Is There a Best Time to Post on Facebook?

What is the best time to post on Facebook? In theory, it’s a simple answer: The best day and time to post on Facebook is when more of your followers are likely to be online.

This is when your audience is most likely to see your content and engage with it, which sends important signals to the Facebook algorithm to extend the reach of your posts.

In practice, it’s a little more complicated, since your audience is not necessarily the most active online at the same time as anyone else’s. Add in time zones and different social behaviors during weekdays and weekends, and things get a little tricky.

Here are some important factors to consider:

• The average Facebook Page posts 1.68 times per day.
• More than two-thirds (67%) of Facebook users log in every day.
• About half of Facebook users (49%) visit the platform multiple times per day.
• People spend an average of 33 minutes a day on Facebook.

So you have a few chances throughout the day to reach most Facebook users.

Fortunately, there are some great tools to help you learn the best day and time to post on Facebook for your specific Facebook Page. We’ll get into those in the last section of this post. For now, here are some general guidelines to use when planning your Facebook posting strategy.

Overall best time to post on Facebook

The best overall time to post on Facebook is between 8 a.m. and noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Of course, you’ll need to think about the time zones in which your audience lives when planning these posting times.

For example, the Hootsuite social team likes to post at times that work for both the Eastern and Pacific time zones in North America, since that’s where many of Hootsuite’s Facebook followers are based.

That means 6:15 a.m. PST, 9:15 a.m. PST and 12-12:30 p.m. PST are usually the best posting times. That first slot may seem awfully early for followers on the West Coast, but it’s already 9:15 in the major centers or Toronto and New York by then, so it’s the perfect time to reach Eastern time zone followers as they sip their first workday coffee. It also catches audiences in the UK and Europe while they’re still at work, reaching them mid-afternoon.

“We are aware that our audience is global,” says Eileen Kwok, Hootsuite’s Social Marketing Coordinator. “So we try to schedule posts at different time marks to increase our chances of our posts getting viewed by a variety of followers.”

Best times to post on Facebook for every day of the week

In addition to the best time of day, you need to think about which days of the week make the most sense for publishing your content.

For example, the Hootsuite social team finds that Mondays through Wednesdays are the most effective days to post on Facebook. That doesn’t mean Hootsuite only posts Mondays through Wednesdays. You just have to think strategically about ways to boost relevance and engagement on those non-peak days.

If you publish over the weekends or holidays try your best to make the content playful or something aligned with the holiday/cultural moments taking place. Writing copy that is relevant to the day of the week can help boost engagement.