Facebook Insight Times, You Could Be Reading Them Wrong! — Mario Leitao
Facebook Insights provides you with an awesome graph that shows you the times that your followers are online, but you could very well be reading it wrong!
The graph I’m talking about looks like this for one of my Facebook Pages:
Now just looking at this graph, it appears as though this pages followers are mostly online between 10 PM and 10 AM, with overnight hours like midnight and 3 AM etc. being popular times with lots of followers online… THIS IS WRONG!
It also seems like the worst times are between 1 PM and 7 PM with 4 PM and 5 PM being the worst… once again THIS IS WRONG!!
Why is it wrong?
Well, simply put, it’s wrong for this page and it’s wrong for everyone else outside the Pacific time zone.
On Facebook, if you look at the paragraph or heading just above the graph it says “ Insights for the time of day are shown in the Pacific time zone.”
Unfortunately Facebook does not show this graph to you in your own time zone so you could be interpreting the times and the graph incorrectly.
I for example, am in South Africa and we follow Central African Time (CAT), yet the graph times are in Pacific time. (I’m fairly certain this will be the same for everyone.)
So taking this into account and adjusting it to my time zone, it means this pages peak times are actually between 8 AM and 8 PM (and not 10 PM and 10 AM as the graph shows).
It also means that my worst times are actually 1 AM and 4 AM (instead of 3 PM and 6 PM as shown on the graph).
Only after converting the times for yourself will your graph actually be accurate for you and will make more sense to you.
This is the same graph as above but with my time zone typed in below the times given on Facebook:
My advice, if your times zone is different to Pacific time, is to screenshot the graph and copy it to a program like Microsoft Word where you can type in for yourself the times according to your time zone.
Once you have done that, save it or print it with your times and use this saved or printed graph to determine the best times to post your content.
To adjust the times you may want to use a website like https://savvytime.com/converter like I did to simply convert the times. (In my case I converted from Pacific Time to Central African Time but it can be used to convert from any time zone to any other time zone too.
I hope this makes sense to you and that in future you will remember this when looking at your Facebook Page’s insights graph.
Please share this with someone who you think would find this helpful.
Originally published at https://www.marioleitao.co.za on February 6, 2020.
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