OctosparkOctoSpark
7 free tools

Best time to post on social media

Week-by-hour engagement heatmaps for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, X and Threads, read in your own timezone rather than an American one.

Which heatmap you want

Seven platforms, one grid each, and what really separates them is how much the hour is allowed to matter. The peaks below come from each platform’s own curve and are quoted in the timezone the studies publish in; every page converts them to yours.

  • Best time to post on Instagram: the published benchmark is strongest Tuesday around 11am US Central, and read it with your format in mind, because of Stories, feed posts and Reels only the first is genuinely bound by the clock.
  • Best time to post on TikTok: the published benchmark is strongest Tuesday around 8pm US Central, and use it to rule out dead hours rather than to hunt for a golden one, since the recommendation feed does the distributing.
  • Best time to post on Facebook: the published benchmark is strongest Tuesday around 11am US Central, and read it alongside the split between a Page and a Group, which changes the answer more than the hour does.
  • Best time to post on LinkedIn: the published benchmark is strongest Tuesday around 10am US Central, and this is the one platform here where the weekday matters more than the hour, and where the weekend genuinely collapses.
  • Best time to post on YouTube: the published benchmark is strongest Friday around 6pm US Central, and read the warm band as when people are watching, not as when you should be pressing publish.
  • Best time to post on X (Twitter): the published benchmark is strongest Tuesday around 10am US Central, and this feed has the shortest useful life of any covered here, so the slot has more to answer for than it does anywhere else.
  • Best time to post on Threads: the published benchmark is strongest Tuesday around 8pm US Central, and this is the newest platform covered and the thinnest evidence base behind it, so hold the cells loosely.

A heatmap is a hypothesis, not an answer

Every grid on these pages is built from published peak windows and weekday weights, interpolated across all 168 hours of a week and scaled so the busiest cell reads 100. That makes it a reasonable place to start when you have no history of your own, and a poor thing to argue with once you do. Your own audience data beats all of it, and it is usually one tab away.

  • Instagram professional accounts, TikTok business and creator accounts, Facebook Pages through Meta Business Suite and YouTube Studio all report when your own audience is around. Any of those supersedes this page the day you have a few weeks in it.
  • Those reports mostly record when people open the app rather than when they engage with anything, so they are a better hypothesis than a benchmark, not a verdict.
  • The numbers here rank cells against each other and measure nothing. A 70 means roughly seven tenths as busy as the strongest cell of that week, not seven tenths of anything you can count.
  • Timezone is the step most articles leave you to do in your head. The benchmark is published in US Central and every page shifts it to whichever zone you pick, which is the only reason the hours are readable at all.
  • Studies pool accounts with nothing in common. A B2B account, a teen-facing account and a local business genuinely do not share a peak, and an average across the three describes none of them.

How timing tests go wrong

Posting time is easy to change and hard to evaluate, which is a bad combination. Almost every mistake below is a way of concluding something from a test that could not have shown it.

  • Reading the digits instead of the bands. In an interpolated grid the gap between a 78 and an 81 is drawing, not evidence, while the gap between 78 and 30 is real.
  • Judging a slot on three posts. Volume is what makes a difference visible, so give each candidate several weeks and compare typical posts rather than best ones.
  • Changing the format and the slot together. A month of video against a month of images measures the format and tells you nothing about the hour.
  • Scheduling in your own timezone when your audience lives in another. The grid converts hours for you precisely so this decision is conscious.
  • Chasing the busiest cell. On any surface that still shows posts in order, the warmest hour is also the most crowded one, and a slightly quieter slot can beat it.
  • Treating a heatmap from an article as measurement. Most of them, including these, are curves drawn through a handful of published points.

When the posting slot is not your problem

Timing is a tiebreaker between two otherwise similar posts. It is not a substitute for making something people want to watch, and past a certain point tuning it is a way of avoiding the harder work. If you have posted consistently for a couple of months, you already hold better evidence than this page can offer and should be reading that instead.

  • Below roughly ten posts per candidate slot there is nothing to measure. Pick a time you can sustain, keep it steady so your weeks stay comparable, and spend the attention on the posts.
  • Where a platform pushes work to people who do not follow you, the publishing hour barely survives the first day. The opening seconds of the video decide far more than the slot ever will.
  • If your audience spans continents, no single slot serves it. Choose the region that actually matters to you rather than averaging into an hour that suits nobody.
  • If something is timely, publish it. Holding news back for a warmer cell costs more than the cell was ever worth.
  • If you can only be present for replies at one time of day, post then. Being around for the half hour afterwards does more on a conversational platform than the hour you chose.
The rest of the job

You just fixed one post. Now do the month.

The best time to post on social media solves one piece of one post. OctoSpark plans, writes and schedules the whole calendar across every network you use, publishes it for you, and reports what actually performed.

  • One calendar for every network
  • Schedule once, publish everywhere
  • Drafts written in your own voice
  • See what actually performed
Open the full sign-up page

No card needed. These tools stay free either way.

Frequently asked questions

How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.

  • Is there a single best time to post on social media?

    No, and any article that gives you one hour for all platforms has averaged away the only thing that mattered. The useful version of the question is narrower: for this platform, for an audience in this timezone, on this kind of post. Even then the honest answer is a band of a few hours rather than a minute, and the band is a starting point for testing rather than a schedule.

  • How do I find the best posting time for my own audience?

    Shortlist two or three candidate slots from the warm band on the relevant page, then alternate between them for several weeks with the format held constant, and compare the median post in each slot rather than the best one. If your platform reports follower activity, start from that chart instead. Expect the whole exercise to take a month or two, because anything faster is measuring luck.

  • Where does the data behind these heatmaps come from?

    Aggregated engagement studies published across 2025 and 2026, which report peak windows and strong or weak weekdays rather than a measured value for each of the 168 hours in a week. Each page states the shape it was given, and the grid is drawn through those points. Inventing 168 numbers per platform would dress up a handful of findings as precision nobody has.

  • Does the answer change with the timezone?

    The clock that matters is your audience’s, not yours. The benchmarks are published in US Central and each page converts every cell into whichever zone you select, so if you live in London and your readers are in New York, set the control to New York and schedule against that. Where an audience is genuinely split across continents, treat it as two schedules or accept a compromise deliberately.

  • Is my data private?

    Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.

  • Is this really free?

    Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.

  • Do I need an account?

    No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.

  • Can I use the output commercially?

    Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.