When I started posting my new series of Facebook data points, one of the most requested graphs was the days of the week (and times of day, which is coming soon) that are best to publish on to get lots of Facebook shares. What I found when I looked at days of the week is at first a little unexpected, but upon further thought fairly logical.
While I found less articles posted on the weekends (notice the gray bars at the bottom of the graph which indicate volume of URLs analyzed for each day), those stories that were published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook more, on average, than stories that were published during the week. The reasons for this probably include the fact that more than half of companies in the US block Facebook, so people can only use the social network at home, on the weekends. Additionally, the mainstream Facebook audience does not use Facebook for work.
The takeaway? If you want your article to be shared on Facebook by your readers, try posting it over the weekend.
For information on my methodology, start with this page. For this data point I’m using over 5000 stories and “average” is the interquartile mean which is less sensitive to outliers. The 0% line indicates the average number of “shares” stories from each site in my study get, when the line is above 0% it means that stories on that day are shared more than the average, and when it is below, they’re shared less. If you’re curious why it appears most of the stories in the data set are above average, this is because of the difference in the volume of published stories on various days.
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