While your brand’s audience will undoubtedly be consuming media throughout various times of the day, there’s no secret science to the “best” time to post on Facebook. That doesn’t mean we can’t try to figure it out though! Thanks to the help of some dedicated researchers, there are a few proven trends that you can test out on your own brand (See Dan Zarella at Hubspot, EdgerankChecker and more) to determine when you should be posting. Again, there’s no universal RIGHT way, but here are three basic points that we find helpful:

1. Easy like Sunday morning

Don’t knock the weekend! One of the biggest mistakes we see are brands only posting around their company’s office hours. In reality, posts made on Saturday and Sunday lean toward a much higher like percentage than those during the business week. Why? Well no matter if it’s school or work, during the week people are on the go. On the weekends they have time to relax, pour up a cup of coffee, and consume all your great media.

2. Consider your consumer

While the weekends have been proven, the rest of the week is a crapshoot. The best bet is to literally put yourself in your customers shoes. Figure out their behavioral patterns online through research.

For example: Media outlets post the morning’s top news stories early so the audience can like, comment, and share as they wake up. Are you a restaurant? Consider this: It’s 10:30AM, the hunger pangs set in. Is it lunch yet? You probably get like me and click over to Facebook to pass the time while you quell that hunger. What better than to see your big juicy burger, slow cooked rack of ribs, or other lunch special at 11:00am as my coworkers and I decide where to eat.

3. Use insights to guide your postings

The supplied Facebook insights will tell you a lot. If you’re monitoring and measuring regularly, you can use them to identify trends in your social activity and improve them. What’s this look like? Take a look at our client Captain Stan’s Smokehouse. After doing some research and testing through the Facebook insights and our own analytics tools we learned that most people weren’t actually coming to our page after the initial like, or seeing many of our updates, despite regular postings.

To combat that and offer a reason for fans to come back every week, we started “Woodbine Wednesday” a weekly fun fact about the tiny little town of Woodbine, GA where this BBQ house is. It was a simple call to action that invited our fans to come back to the page each Wednesday to learn about the new fact through humorous posts and great photos.

As a result, we increased the reach of social content by nearly 230% from April to May, but more importantly we increased the number of butts in the seats.

From roughly 1,500 to 5,000

How are you using the SCIENCE of social data to improve your messaging? When have you found the best times to post for your brand? Let us know in the comments.