The Best Times to Post on Facebook for Businesses

When is the best time to post on Facebook for businesses?

This is a question that we get asked all the time. While we’ve touched on it in past articles, with organic reach declining it’s more important than ever to know when your posts will best be seen, and even when users are most likely to engage with them.

So how can you find the best times to post on Facebook? When are those best times?

If you want a lot of eyes on your posts and content, you have to know what times work best for you, and see which of them works best your particular audience.

In this post, we’ll show you our personal data on what we’ve found to be the best times for businesses to post on Facebook, as well as showing you how to your specific best times and how to schedule posts to take advantage of them.

Best Times to Post on Weekdays

Weekdays tend to be among the most popular times to post, and that’s not only because business hours are continuous (so if you’ve got a 9-5 employee working on your social media, they may only post here), but also because social media has become part of our routine.

During the week, there are few times when there won’t be at least some of your users are online if you have a lot of them. The hard part is finding the most concentrated times.

As a general rule, we’ve found that for our audience, posts uploaded at 10am or later tend to perform well. Posting early gives you the edge to still have your post in the Newsfeed later. Activity and our audience’s usage stayed consistent from 10am to about 7 or 8pm on weekday evenings, with peak times occurring often between 3 and 4pm, sometimes with peaks happening in the afternoon. You can see this information in our chart below:

Out of all the weekdays, Fridays tended to have the least activity, but they still did ok for traffic, still beating out weekends. That being said, weekends shouldn’t be dismissed, and they have their own best times to post, and their own value. 

Best Times to Post on Weekends

It’s important to keep that in mind when you’re posting on the weekends, your audience’s best times may be drastically different than another Page’s. A college student’s weekend—and the times they’re even awake—are very different than a thirty-five year with a 9-5 job during the week. While our data can help you, you’ll want to check your Insights for your own current best times, which we’ll talk about later on in the blog post.

Come Saturdays, don’t even think about posting early. While our Page Views started getting some views around 8am, engagement didn’t increase until a little later on in the day. After about 9pm on a Saturday though, just about all activity dropped off entirely, so you’ll want to post a few hours before that to still get some hits on your post.

On Sundays activity on our Page didn’t start until 9am. We had slightly more concentrated blocks of activity around 10 am and 4pm. Posting just before these times on a Sunday will be your best bet.

It is important to note that for our data, the most concentrated times with highest levels of activity did not happen at all on either Saturday or Sunday—they happened all on weekdays. That doesn’t mean weekends should be ignored entirely, but it’s good to take note that a lot of your focus and your most important posts should go to busy times during the week.

Best Overall Times for Businesses to Post on Facebook

So, what have we found to be the absolute best times—on the absolute best days—for businesses to post on Facebook?

These times aren’t just good times—these are what we found to be the absolute best times to post on Facebook for businesses.

• Mondays at 2pm and 4pm
• Tuesdays at 11am, 1pm, and 3pm
• Wednesdays at 3pm and 4pm
• Thursdays at 3pm, 6pm, and 7pm

Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays all got activity—but not necessarily a lot of it. Friday got the most (with engagement factored in, which our chart doesn’t show), then Sunday, and then Saturday had the least.

If you want to post on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the best times are:

• Friday 10am-6pm
• Saturday 9am-6pm
• Sunday 10am and 4pm

Again, for reference, here’s what our data provided us with:

As mentioned though, these best times work as a great guide line and are fantastic for split testing, but it’s important to be able to tune into your audience and really see what times work best for you, and for them.

Here’s how to do that….

Finding Your Best Time

With the differences in how different users utilize Facebook, it’s up to you to figure out when your best time is to post. These are the times that work best for us, and they’re a great starting period.

Again, to find the best time for your exact page and your exact audience, the best thing you can do is to test out a few posts on each of the suggested times listed above (and a few others, if those don’t work for you).

Your Page’s Insights is the best way to see what’s working for you so far, and to help you find the best times your audience is already active. When you go to your Insights, go to the Posts tab and it will automatically show you when your fans are online.

Test a few similar posts at set times over the course of a few weeks and monitor their progress on your Insights post tabs. From here, you can—and should—evaluate for reach (how many people are seeing your post) and number of clicks, likes, shares, and comments on each post individually.

Scheduling Posts Ahead of Time

It’s not enough just to know the best times to post; you actually have to have great content to post in them, and you have to make sure you’re hitting those time slots. One of the easiest ways to do this—to post the right content at the right time—is to create great content ahead of time and schedule it to post later, especially if you’ve got that 9-5 social media marketing employee who doesn’t feel like working unnecessary overtime.

Facebook now allows you to schedule posts and run them at a later time.

To schedule a post on Facebook, you’ll start from your Page’s Timeline. Click on the box where you can upload a new status, and type in your post.
In the bottom corner, next to the Publish button, you’ll see a drop down arrow. When you click it, you’ll have the option to schedule a post.

It brings you to a screen where you can choose the exact time and date you want your post to go live. After you schedule your post, hit schedule, and you’re all set.

I also highly recommend Rignite for scheduling posts and campaigns, especially if you want to repeat the post at a later time or want your posts to extend cross-platform. We use Rignite, and it’s been one of the best resources I’ve got in my toolbox. You can see our Rignite review here to see if it will work for you, too.

To see more about being successful with Facebook marketing and Facebook Ads, you can read more about our FB Ads Formula here. You can also see more about how to promote your Facebook Page (without paying to) in this post.

Have you found the best times to post on Facebook for your Page? What time works best for your audience? Leave us a comment and let us know!

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