FollowYour first goal with each post from your business Facebook page is to be seen by fans. But every post has a limited lifespan. During that time, your fans see the post in their news feed and may like or comment.
But after a certain point, Facebook stops showing the post in their news feed.
If you knew the average lifespan of your posts, you could post again right when the previous posts died off. Your page would always have a live post out there for fans. You’d be maximizing your possible exposure.
How Often Should You Post?
The changes to the news feed emphasize recency by blending top stories and recent stories.
There’s been talk about whether pages need to post more often: Should the typical recommendation to post once a day shift to posting two or three times per day?
The chart above, using data from the advanced Facebook page analytics company PageLever, shows that for pages with large fan bases, the shortest post lifespan was 11 to 13 hours. The longest was 50 hours, which was over a weekend.
Caveats For This Study
- This data comes from only 20 posts — an incredibly small sample size — but the posts are from pages with more than 2 million fans each, representing a lot of engagement.
- In the Facebook application programming interface, comments have a time stamp, but likes don’t — they time stamp likes in PageLever. Impressions are less reliable, so stick with the middle column for data
- It’s possible that since the average page has fewer fans than these sample pages, they’ll get less engagement and their post lifespan will be shorter.
- Read more details in the PageLever post.
Manually Discover Your Own Post Lifespan
Even without PageLever, you can check your own page’s typical post lifespan. Just check your post every hour and count its likes and comments.
Impressions are updated irregularly, so they’re not as reliable a way to check. Likes are much more reliable, and tend to happen in larger numbers than comments. So likes are the best metric to watch for post-die-off.
Once the likes per hour drop off dramatically, it’s time to post again. The only thing is, it’s a drag to do this manually, around the clock.
Below is the kind of data you can get from PageLever about it’s post. It’s an easier way to go.
Source: allfacebook
