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The Importance of Timing for Facebook Posts

Using Facebook to market your business can be a cost-effective way to reach a huge audience, but as with other mass media advertising, choosing a schedule for your marketing efforts is vital to getting the best returns on your investment. There are a couple of factors to consider when deciding how and when to use Facebook to market your business: what time of day is best to make your posts, and how often your posts should be made.

There are general peak times for Facebook users to log on; between 5pm and 7pm, and again at 11pm, are peak times in most locations but to accurately target your specific audience it is best to find out when they most commonly use the site. Different demographic groups use Facebook at different times, and depending on which niche your business is in, you will want to post your promotional status updates just prior to your target audience logging onto Facebook. For instance, if you are a local business and you are making your posts at 2am then it is unlikely that they will still be prominent in the news feed when your audience is logging on in the morning, so the customers that you want to attract will never see them. A better strategy would be to make your Facebook posts at 7am so they will still be somewhere near the top of the feed first thing. With the right kind of content a post that is made first thing in the morning could still be there late in the day. This touches on the second consideration, how often posts should be made.

Facebook posts have a lifespan in the top posts area that is generally between 10 minutes and 10 hours long, depending upon the quality of the content and the engagement that users have had with it. A plain text post that announces your daily special is going to have a shorter lifespan than a picture of your product with a call to action that encourages comments and shares. Part of the longevity of your posts is determined by the amount of affinity that you share with your Facebook followers so it is a good idea to spend some of your Facebook marketing time on sharing and commenting on others’ posts. All of this will contribute to calculating how long your status updates last and how often you need to make new posts to stay current in the news feed. On average it is most practical to make two posts a day but four or even six can be used to really push a special promotion. More than that and your followers may begin to see your posts as spam and pay less attention to them.

If you make your first scheduled Facebook post early in the morning then it would be reasonable to make your second one in the late afternoon or early in the evening to ensure that you have spent a considerable amount of time in the top posts for that day. Of course, if your posts have a life span of ten minutes instead of ten hours then you will need to do some work on optimizing your Facebook profile and your posts to improve your Edge Rank rating. Facebook can be the most cost-effective marketing tool available for some businesses, especially smaller ones, so knowing how to use it efficiently so that it drives traffic to your business has become an indispensible tool for running many businesses. Taking the time to work out a schedule for your Facebook marketing can make it really work for your business.

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