Finding the best time to post on Facebook is a great way to boost engagement, drive traffic, and gain new followers.
But no Facebook Page is created equal — so how do you find the best time to post on Facebook?
In this blog, we’ll share how to find your best time to post on Facebook, plus how to automate your posts to maximize reach and win back a ton of time! Also, follow the links for our separate guides on the best time to post on Instagram for likes and the best time to post on TikTok.
When Is the Best Time to Post on Facebook in 2023?
When it comes to the best time to post on Facebook, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
Each Facebook Page is unique, with different audiences, cities, and time zones to consider. So while some encourage posting on weekends, others say the best time to post on Facebook is at 9 am, no matter the day.
Here at Waffle Bytes, our social team found that our best time to post on Facebook is between 6 am-12 pm PST.
“It will be determined by where your audience is located,” shares Waffle Social Content Lead, Christine Colling (more on this Waffle Bytes).
You’ll also want to avoid posting when your audience is offline, AKA the worst times to post on Facebook. These might include hours of slumber or long weekends when your audience is less likely to be scrolling the app.
This means finding your personalized best time to post on Facebook is integral to increasing the likelihood of followers seeing and engaging with your posts.
How Do I Find The Best Time to Post on Facebook?
To find your best time to post on Facebook, you’ll need to do a little digging (and some testing) to figure out when your audience is most active.
To get you started, here are three tried and actual tactics:
- Use Facebook Page Insights to Find Top Engagement Times
- Check Facebook Audience Insights for Optimal Timezones
- Experiment with Posting Times and Measure Your Progress
#1: Use Facebook Page Insights to Find Top Engagement Times
Facebook Page Insights has tons of valuable data surrounding your Facebook Page’s performance — which can help you discover your total posting times!
Knowing when your audience is most engaged is an excellent indicator of when your best time to post might be.
You can find this data by opening your Facebook Page and clicking “Insights.”
On the left side of the screen, you’ll find different sections of your Page Insights, while the right side shows graphs and charts.
Scroll down to the “Your 5 Most Recent Posts” section. It will open a graph showing when your followers are online:
TIP: If you hover your cursor over the days at the top of the Page, you can see which ones result in the most engagement on your Page.
Facebook also tracks the reach and engagement of your Facebook posts to find when your followers are most likely to react, comment, and share your content.
To see this metric, click “Posts” from your Page Insights and scroll down to “All Posts Published”:
Here you can sort posts by clicks, reactions, and more, to see the total engagement by type for each post.
Pay special attention to the Published column timestamp — this tells you when each post was published to your Facebook Page and is a great way to track when your audience is most likely to engage with your content.
NOTE: Keep in mind that your engagement numbers may be slightly skewed if you boost your Facebook posts.
#2: Check Facebook Audience Insights for Optimal Timezones
Facebook Audience Insights was designed to help plan and optimize your Facebook ad campaigns — but it’s also a valuable starting point to find your audience’s locations and top time zones.
Unlike Page Insights — which tracks interactions with your Page via reactions, comments, and shares — Audience Insights looks at your current or potential audience’s age, gender, and, most importantly, location across all of Facebook.
Click “See All Insights” to open your Audience Insights dashboard to get started.
Select “Audience” and click whether you want insights about your current or potential Facebook audience.
TIP: If you want to learn about your existing Facebook audience, we recommend the former!
Scroll down to find the top cities and countries where your followers live. This is extremely helpful for pinpointing your full-time zones and identifying when your audience is most likely to be online and active:
For instance, Christine notes, “most of our audience on Facebook is from the USA, UK, and South Africa, so posting when those three countries are online has worked best for us.”
So if you learn that most of your followers are based on the west coast of North America, consider experimenting with posting in the PST time zone.
TIP: You can also discover a breakdown of audience locations by using Facebook’s Creator Studio.
#3: Experiment with Posting Times and Measure Your Progress
Once you have a clear idea of where your audience lives, it’s time to experiment and measure your progress!
For this, we recommend creating a spreadsheet to track how much engagement you receive when you post at different times on different days.
Start by picking five different times throughout the week.
For example, if you notice that your followers are most active between 5 and 9 pm EST, schedule your posts to appear at 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 pm.
In your spreadsheet, track how many likes, and comments each post receives, along with the date and time you posted them.
The following week, switch the timing of your posts for each day. For example, if you posted at 5 pm on Monday in week 1, standing at 6 pm during week 2.
It might take a few weeks, but you can use this information to help determine the best days to share content with your audience and the times that work best to drive traffic.
