When it comes to marketing your financial planning business on Facebook, you may be aware that only a small percentage of your Page followers will see your posts.

Facebook is continually tweaking its algorithm to deliver newsfeed results that are most likely to interest the recipient. This means that not all posts are created equal.

There are a number of different variables that Facebook takes into account when it determines what posts will be displayed in a news feed. These includes things like the type of post, your interactions with that Page over time, how recent the post is etc.

Of course, you’re able to boost your post by paying a fee to ensure it gets seen by more people.

But one of the things that remains important is simply to post at the times that your content is most likely to be seen. This means posting when your followers are on Facebook.

What’s The Best Time To Post?

The short answers is “It Depends”.

Here’s the longer answer – “The best time to post is when the biggest number of your followers are active on Facebook”.

I’ve highlighted the “your followers” bit for a reason. I’ve seen a lot of articles and infographics about the best times to post on social media but the problem with these articles is that they’re too general. You see, just because one posting time works for one Facebook Page, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for yours.

One Page may have a lot of followers active during the day, another may have very few active followers during the day, but a lot of active followers in the evening. So if they both posted at the same time, they could experience very different results.

So, the big question is – “When are your Page followers using Facebook?”

Introducing Facebook Insights

Facebook’s Insights section provides a lot of information about your Facebook Page.

You’ll see the Insights option at the top of your Page. Click on “Insights” to get started. (note: you need at least 30 Page followers before you can access Insights)

Once you’ve opened the Insights section, on the left hand side of the Page, click on the “Posts” Link.

Once you open that section, you’ll see at the top of your Page a section called “When your fans are online”.

Below this title is a graph that shows when your Page fans were online over the past week.

The top portion of the graph shows the individual days, and below that is a graph for the while week.

Here’s an example for a Page that I manage.

You can see in this example that from around 4am up to around 9am there’s in increase in the number of followers who are active on Facebook. This number reduces over the afternoon, but there’s a slight spike around 8pm.

So for this page, the best times to post would be around 7-9am and around 8pm. If I wanted to post more, I’d probably look to do a couple of posts in the morning and then one in the evening.

Here’s another example from the Facebook Page for the financial planning business that I used to own. I don’t use this Page any more, but I can still access the follower data.

You can see from this graph an increase in followers around 7am. It then drops a bit, but slowly increases through the afternoon and you can see that there’s a good number of followers from around 4pm to 9pm.

Most of the Page followers for this Page live in Adelaide, so I’d expect their waking hours to be similar.

The best times to post for this Page would be just before 7am, then sometime in the afternoon and again in the evening.

Now let’s look at an example of a Page with a very different audience.

This is for my Strictly Guitar Facebook Page. This Page has a lot of followers from the US, so the times when its fans are online are very different to the other examples I’ve shown you.

You can see for this Page that the majority of Page followers are on Facebook from around 10pm to around 6am (remember, I’m in Australia and this is my local time).

If I posted in the afternoon, very few of the Page followers would be on Facebook so not many people would see my post.

But if I posted at 1am, that post would have a much higher chance of being seen by more people.

So When Is The Best Time To Post?

So let’s go back to that question of “When is the best time to post?” I hope you can see that the answer depends on the people who follow your Page.

Forget what other Facebook ‘experts’ say – there’s no one right answer.

Whilst I’ve observed some similar Page statistics across a few Pages that I manage for advisers, I’ll never assume that those numbers will be the same across all financial advice businesses.

Always be testing. Vary your posting times to see if you get different results. Remember, Facebook will only show your Page posts to a small number of your Page followers.

If you’d like to learn more about using Facebook for your financial advice business, check out our Facebook for Financial Advisors course. It covers everything you need to know to use Facebook to attract and retain quality clients.