Facebook: The Best Day Of The Week To Publish Your Content

[morestar]

Hey everyone. Even though we love visiting Facebook, we're all busy people. We all want to find time to read all the status updates from the Facebook pages we like but sometimes we can't. Sometimes we have to ignore updates and get on with our lives.

Well if you're one of the people who use Facebook as an internet marketing strategy, by publishing content to your Fan pages, the same thing could happen to you. Your content could get missed and pushed to the bottom of the news feed. Of course even being at the bottom of the news feed is still valuable it's not as valuable as a click-through and a conversion.

So for those of us who use Facebook pages as a part of our internet marketing strategies, we post various types of updates to our fans and gauge the value of our articles (http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/105786-Using-Facebook-To-Gauge-The-Value-Of-Your-Articles) by checking out such things as traffic reports and impression counts but like a press release, is there a better day of the week to post that update to your fans?

Some Facebook Fan Page Metrics To Consider

Well moving away from the day of the week for a quick moment, we'll find there are other metrics to consider such as member age. Another is gender. Another is the country of your members and even the state or province but when it comes to days it might be wise to consider whether or not the day is a holiday, what kind of holiday it is, the days of the week and/or the time of the day when there is the most traffic.

That's quite a bit of information to sift through and calculate but if you have the time and resources to do so, the research will probably pay off - no matter what size business you are.

So with all that said, I would suppose, I would have to agree with this article where the OP and the first comment sum up that Sunday is the day Facebook receives the most traffic (http://www.quora.com/Which-days-register-the-most-traffic-on-Facebook).

It's summed up as follows:


Sunday - impressions surged in evening; people started catching up on people they met over the weekend and posted photos
Monday -Similarly high and seemingly more post weekend activity (browsing profiles, exchanging messages). The bored or at least procrastinating at work network drives the activity.
Tuesday - impressions way down- people get to work and stop screwing around on the site. Many of them waiting to hear back from that hot guy or girl they "friended" or messaged.
Wednesday - back to Monday levels. Folks hear back on their friend requests and messages.
Thursday - even higher activity. Users start to set up plans for the weekend.
Friday - impressions drop precipitously - people are out.
Saturday - impressions bottom out. Always, even in hey day of MySpace, the lowest day of the week. - people are out.


I agree with the above ideas for the most part and they seem to make sense but everyone's niche market is different.

I can safely say, with respect to my first signature link, a lot of the best times to post status updates would be after mid-night when people are coming home from the bars or during holidays where family means the most.

What do you think? What niche market are you in in which that ideas above definitely don't apply?

Is there another metric in the list that we haven't covered? Let me know!

;)

[jaycar]

This is great information. I never really thought about it before as to when is the best day to post an update. Unfortunate though that on Sundays most of us have a day off from work.:-)

[morestar]

This is great information. I never really thought about it before as to when is the best day to post an update. Unfortunate though that on Sundays most of us have a day off from work.:-)

lol jaycar you need a few 'dedicated employees'!

However, there is one surefire way to resolve this issue if you're using wordpress for whatever purposes you're trying to get a message out for.

As we know, with wordpress we can have our posts picked up by certain Facebook blogging apps. like RSS Graffiti (http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/?ref=ts) that will pick up the post and publish it to our fan page. With that we can also set a future date for an article to go live. In the case that you're not working on Sunday, set the post to that future day and voila! you've connected with your fans!

;)

[NJ]

Next stat: most people are off work on Sunday. So, how tolerant will Facebookers be of receiving your ads masquerading as Facebook posts on a day they may consider off-work, family and friends day? I noticed that if I post web development articles on Sunday, I don't get many replies, even though that's a good day for me to post.

[nickoran]

I read this really hoping you were going to give a specific time and day during the week with actual stats to back it up and then as I read through going, "this doesnt fit in my niche, oh but this does...." etc. What you have said does make sense but people need to be able to find out what thier specific target market are up to and use that to target them properly.

You can use google analytics to narrow results down by time, Ive done this to see when twitter users click through to my site and found very specific times of day that people visit my site. they make perfect sense and tend to be mid day or end of the working day (I suspect a lot of people at work). This works well for one niche and not for others so its worth having a look.

one of my favorite quotes to bare in mind though is from Seth Godin, who wrote a list of blogging tips and one of them was: (roughly along the lines of) "post during the week, theres more people online. Post on the weekend, there's fewer blogs being published."

Ive likened this to twitter because I havent investigated facebook yet in this way, facebook does have other factors which come into it, i.e what you publish on your wall at one time doesnt always show up on everyone elses wall at the same time.

[weblover50]

Hey great info there, thanks.

I have just got started with using facebook as a major marketing tool for one of my web concepts. This source is definitely what I was looking for.

[mjtaylor]

Results vary. A lot has to do with the content you are pushing and your friends and their interests. If I were scheduling an ad to run on FB I think this would have more value. For the individual, it is an excellent starting point to compare with your own experience of your friends and their activity and responses to your content.

Nice thread, as always, morestar.