The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains a detailed walk-through of how to measure the lifespan of your posts through Insights, and how to optimize for gaining new fans or link clicks. 

Facebook’s new Page Insights and some third-party tools can help you determine the lifespan of your Facebook Page updates. When your updates stop receiving Likes and comments, it may be time to post a new update to make sure you’re consistently engaging your fans. Here we’ll walk-through how to find your optimal Facebook Page publishing frequency.

PageLever ran a limited study of 20 posts from five Facebook Pages with over 1 million fans. It found that that average lifespan of a Page post in the news feed was 22 hours and 51 minutes. The median lifespan was 19 hours and 30 minutes. These figures were based on when posts ceased to receive Likes and comments. Posts continued to receive impressions for a slightly longer period of time, but the bulk of feedback occurs within the first 20 hours of a post’s lifespan.

Third-party tools such as PageLever and EdgeRank Checker can track the activity on a post by the hour so you can easily get an accurate, personalized assessment of the life-span of your Page posts.

If you don’t want to use or pay for a third-party tool, assessing the lifespan of your posts is more difficult as Facebook does not report Likes, comments, or clicks by hour, just by the day and per post. However, there is a manual way to gather this data.

To do so, visit your Page and click the Insights tab in the left-sidebar navigation menu. At the bottom of the main Insights tab in the Page Posts section…

Instructions for tracking the lifespan of your posts through Insights and optimizing for news fans or link clicks can be found in the full version of this article. This is available in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.