Best Time Of Day For Facebook Posts

If you just attended my AES session on Social Media For Musicians And Engineers or read my Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook, you know that I'm big on social marketing via Facebook and Twitter. While you might be writing the best, engaging posts, they do you no good if there's no one reading, so the question then becomes, "When is the best time of day to post to Facebook?"

Now comes a study from the social media company Vitrue that looked closely at the viewing habits of Facebook channels of selected companies and brands. The study was conducted over a period of 3 months and looked at more than 1500 brand streams, 1.64 million posts, and 7.56 million comments. Shares and "likes" were not included in the study. Here's some of what they found.

• Usage is highest at 11AM, 3PM, and 8PM ET.

• The biggest spike occurs at 3PM ET on weekdays.

• Wednesday at 3PM is the busiest period of the week.

• Fans are less active on Sunday.

• Post that occur in the morning tend to perform almost 40% better in terms of user engagement than those in the afternoon.

• The top of the hour (:00 to :15 minutes) sees more interaction than other parts of the hour.

• In what seems to be a contradiction, 65% of users only access Facebook when they're not at home or at school, which means in the evening.

Remember that these are the findings of a three month period and by no means definitive, but it's a good place to start when setting up your Facebook posts.

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