Brian Carter is vice president of marketing and customer success at InfiniGraph. He's also the author of The Like Economy and the forthcoming LinkedIn For Business. Follow him @briancarter.
If you have a Facebook page, you likely know how important it is to get likes and comments. Without those, your EdgeRank suffers, and your posts are seen by fewer fans in the future. Facebook has already admitted that the average Facebook page only reaches about 17% of its fans. Since less than 1 to 2% of fans go back to your page, EdgeRank and newsfeed visibility are critical.
When you get a new fan, you have the opportunity to keep them engaged. If you don't, they'll simply stop reading your posts. Here are some of the things you should keep in mind as you determine how best to engage your Facebook customers.
Which Days are Your Fans Most Responsive?
You need to maximize likes and comments to be visible to fans. Part of getting better engagement results is knowing which days of the week your fans are most and least responsive. This is different for every company and industry. Knowing the best day of the week for all Facebook pages won't help you with your brand. So even if the best overall day is Tuesday, your company's best day might be Sunday.
For example, recent research indicated that the most responsive day for high-fashion brand pages is Wednesday, while the most responsive day for outdoor clothing brand pages is Thursday. Why should brands care? Well, even if you post every day, your greatest focus should go to those days when followers are most responsive. So, if your best day is on the weekend, make sure you have that covered.
It also turns out that the best days of the week to post on Facebook are not always the same days brands create the most posts. Sometimes it's a Sunday, and maybe no one is working. It appears that the amount a brand posts is not based on their most responsive days, but perhaps just on convenience or coincidence.
Case Study: Chanel
When you compare individual companies, you see that the days they do the most posts are not the same days that they get the most likes and comments per post. For example, see the following charts:
Here is when Chanel posts the most (average posts per day over 90 days):
And here is when their fans are the most responsive (likes + comments per post):
Chanel's fans are most responsive on Saturdays, but it's their second-to-least posted on day of the week. Most likely, their social media person isn't working that day, and they're not scheduling posts for that day. Without realizing it, they're missing out on a lot of likes and comments, which of course hurts their Edgerank and lowers their fan page's post visibility.
This highlights that you shouldn't post most when it's convenient for you, but when your fans are most responsive.
How to Maximize the Most Engaging Days
If you want to figure out this data for your page, here are the steps:
- 1. Go to your Facebook page insights and click on likes.
- 2. Click on export data. Choose post level data, then select at least a two-month range so you have a good sample.
- 3. Save it and open it in Excel.
- 4. There's not a quick way in Excel to group dates by day of week, but with a bit of manual work, you can find the average lifetime of engaged users per post, per day of the week.
The only shortcoming here is that the data is limited by how good and engaging your posts have been. It's better to look at 10 to 20 brand pages per industry. You will have to manually look at hundreds of posts, or find a way to scrape that data. Then you can find the average likes and comments per post, per day of the week across an entire industry.
If one of your competitors is doing a much better job at getting likes and comments, you might want to follow their lead. It could be, in part, the days of the week they post, and also the type and quality of content.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ymgerman
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