Best times to post on each network (and how to find yours)

Why "the best time to post" depends on you

Every year someone publishes a chart of the best times to post on each network. They are averages over millions of accounts in every time zone and industry. Your audience is not average: a bakery, a B2B software company and a gaming community are online at very different moments.

So treat the general advice below as a starting schedule, then let your own numbers take over.

Starting points per network

All times are in your audience's local time. If most of your followers live in another time zone, plan in theirs.

• Instagram: weekday mornings (8:00–10:00) and early evenings (18:00–20:00). Reels and Stories are less sensitive to timing than feed posts.
• Facebook Pages: mid-morning to early afternoon on weekdays (9:00–13:00).
• LinkedIn: working hours, Tuesday to Thursday, especially 8:00–10:00 and around lunch. Weekends are quiet.
• X: mornings and lunchtime on weekdays. Conversation moves fast, so posting more often matters more than one perfect slot.
• Threads and Bluesky: similar to X; mornings and evenings work well for conversational posts.
• Mastodon: depends on your instance; a community instance follows its members' time zone.
• YouTube: publish a few hours before your viewers' evening peak, so the video is processed and starts collecting views when they arrive.
• Telegram and Discord: your community's habits rule. Look at when members are active and avoid posting at night, when notifications annoy more than they help.

Turn the guesses into a queue

Instead of choosing a time for every post, set a few weekly queue slots per channel, for example Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:00 for Instagram and Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 for LinkedIn. Each post you add to the queue takes the next free slot of its channels, in your workspace's time zone, and daylight saving time is handled for you.

Tip: spread your first month's slots over different hours on purpose. If you always post at 9:00, you will never learn whether 18:00 is better.

Find your own best times with the heatmap

After a few weeks of publishing, open Analytics and look at the best times heatmap. It works like this:

• Every published post adds its engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves and quotes, as reported by the network) to the cell of the weekday and hour it was published, in your workspace's time zone.
• Each cell shows the average engagement per post, not the total. Posting ten times at 9:00 doesn't make 9:00 look better by itself.
• The heatmap uses at least the last 90 days of published posts, and you can filter it by channel, because Instagram and LinkedIn audiences rarely peak at the same time.
• The top cells are highlighted as your best times. A cell needs at least two posts before it can be ranked, so one lucky post doesn't mislead you.

Networks whose APIs don't provide post statistics (LinkedIn personal profiles, Telegram and Discord) can't contribute to the heatmap. For those, use short links: their daily click counts show when your audience acts on what you post.

Adjust, then repeat

1. Move one or two queue slots towards the darkest cells of the heatmap.
2. Keep one "experimental" slot at a time you haven't tried yet.
3. Check again after a month.

Timing won't save a weak post, but the same good post published when your audience is around simply gets seen by more people. A few minutes with the heatmap each month is enough to keep your schedule tuned.