• by Ray Schultz , July 20, 2022

Publishers who post content on Facebook should perhaps reconsider the common wisdom about timing. 

Nights and weekends, typically thought of as down times, actually deliver healthy traffic, according to “Should you post on nights and weekends?”, a study by Echobox. 

Content posted on Saturday and Sunday generates 23% of all clicks for the week. 

What’s more, “if businesses shared the same number of posts equally across each day of the week, we would expect the weekends to account for around 28% of total weekly posts,”  the study adds. 

Saturday and Sunday also tend to be the two best days for referral traffic. 

Nights, while not as strong as weekend days, “nevertheless generate a healthy portion of pageview” overall, the study continues. 

Content shared at night—defined as the hours between 12 a.m. and 8 a.m.—produces 12% of brands’ weekly shares and 9% of page views, a figure that leaps to 13% when intelligent automation is used. 

The study notes that intelligent automation relieves the cost of hiring more staff to post content outside of work hours, while eliminating the need for overtime. 

Nights and weekends are also good times for resharing content. 

Reshared content generates 67% of the clicks it generated the first time it was posted, the firm says. And for 13% of publishers, reshared content produces even more than it did the first time.  

However, all the above figures "may under-represent the true potential of night and weekend posting, as businesses may not share their best content during these periods (instead preferring to share their best performing content during business hours and weekdays),” the study states.

Echobox’s data science department analyzed 15 million shares over the course of a year.