Study Shows When Facebook Users Are Most Active

For the past three years, a social media management company called Vitrue has been examining Facebook activity patterns around brands and companies. The study, which Vitrue recently released, reveals the days and times when certain brands experience the most activity from their Facebook fans.

According to Mashable, "Vitrue analyzed Facebook post data from August 10, 2007 to October 10, 2010 from more than 1,500 brand streams -- more than 1.64 million posts and 7.56 million comments in all. Shares and 'likes' were not included in the study."

Vitrue's data indicates that the most activity took place on Wednesdays at 3 p.m. ET.

In general, the study shows that weekdays were busier than weekends. While users engaged with brands most on Wednesdays, they tended to be least active on Sundays.

Vitrue also found that the least amount of daily activity occurred during the wee hours of the morning, when many users are alseep. Likewise, daily activity spiked around mid-morning and dropped off sharply at 8 p.m. ET. As Mashable notes, "The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET."

Interestingly, brand posts published in the morning fared better than posts that went up during the 3 p.m. peak. And, Vitrue discovered, fans posted and commented more on items published during the first fifteen minutes of the hour than on posts published at quarter-past, half-past, and quarter-to the hour.

For more details, including official charts of the data, visit Mashable's breakdown of the Vitrue study.

Comments

[rotorhead1871]

12:49 AM on 11/02/2010

you dont need a "study" to figure this out, just get the web traffic report. sheeeeeesh.....

[Joel BStylz Ogola]

05:00 PM on 10/29/2010

This facebook thing is Starting to get too Creepy!

[Max Shaw]

03:42 PM on 10/29/2010

Wow, fascinating. So let me see if I grasped this article correctly...

People tend to post in the morning and afternoons, and at night tend to sleep instead...And morning posts are read more because no one likes to back track through old posts during the day..

People tend to post less on weekends because they have real lives to live, and would rather be on facebook during the work week when everything is boring and theres nothing else to do.

I wouldve never known that if not for you, Virture. Thanks! [for stating the obvious]...

[Monk2001]

12:33 PM on 10/29/2010

At work?

[J the Mac]

12:30 AM on 10/29/2010

What I'm getting from this is "Mark Zuckerburg allowed a private company access to people's account data and therefore still can't grasp what the word privacy means"

[poster1122]

10:30 AM on 10/29/2010

Actually, this type of data doesn't require access to user account data. It's typically installed with most web servers to monitor load and guard against denial of service attacks. If your company has a website, your IT department almost certainly keeps statistics on number of connections throughout the day. It's one of the tools they use to determine when it's time to upgrade to keep up with user demand. If the web server is a commercial product with limited concurrent user licensing, it may also be used to enforce the terms of that licensing.

Sites that are large typically published their usage graphs so they can brag about making the Top 100, 1000, whatever lists for Internet traffic at places like Alexa.com.

[poster1122]

10:32 AM on 10/29/2010

Actually, quick correction: Alexa's model appears to be different (and doesn't seem to be very good). Apparently, they "roduce traffic rankings and statistics based on those people who access the sites while using the Alexa toolbar," according to Wikipedia.

[Bartolo27]

09:14 PM on 10/28/2010

Huge spike when the kids get out of school.