My reach tanked 60% after I switched my posting time, and I'm still not sure why
So last month I moved my posting window from 7pm to 11am because some guy on YouTube swore mornings were the new gold rush. Big mistake. My average reach dropped from about 4,200 people per post to roughly 1,700 over the next three weeks, and I couldn't figure out what went wrong. I checked my hashtags, my captions, my cover images, all of it looked the same as before. Then a friend who runs a page in Portland asked me a simple question: when do MY followers actually scroll? I pulled up my insights and turns out 70% of them are on between 6pm and 10pm, which I should have checked first. I moved everything back to 7pm last Tuesday and my last two posts are already back over 3,500 reach. The dumb part is I never tested it on a small scale first, I just flipped the whole schedule at once like a rookie. So now I'm curious, do you all trust the general best time to post advice or do you go off your own audience data only?