Until someone comes up with some brilliant hack for notifying Facebook marketers when their updates have faded into oblivion on fans' newsfeeds, page managers are stuck with paid services, labored data gathering or just plain ole' relying on statistics.
For the latter of the three, we bring you the results from a third party analysis by PageLever. According to a survey of twenty posts from five branded Facebook pages pages with 2 million fans or more, people stopped liking and commenting on branded Facebook posts 22 hours and 51 minutes after publication.
Post impressions lasted another seven hours before completely disappearing from fans' newsfeeds, but the answer to post schedules isn't as simple as a daily post. There were significant deviations within the context of just twenty posts. In one case a post stopped getting impressions just 10 hours and 42 minutes after publication. Another post though, stretched out to 50 hours of commenting and 59 hours of impressions before EdgeRank knocked the update off of newsfeeds.
When compared to the 2.8 hour lifespan of a tweet, this makes posting worthwhile, but such varying results lead us to believe every page requires consistent and individualized measurement.
Do you know the lifespan of your Facebook posts? How long are they getting Likes before dropping off into the ether? If you don't know now, it's time to start keeping track. These kinds of findings are going to make the difference between average and highly engaged brands on the Internet.