A recent study on the Facebook.com algorithm from Buddy Media states that Facebook pages that execute posts outside of working hours showed 20% higher engagement rates.
The study from the US Facebook marketing consultancy gets under the skin of how to get into the most recent news feed of anyone in your fan base. By targeting people outside of working hours you get to maximise the audience that have a corporate firewall or a grumpy boss that frowns at looking at cool sites on a lunch break. Furthermore, Buddy Media’s study shows that Facebook response on a Sunday is particularly high – some food for thought for anyone managing online communities via this social media giant.
As Facebook have displayed in recent months, they are devoted both technically and tactically to competing with Google.com. We are rapidly moving into Facebook optimisation, where companies are looking to support marketers in their plight to ‘breaking Facebook’. However, social media marketing done right cannot be overly mechanical. If social media advertising interrupts us in our social environment then so does a badly crafted news feed from a company that you opted to ‘like’.
To conclude – if you schedule your messages with a tool such as Hootsuite and monitor mentions with one of the great tools like Tweetdeck then check when people talk to you and seriously consider moving everything to first thing in the morning (works well for Twitter users) and 7-10pm through the week (great for Facebookers).