If you own a Facebook page, you’ll appreciate the work that goes into building up (and keeping) the Likes on your page. But as Niall highlighted last week, once you have a Like, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s there to stay. You’re not always guaranteed to continue reaching the community you’ve built up, but there are ways that you can help ensure you do. Social media company Social Fresh has helped with this by reproducing an interesting guide into the best times of day to update your Facebook page, to increase your chances of reaching the biggest audience. The findings are based on date from Virtue, a social publishing tool, who analysed the level of status updates throughout the day. As Facebook pages grow in popularity and continually advance, we’re finding the right (and wrong ways) to manage them. But is there a science to how to run them optimally, with the answer lying in the huge wealth of Facebook data available to analyse?
The best times to update your page
The data shows that the increase in conversation peaks at around 3pm :
The difference in conversation level throughout the day shows just how crucial it is to consider the time that you post. It’s interesting to note that this occurs towards the latter part of the working day, so can also read as a graph of peak procrastination levels! Indeed, the survey also found that Saturday and Sunday were the quietest days for posting. This is hugely valuable information for Facebook page owners. Though the work may have been done in attracting people to your page, your update could just go out at the wrong time which means it’s missed from their newsfeed. Something as simple as this has a huge impact on your page.
However, given that there is also a peak in activity at around 8pm, enforces the fact that for those who work in social media, or run social media profiles for businesses, your working hours are moving further and further away from the 9-5. The truth is that social media is still going strong outside of office hours and you can’t afford to ignore what’s happening just because you’ve left the office. This could be one of the single biggest changes to organisations and shows the need to have a fluid business structure.
How to stop people leaving your page
Research has also been done into the top reasons people unsubscribe from a brand on Facebook – with frequency of updates, losing interest in the brand and uninteresting updates coming out on top :
So can this data actually be used to run a good page, or do you risk being obsessed with the numbers and the stats and forget the content and community at the heart of a page? Being armed with this knowledge can only help brands and though it obviously doesn’t all come down to the science behind good updates, this tells us more than perhaps we’ve ever known before about what makes good marketing and what people are actually responding to. There has never been such a telling indicator of someone falling out of love with your brand than actually ‘unliking’ you and the good news is that you’re able to see this through the insights Facebook provides. The huge amount of data that we have available through Facebook is phenomenal and the impacts for businesses are huge, providing this is used correctly of course. Running a Facebook page may not come down completely to the ‘science’ but smart marketers will be using the information available to help shape the strategy and find out what it is their fans actually want.
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