When to post to your Facebook fan page

As I’m working on an upcoming (top-secret) social media campaign, the following question came up again for the 5th time in a month:”at which point during the week should I update my product’s fan page in order to get the most visibility?”

An obvious question, since for a product page with 10,000 fans, getting 10% of users to read, interact with and click on the link provided in an update means getting an extra 500 clicks compared to an update with a 5% CTR (I know, at this point you’re either wondering how come your product does not have a fan page yet, or why I feel the need to explain how a better CTR helps a brand)

Now back to the question at hand, with a typical yet oh-so-true answer: The best time to post depends on who your fans are! For example, if your fandom spreads accross the seven seas, you might have to think about timezones before publishing an update: If you post at noon in Montreal (lunch time), it will be 9:00 am in California (start of business day), 6:00pm in Western Europe (as people come home from work) and midnight in Japan (a little late, but perhaps just before going to bed?). Moreover, if your target audience is comprised of 13-17 year olds, posting at lunch time is useless as they are in school and won’t access their Facebook account until the early evening. Anyways, you see my point: there is no formula, so you should adapt to your audience.

However, if we were to define a rule (and I will), it goes as follows: the ideal moment to write your post  is when the proportion  of people reading their Facebook news feeds vs. those updating their status is the greatest. Indeed, the faster updates are being published in a user’s live feed, the faster yours will get bumped down the list. And if you aren’t on the live feed of your fans, you won’t get enough interactions and won’t have a chance of making the news feed of users who log on a few hours later.

Fictitious data showing that the ideal moment to update your status is when number of users (blue) is the greatest compared to the proportion of status updates (red)

So when exactly do we reach that moment of climax?

First an intersting graph taken from onehalfamazing.com shows that on average, fan pages get the best CTR from monday to wednesday, and the worst is from thursday to saturday.

Basically, most users update their statuses when they’re bored at home instead of being out enjoying themselves (or a few too many drinks).

What time is the best time if most of  your fans are in the same timezone. There is no rule, but from my personal experience and the above-stated rationale, the ideal point is probably in the late afternoon (between 3:00 and 4:00 pm) as a majority of users will start checking their accounts when they come home, but they aren’t likely to update their status until after they have read their news and/or live feeds.

Until Facebook releases a better analytics tool to track the CTR on Facebook page updates, you’ll have to take my word for it, or just try different options and adjust to the results!