What 500 Million Facebook Posts Can Teach You about Improving Your Social Engagement

Have you ever wondered how the most popular Facebook pages get all that amazing engagement? Facebook is huge. It has more than 1.44 billion active monthly users and it continues to grow every day.

The competition is stiff. The average Facebook user has hundreds of friends and follows hundreds of pages, many of which post updates every day. How do you stand above the noise?

The folks at BuzzSumo analyzed 500 million Facebook posts collected from over 3 million Facebook pages worldwide and learned some utterly fascinating things about likes, shares and social media engagement.

Here are the main takeaways.

1. The Best Time to Post on Facebook for Maximum Engagement

In many aspects of life, timing is everything. If you schedule an important meeting at noon, and all of the attendees are hungry, you probably won’t have a very productive session.

The same is true with social media. If you publish a post when your audience is not active, you won’t see much engagement. This is why one of the first things BuzzSumo looked into was the most popular times of the day these 500 million updates were published.

Unsurprisingly, they found that the majority of posts are published during the workday and fewer into the late evening or night. According to the study, the most popular time to post is between 10am and 1pm Eastern, and the least popular time is between 11pm and 2am Eastern.

There are many different ways you can use this data to boost Facebook engagement. Some see a huge opportunity for added engagement by posting when there is less competition, while others believe that popular hours mean larger audience.

Both options sound great, but which is the best one? The best way to find out is to test. If you are interested in trying to publish your posts at popular hours, the numbers show that 11am is when the audience is largest. If you want to test the “Late-Night-Infomercial” effect, the study shows that posting volume reaches its lowest at 1am Eastern. Study your insights and see what hours work best for your audience.

2. The Absolute Best Day of The Week to Post on Facebook

Facebook arrived at a point where it simply couldn’t show you everything. They’ve found it to be a really awful user experience for people having to sift through tens of page post to see what’s happening with their friends. So, they started making educated guesses about what users might like.

For small business owners on Facebook, this means having to reevaluate their social media marketing strategies as their posts reached fewer and fewer users. For a business that’s looking to ensure that its posts get the most engagement possible, knowing the best day to post is crucial.

According to BuzzSumo, Tuesday and Wednesday are the most popular days of the week, while Saturday and Sunday are the least popular.

Again, similarly to the best time to post, you need to experiment in order to find out what day of the week works best for you and your audience.

3. What Type of Content Performs Best on Facebook?

How you choose to pack your social media content may impact the amount of engagement you can expect to receive on a post. The BuzzSumo study found that lists, infographics and why-posts perform better than other content types. Surprisingly, how-to posts receive fewer shares than the average post.

There are many possible reasons why lists get the most engagement. They are easy to read and give users an exact idea on what to expect. Likewise, infographics make it easier to consume large amounts of information in a visually compelling way.

However, before starting to create lists and infographics it is important to know that each audience has different preferences and behaviors. For example, lists don’t do as well in education niches where people are looking for well-rounded, comprehensive content.

4. The Ideal Length of a Facebook Post

How long is the ideal Facebook post?

As you might expect, there’s no single right answer to this question. Sometimes, longer posts perform better than shorter ones and vice versa. According to a study from TrackMaven, cited by Hubspot.com, posts with 80+ words get twice as much engagement. While this by no means implies that every Facebook post should feel like reading a novel, it does highlight the importance of context.

Jeff Bullas, on the other hand, believes that 40 is the magic number when it comes to the ideal length of a Facebook post. After measuring the engagement of various posts, he found that short ones received 86% more engagement than others.

After looking at different samples of character counts, averaging from 50 to 300+ characters, BuzzSumo found that 300 characters or fewer is the engagement sweet spot for a Facebook post.

The only way to know for sure is to test. Try different post lengths and use Facebook’s Insights to measure which type performed best – long posts or short posts.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is a complex science. There are no definite answers and the best way to find out what type of approach resonates for your target audience is to test. While these findings are generally useful, some things do depend on your niche. If your audience is into memes, videos and quirky lists, than writing long-form content probably isn’t worthwhile. Similarly, if your audience is more active during late night hours, scheduling your post in the morning won’t drive much engagement.

What did you learn from BuzzSumo’s study? Are you going to change your social media strategy after reading this article? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.