This Study Proves Weekend and Nighttime Facebook Posts Drive More Engagement

A common saying in the world of social media marketing is that you should never post at night or on the weekend because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up driving down your engagement levels. In spite of the fact that this is the case, a new study by Echobox has revealed that this is just a myth after analyzing engagement rates for brand posts that were sent out at various times throughout the week.

It turns out that the content that brands posted to Facebook on the weekend received 23% of their total engagement which is a disproportionately high number with all things having been considered and taken into account. Additionally, businesses that posted the same thing every day found that as much as 28% of their traffic would come from posts that were sent out on Saturday and Sunday.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that nighttime posts also perform surprisingly well. Any posts that were made between midnight and eight AM resulted in 12% increases in sharing of content, and automation allowed this to increase to 13%.

This disproves the idea that weekend and nighttime posting is not efficient. This notion is based on the assumption that people go out on weekends and won’t check their phones, but it fails to recognize the pervasive nature of social media usage throughout all days of the week. People scroll through social media on dates, while hanging out with friends and even at work, and posting on the weekend might boost engagement by allowing people to actually absorb the content.

Many people treat the weekend as an opportunity to scroll through social media at their leisure, which is something that digital marketing agencies should factor in moving forward. Also, businesses usually save their best content and posts for weekdays which suggests that these numbers could be even higher if quality content was reserved for the weekend. It will be interesting to see if this impacts posting decisions made by businesses.