The Shelf Life of Your Facebook Posts Is Shorter Than You Thought [Data]

你知道你的Facebook帖子的保质期?It might just be shorter than you think. Okay, admittedly most of us already knew the shelf life was fairly short, right? We've already seen studies from the likes ofEdgerank Checker,Optim.al, andSotrenderabout this very subject, and they all suggest that most engagement with a Facebook post happens within the first several hours.

So when anew study from Wisemetricswas released last week, we weren't too surprised to find that it re-affirmed what we already knew --75% of engagement on a Facebook post occurs within the first five hours. What's more interesting though, is that Wisemetrics looked not only at engagement, but also at reach and impressions. Andthisdata suggests that the shelf life may actually be shorter than we thought.

Take a look ...

If you're not a mathy person and despise looking at charts and graphs, here's the breakdown of what this means ...

Study Highlights

• It only takes2 hours, 30 minutesfor a post to get75% of the total impressionsit will get.
• In regard to reach,75% of your post's audiencesees your post inless than 2 hours.
• Furthermore, it takes just30 minutesfor a post to get50% of its global reach.

Those are all a lot shorter than 5 hours, huh? So what should a marketer do with this information?

Facebook Marketing Takeaways

The obvious takeaway here is that, because you have just a small window of time to reach your audience with each Facebook post, you might not be posting to your Facebook page as often as you should be. Considering your posts are only truly effective for a few hours, we recommend a posting frequency of about 3-4 per day.

Another great way to maximize each post's effectiveness is toincrease your Facebook reach overall. The greater your reach, the more audience your individual posts will have. But don't underestimate the role of post engagement in all this either. While most marketers are mainly concerned with reach, savvy Facebook marketers understand that, because ofEdgeRank, post engagementaffectsreach by influencing what gets surfaced in theFacebook News Feed. To learn more about how to optimize your Facebook content for better engagement,check out this blog post.

Finally, as Wisemetrics points out, testing and analyzing the timing of your Facebook posts may also be beneficial to improving your Facebook content strategy. With Facebook Insights, you cananalyze the effectiveness of your individual posts通过观察指标达到,订婚clickthrough rates. And by analyzing how the timing of your posts affects these metrics, you can start to get a sense of the optimal dates and times for your Facebook content strategy.

To learn more about how to adapt your Facebook content strategy for the News Feed,downloadour free ebook,Crash Course on the Facebook News Feed.