you find out for your page? Experiment. You need to try posting at different times and on different days and keep a record of what works and what doesn’t work. Yes this is hard work, but who said social media was easy?

I have been tracking the activity on the Mocks Facebook page for over a year, and we now can start to see patterns of when posts should happen and what needs to be posted to get responses. Facebook is a way to market your business so for the best results you need to review what you are doing and made changes as you go along, as you would with any aspect of your business.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.