Facebook is always a tough call when it comes to the frequency and timing of posting messages. Unlike Twitter, which is a war to be seen, Facebook is a slower network with a much higher percentage of your "fans" likely to see your messages (whether they read it or not is another matter). So when is the best time to get those messages out to increase engagement?

Buddy Media, a Facebook marketing company, analyzed Facebook posts of 200+ clients and noted comments and "likes" of each message, also taking into consideration fanbase. They mention that 60% of messages were published during work hours, between 10am – 4pm. This is really not hard to beleive as most people are creating and publishing messages directly on facebook.com and no one likes working late!

eMarketer who reported on the story said "By timing content to post when consumers are poised to be on Facebook, companies have a greater chance of being seen in a fan’s newsfeed." – I agree, but I'm not going to watch the clock to make sure I post at the optimum time! There are plent of tools out there to do that for us. I'm going to pick up on one, as it's the one I use and also work for, Campaign Commander Social Edition. With a tool like this you can schedule your messages to hit the optimum time for you to post. You can post on to multiple pages at the same time and have everything automated. Also why rely on this data? A tool such as CCSE will give you are own engagement reports such as "heat maps" so you can see when your community is engaging the most.

Other stats of interest were that messages with 80 characters or less received a 27% increase in engagement with eMarketer also adding that "Certain words also encourage engagement, particularly those that are instructions such as “like,” “post,” “take” and “comment,” as does asking a question at the end of a post."

Taking these statistics into consideration everyone is going to start posting at 7pm on a Thurdays, however you need to think about your community and engaging with them continuously. One weekly post on a Thursday evening is not enough.

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