The secret to Facebook success – post pics on Friday morning

Sep 28, 2010 by Dirk Singer

What’s the secret to Facebook success? Post pictures up on your page on Friday mornings.

This is according to Virtue (which makes social media management tools), which published a white paper on Facebook page engagement. Virtue first of all looked at 100 random Facebook pages, and then took two pages for two vertical sectors – one for Quick Server Restaurants (or Fast Food) and one for Consumer Packaged Goods.

As part of its research Virtue found that:

Image posts work best. They get 22% more engagement than video posts, and 54% more engagement than text posts. But video is still better than text. Why do images work better than video? Virtue says that it’s because looking at a picture is the least time consuming option, and because making a truly effective video can be somewhat hit and miss.

For Facebook pages overall, Friday is the most and Sunday the least effective day. Not only that, but if you put up a post before Noon you get 65% more engagement.

However, there were variations for the two verticals. The QSR (fast food) page did best on Wednesdays. A case of the mid working week fast food binge? Meanwhile for the consumer packaged goods page, Thursday was the most effective day. And if you are representing a fast food brand, then the rule about posting in the morning doesn’t apply to you. Instead, posting in the afternoon gets you 12% more engagement.

(Via Marketing Charts)