When do political parties post on social media, and does the timing of a post matter for the engagement it gets?

The paper
Posting in Office Hours? When European Parties Post on Facebook and When Their Posts Do Best, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I converted the timestamps of 856,696 Facebook posts by 112 party pages and 74 party leaders’ pages in 20 European countries, collected through CrowdTangle (Meta’s former tool for tracking public pages) between 2010 and 2020, to local time.

What I found

Parties posted mostly during working hours. Two thirds of posts appeared between 09:00 and 18:00, fewer than one in ten after 21:00, and fewer than one in five at weekends. But posts made at other times drew more engagement. Comparing posts by the same page in the same month, posts made between 21:00 and midnight drew about 10% more interactions than posts made at midday, and evening posts from 18:00 to 21:00 about 4% more, while morning posts drew slightly less. Sunday posts drew about 9% more than Monday posts.

The evening premium held when comparing posts made on the same day in the same country, so it is not just a feature of big news days. A premium for posts made after midnight disappeared on that comparison, which suggests it reflects the days those posts were made. Posts made in an hour when other parties in the country were also posting drew more, not less.

The differences are modest, and they say nothing about what posts said, but they point to a gap between when parties posted and when their posts drew most engagement.

Caveats

These are modest differences in engagement, and engagement is not the same as reach. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

The views in this post and the paper are my own.