Best (and worst) day of week to get a Facebook ‘Like’ in UAE…

Psst… don’t tell Mark Zuckerberg, but a bunch of social media experts here in the UAE have cracked the technical code to being popular on Facebook.

No really, the nice blokes at RBBi, a specialist digital marketing agency, maintain that they have studied, sliced, scrutinised, analysed, dissected and explored the data generated from thousands of Facebook ‘Likes’ of people like you and me, and arrived at some insightful conclusions.

If you’ve been posting relevant, interesting content and not many of your ‘Friends’ have been ‘liking’ it, you should know that you have probably been doing it on the wrong days. Yes, there are apparently two best days of the week to post on Facebook if ‘Likes’ is what drives your social media behaviour.

Without further ado, let’s tell you what those days are – it’s the weekends, which means that, like for like (pun intended), Fridays and Saturdays will generate more ‘likes’ for your posts than your regular weekdays. Fridays, indeed, are the best, followed by Saturday. That’s according to the recently published RBBi report titled ‘Facebook Audience Insights In Mena – Fan Acquisition.’

RBBi maintains that its analysts studied a host of posts, and “identified the number of likes generated per day, and used the number of posts for each day to ascertain that the natural days users tend to like a page are Friday and Saturday.”

Why do we ‘like’ more on the weekends, you ask? We posed the same question to RBBi, who said that they’ve done a quantitative analysis on the data, and not yet qualitative to answer that question. We’ll assume that we’re all more relaxed over the weekend, and tend to be liberal with our ‘likes’ on those days.

Supporting this theory of ours is RBBi’s insights on the worst day to post – it’s Wednesday, perhaps when workloads are at their peak and people like me and you are trying hard to ensure that the week’s workload doesn’t slip over into the weekend.

This reasoning, though is solely ours, while the facts that Fridays and Saturdays are best – and Wednesdays worst – to generate Facebook likes in the UAE are a result of RBBi’s analysis. Here’s an idea – let’s challenge those findings by liking this page (from the menu bar on the left-had side) today, a Thursday, so many times that RBBi is forced to re-analyse the weekend data!

Moving on, we also asked Harvey Bennett, Strategy Director, Digital Media Specialist, RBBi if we, as Facebook users, should expect brands (at some point in the future) to start paying us (in cash or kind) for Facebook likes?

“I think it’s extremely unlikely that brands will offer cash for likes, ever,” says Bennett, mercilessly razing our pension plan to ground. “There are various loyalty programs that plug into Facebook, but the idea of brands straight up offering money for a like is unlikely to manifest. Not least because the RoI of a like is so intangible.”

Another insight from the research report – which RBBi says is aimed at brands and advertisers who use Facebook as a critical part of their online marketing strategy – is that the ‘likes’ drop during the Christmas/year-end season. This, however, is contrary to our theory that the more relaxed we are (like during weekends), the more liberal we are with the ‘Likes’. By that logic, brands should expect a whole lot of ‘Likes’ during the last weeks of the year, but it isn’t so.

The study notes that there is a steady increase in the number of likes leading towards Christmas, followed by a huge drop in the week between Christmas day and New Year’s Day. “Likes drop in the year-end period because brands [tend to] invest less in their advertising on Facebook in this period,” says Bennett.

In fact, RBBi maintains that this should actually encourage brands to advertise more on Facebook during the last week and the first weeks of the year “because less competition in the auction will reduce the CPC price”. [For the uninitiated, CPC is marketing gobbledegook for cost per click].

Another valuable insight from the report is the fact that desktop still rules the roost when it comes to Facebook likes, although mobile is threatening to eat desktop’s lunch. On an average, about 70 per cent of ‘likes’ are generated by people accessing Facebook a desktop browser, but the split is fast moving in the favour of mobile.

“The transition from desktop to mobile is ongoing. The split is pretty equal and considering the age of the Facebook mobile app v desktop site, I would suggest we already see mobile giving desktop a run for its money,” says Bennett.

And guess what? Women rule Facebook ‘likes’ as they are responsible for more than 60 per cent of ‘likes’ analysed by RBBi. “We reviewed the demographic data of our 40 brands and found that nearly 61 per cent of the audience doing the liking was female,” the report maintains.

“This means one of two things. Either women in Mena are more inspired by brands than men, or content being posted by brands is resonating louder with their female audience,” it suggests. “The key takeaway here is that it is important to understand the audience with which you are communicating, and the audience most likely to amplify your message by liking you. Understanding that the males and females behave differently on Facebook is as important as communicating across generations,” it highlights.

There are enough insights in the report to write a book, but here in a nutshell are the key conclusions:

1. Paid advertising is by far the most successful method to acquire fans

2. Mobile is a growing part of the fan acquisition arsenal

3. There is an opportunity in the region to capitalize on mobile as a source of cheap likes

4. More likes come from paid advertising than organic

5. Post on the weekend if your objective is to acquire viral likes triggered by your existing fans

6. Facebook is generating more and more likes. However, there seems to be a break in liking immediately after Christmas. This could be an opportunity for brands to take advantage of lower CPCs

7. Travel & Leisure is generating the most paid likes across the region

8. Pages with more than 99,999 likes will benefit more from Facebook’s organic like units (Page Recommendations)

9. Egypt is the source of most page likes in the region

10. Women are more likely to like brand pages more than men

11. 18 - 24 year olds are most likely to like a brand, but this varies by industry

12. Average page size varies by industry

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