Knowing when to post next on Facebook is a common question Publishers and Social Media Managers face when managing their online presence. You can take two approached:
- Simple to manage: The simplest way is to auto-post at set intervals. It requires zero effort once you set it up and it’s enough to keep your page alive.
- Optimized for outcome: What if you want to grow your engagement on Facebook? How often should you post to maximize organic reach? Does posting more frequently lead to more referral traffic from Facebook? These are the questions we set out to answer in our recent effort to optimize our Post Recommendation algorithm.
We ran a month-long experiment with one of our customers. Every week on the same day, we adjusted the parameters of our algorithm while the publisher adhered as much as they could to the Post Recommendation.
After three weeks of experimenting with different settings we discovered that:
- The frequency of Facebook posts a publisher shares does impact their Facebook engagement and referral traffic. It’s a fine balance between posting often enough but not too often.
- We identified a clear drop in engagement when a page was posting too frequently – in our case, this took place on Week 2 of the experiment.
- Facebook engagement clearly impacts referral traffic: highs and lows in Facebook posts closely correlate with highs and lows of Facebook referral traffic.
We used these findings to crunch more data. As a result, we updated our Posting Recommendation algorithm for all users. You can now get better recommendations for posting frequency, which would help you optimize engagement and grow referral traffic from Facebook.
Check the new recommendation engine and reach out to us if you have questions.