BOOK

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When, Where, & How to Poston Facebook

Facebook ContentMarketing Guide

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F A C E B O O K B U S I N E S S E S S E N T I A L S

When, Where and How toPost on Facebook

FACEBOOK CONTENT MARKETING GUIDE

Once your Facebook page is up and running, it’s hard to know what the magic formula is for spurring engagement In this fourth installment of our Facebook Business Essentials series, we’ll give you a quick content marketing overview, and then answer the two most common questions when it comes to Facebook posting:

1. How Often Should I Post on Facebook?

2. When Should I Post On Facebook?

And... Onward!

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HOW OFTEN SHOULD WE POST ON FACEBOOK?

This question is one that’s asked, at some point, by just about every social media manager out there. The truth is that every brand has its own magic formula for resounding success, but – as a good rule of thumb - your company should post at least 1 – 2 times per day on your Facebook page.

Facebook’s newsfeed is a channel for your content marketing plan, and contributing content consistently is important. Here are four good reasons to keep the content flowing:

1. Forget the Likes: It’s All about the Newsfeed

After a user has liked your page (or chosen to follow it), the user will most likely never visit your Page again.  According to multiple studies, 90 – 95% of fans never return to a Page after they have liked it.

This means that the biggest (and perhaps only) opportunity you have to influence and engage with your followers is via their Newsfeed – and the only way to get into their Newsfeed is with posts.

2. Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm Rewards Engagement

To decide what goes in a user’s Newsfeed, Facebook uses a super-secret algorithm that evaluates over a million factors.  Those factors are constantly changing and Facebook’s not saying much – but what they will say is, “Our goal is to show the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them.”

Hmm, that’s not very specific.  We’ll do you one better:

Establishing a good relationship with followers wherein they often Like, share and comment on our posts influences our place-ment in that user’s Newsfeed. The better the relation-ship we have with a user, the more likely it is that our posts show up in this user’s Newsfeed.

User engagement on our posts influences how many other people see that post. The more users that get involved in a post (e.g. Like it, share it), the more Facebook will prioritize that content for other users. Also, the user activity is visible to their network.

All stories in the users Newsfeed are fairly new. It is a Newsfeed, after all. If you posted something yesterday, it’s unlikely your followers will see your post today - unless your post engaged a lot of users, which can give it a bump: this is called “Story Bumping.”

TIP: If a piece of content has

spurred a lot of engagement, it

may bump your newer content

out of the way in the Newsfeed.

Check back every 4-6 hours to

see if engagement is waning; if it

is, go ahead and post something

new. If engagement is still strong,

shelve the new content: partici-

pate within the comment field in

the popular post by replying to

people.

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3. The statistics tell us a story

The data doesn’t lie: Pages that publish posts more often have more engaged followers. And with more engaged followers, posts get better Reach.  And with better Reach, your Page will get more likes.  Facebook content success creates a snowball effect, and to prove this hypothesis, we analyzed some of our data on Meltwater’s free Facebook marketing analysis tool, LikeAlyzer.

To run this study, we took a deeper look at 25,000 different Pages and how often they posted.  Our core findings are as follows:

Pages that post between 1.5 – 2 new posts per day engage (on average) twice as many users as Pages that posts once or twice per week.

Pages who post once per day engage almost 10%

of their followers.

4. Different Followers Log in at Different Times

Because the newsfeed rewards newness, the chances of your post showing up in users’ Newsfeeds is directly correlated to how long it’s been up since.  So, it’s not only important to post at least twice a day, but also to make sure that you post on Facebook when your fans are online. And this leads us to…

TIP: Quality before quantity.

While frequency is important,

it’s not more important than the

quality of your content. You should

never post more than 1x per day if

you can’t provide any value to your

followers.  Nobody likes a spam-

mer, and less quantity with higher

quality is better than high quantity

with lower quality.  On Facebook,

you are never better than your last

post - and if that post is a bad one,

users can very easily unfollow you.

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When should we post on Facebook?The quick and easy answer: the best time to post on Facebook is when your audience is online!

Until recently, there wasn’t an easy way to see when your fans were likely to be online, and marketers had to experiment with different times to figure out what worked best. Well, good news: the “When your Fans are Online” Facebook Insights tab was specifically designed to help you find the best time to post on Facebook.

How to find the best time to post on Facebook: 1. Go to your Page settings (the icon that looks like a gear – check out the below screen grab), and click on “View In-sights.” (Note: you must be a Page Admin.)

If you’re looking to learn more about how to know what your audience will find compelling, check out our free social listening e-book.

The latest Facebook Page update slightly changed the Insights link to a more prominent location at the top left of your page. These changes began to happen as we published this book.

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2. Click on the “Posts” tab, and then on the “When your Fans are Online” tab.

3. Find the best time to post on Facebook by looking for times when you have the most fans online.

EXAMPLE: Meltwater

How Meltwater finds the best time to post on FacebookThe “Times” section (see below) is what we’re most interested in because it shows us how many of our fans are online each hour. When we hover over the graph, we can see that our peak is at 7am (in our timezone):

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We can also go deeper than this, and break down what time our fans are online each day of the week. To see this, we just click on any day of the week in the “Days” section, and a line appears over the original graph:

This shows us that a large number of fans are online between 6-9am on Tuesday, so we definitely want to post in the early morning to maximize Reach. Since Meltwater is an international company, we’ll also use this graph to determine the best time to post status updates in other time zones.

Please note that these times are unique to Meltwater and will vary from the times that work best for your Facebook page because you have a unique set of fans. This will change weekly, so check back often.

Why knowing the best time to post on Facebook matters more than everIt’s important to know the best time to post on Facebook because the News Feed algorithm has been updated to reward engaging posts with Story Bumping. Facebook explains, “Organic stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top of News Feed if the stories are still getting lots of Likes and comments.” This means that if you post status updates when your fans are most likely to

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be online, you have a better chance of getting more likes and comments – which can help move your post to the tops of your fan’s News Feeds that haven’t seen it yet.

To benefit from this update, it’s important that you also use Facebook Insights to understand which posts your audience responds to best. You can find this data in the “Posts” tab, right next to “When your Fans are Online”. First, take a look at “Best Post Types” to get a high level view of how your status, link and photo posts are performing.

This tells me that status posts get the highest reach, but that photo posts get the most clicks. Link

posts sit in the middle, getting a higher reach than photos, and about the same number of clicks as status posts, so I will continue using all three post types.

Since your audience is different and will, therefore, react differently to the variety of content you post on Facebook, just make sure that you’re checking this insight frequently to stay up to speed on the kind of content that’s resonating.

Next, we’ll take a look at the “All Posts” tab to see exactly which posts have the highest Reach and Engagement.

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A photo post immediately stands out as one of our posts with the highest Reach and Engagement, so it would seem that we should post more pictures of Meltwater employees in cool locations (easy enough to do, since we have an awesome global team with plenty of pictures to share). Our next best post is a text post about social marketing ROI – something we know is a hot topic – so we’ll try to share more content with an ROI perspective, and we’ll let the Content Marketing team know what’s resonating.

Knowing how often and when to post on Facebook are key to establishing a good content marketing strategy. Now that we know how often to post and when to do it, it’s time to

talk about expanding our Reach. In book 5 of our Facebook Business Essentials series, you’ll learn how to make sure that you understand the finer points of Reach in order to maximize your impact with the most people.

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Conclusion & Resources

After reading this book, you should know when - and why - to post on Facebook. Your next step in our 7-book Facebook Business Essentials Series is learning how to expand your Reach.

The book you just read is part 4 of a Facebook marketing education series that provides the essentials for marketers from beginning to advanced levels, so – even if you’re not interested in learning about Facebook content marketing timing - be sure to check out our other Facebook marketing guides.

If you’re interested in checking out how a good social marketing tool can help you get the most out of your Facebook efforts, check out Meltwater Buzz:

If you’d like to stay up to date on the latest tips and tricks from the digital marketing world, please subscribe to our social media blog.

About the AuthorsIt takes a village to write a Facebook marketing series of this breadth and depth. Here are the folks who contrib-uted to this book:

Robert Rydefalk, Contributing AuthorFounder of Facebookskolan

Robert is a Product Manager at Meltwater who loves big data, building tools for social media mar-keting, and blogging about all the business possibil-ities Facebook offers. Robert is the founder of Swe-den’s largest blog about Facebook, Facebookskolan.se, and LikeAlyzer.com, a free Facebook analytics tool.

Follow Robert on LinkedIn

Leslie Nuccio, Editor & Contributing Author

Leslie Nuccio is a marketer and writer who started working in digital marketing before the first millennium Internet bust, and has been working in social media marketing since the dinosaur ages of 2008. Leslie is on staff at Meltwater to wax poetic about all the social media mar-keting topics she can think of that will help fellow mar-keting types utilize the power of social media marketing.

You can find her at the Meltwater social media blog, or off on a trail with a dog.

Follow Leslie on Twitter

Jen Picard Editor & Contributing Author

When she’s not doing marketing at Meltwater, you can find Jen snowboarding in Tahoe, traveling abroad, or enjoying a night in with friends and a good bottle of wine. She’s a graduate of UCSB with a degree in Socio-Economic and Political Global Studies.

Follow Jen on Twitter