Best Times to Post on Social Media
Greetings, readers!
If you are anything like me, you prefer to do things in the most ideal way. Put in the right amount of effort toward the right things at the best time. In the realm of social media, this is called optimal engagement. What time to post or engage with your audience with what app matters. And thanks to information and surveys compiled by sociopilot.co, I have created a comprehensive list of the optimal times to post for the six most popular apps on social media: FaceBook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
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We start off this list with the most used social platform of them all. With 2.95 billion active users (and only 7.88 billion people on earth), pegging down a specific time is tricky. Simply put, there are different audiences for different users. Although there may not be an ultimate best time, it’s optimal to post during “your best time” and be consistent with that.
Nonetheless, here are some ideal post-times by day:
Monday – 6 am to 4 pm
Tuesday – 7 am to 4 pm
Wednesday – 7 am to 4 pm
Thursday – 6 am to 4 pm
Friday – 7 am to 4 pm
Saturday – 8 am to 3 pm
Sunday – 11 am to 4 pm
Launched in 2002, LinkedIn is considered the best online space for B2B and B2C marketers to promote their content. With 300 million active users, a 2023 survey reports that 91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content.
Here are the general timings to post on LinkedIn:
Monday – 11 am
Tuesday – 6 am to 8 am
Wednesday – 12 pm
Thursday – 2 pm
Friday – 8 am
Saturday – 4 am to 5 am
Sunday – 6 pm
X (formerly Twitter)
Sociopilot.co reports that there are somewhere around 500 million tweets per day (that’s 9281 tweets per second!). With so many posts competing for your attention, when you post narrows engagement to your specific audience. It’s best to post during office commute times – when people travel to work in the early morning or when they are going home. X is also optimal during work breaks and lunch and weekends are X’s least favourite days.
But in the spirit of this article, here are the best times to post on X:
Monday – 8 am to 4 pm
Tuesday – 9 am to 4 pm
Wednesday – 8 am to 3 pm
Thursday – 9 am to 12 pm
Saturday – 9 am to 10 am
Sunday – 9 am to 12 pm
For IG (and for most of these apps), you will get the most engagement when your followers are online. Similar to X and LinkedIn, the best times to post are the commutes before and after work and during lunch and weekends are the times when Instagram rests.
Monday – 9 am to 10 am
Tuesday – 9 am to 10 am
Wednesday – 5 am, 11 am, 3 pm
Thursday – 12 pm and 5 pm
Friday – 9 am to 10 am & 5 pm to 6 pm
Saturday – 8 am to 12 pm
Sunday – 10 am to 2 pm
If you want to get a breakdown by industry, sociopilot.co’s article on the best time to post on Instagram shows optimal post times for travel & tourism, fashion & apparel, fitness & wellness and food & beverage.
TikTok
The baby of these social media siblings but with 1 billion active users worldwide. TikTok is a little different than the others where breaking the success code takes more than just posting at certain times. Creativity matters.
Monday – 6 am, 10 am, 10 pm
Tuesday – 2 am, 4 am, 9 am
Wednesday – 7 am, 8 am, 11 pm
Thursday – 9 am, 12 pm, 7 pm
Friday – 5 am, 1 pm, 3 pm
Saturday – 11 am, 7 pm, 8 pm
Sunday – 7 am, 8 am, 4 pm
By Industry:
- Restaurants: Monday to Thursday, 2 pm to 5 pm.
- Photographers: 2 pm to 3 pm.
- Non-profit organizations: 10 am to 2 pm
- Schools: Tuesday to Thursday, from 11 am to 3 pm
- Lawyers: 3 pm to 9 pm from Tuesdays to Thursdays
- Real Estate Agents: Tuesday to Thursday at 10 am
- Musicians: Saturday at 9 am and Sunday at 1 pm
- Dentists: Thursday to Saturday, 9 am to 10 am or 4 pm to 5 pm.
- Doctors: Monday to Friday 12 pm to 1 pm.
- Artists: During lunch hours 1 pm to 2:30 pm and in the evenings between 7 pm to 9 pm.
- Churches: 12 pm to 3 pm on weekdays and 9 am to 11 am on Sunday.
- Fashion: Saturday and Sunday 10 pm to 7 am.
- Insurance Agents: Monday to Friday between 9 am to 12 noon
- Gamers: 10 am to 12 pm.
YouTube
Finally, we get to YouTube, with 2 billion monthly active users. With a vast sea of content, timing plays a crucial role in maximizing visibility to effectively reach your intended audience. But unlike other social media networks, the best time to post on YouTube has different math behind it. Similar to Google, it takes time to index your video and approximately 2-3 hours to publish.
Ideal post times are a little more straight forward:
Monday-Friday – 2 pm to 4pm
Saturday-Sunday – 9 am to 11 am
Closing Remarks
Even with all of these ideal post times, there are different times for different apps for different audiences. Typically, it is best to post during office commute hours and during lunch and the worst time to post are on weekends.
Each app will have its own analytics and within those analytics are your own, where you can see when your particular audience are online and most engaged.
But even when you have your audience’s ideal post times, it takes more than just when to post: content and quality matters.
Thanks for reading and catch you on the next one!
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