Best Time to Post on TikTok

What is the best time to post on TikTok?

Every creator, influencer, and brand on TikTok has followers located in different time zones. It is important that you find the best time to post on the platform based on your audience.

There is no one size fits all.

As trends and user behavior change on TikTok, your audience will determine the best time to post. You must create a posting schedule to fit your unique audience.

Optimizing your posting times will help improve the performance of your content. You will also get more engagement on your posts and reach more followers.

In this article, you will learn how to use TikTok analytics to find out the best time to post on TikTok.

Let’s start.

Best time to post on TikTok: what the stats say

Influencer Marketing Hub conducted a study to identify the best global times to post on TikTok. In the study, they analyzed 100,000 TikTok posts to discover the best time to post for each day of the week.

Here is the result of their study in Eastern Standard Time (EST):

• Mon: 6 am, 10 am, 10 pm
• Tues: 2 am, 4 am, *9 am
• Wed: 7 am, 8 am, 11 am
• Thur: 9 am, *12 pm, 7 pm
• Fri: *5 am, 1 pm, 3 pm
• Sat: 11 am, 7 pm, 8 pm
• Sun: 7 am, 8 am, 4 pm

Note: The asterisked (*) times are when TikTokers are most active on the platform.

From this study, we can deduce that the best times to post on TikTok are 6 am to 7 am, and 7 pm to 11 pm. While the days with the highest engagement are Tuesday by 9 am, Thursday by 12 pm, and Friday by 5 am.

Here is a visual representation of the study for better understanding:

Tip: these times are in Eastern Standard Time (EST). The time you post will vary depending on the time zone your audience is located in. You can use a free tool like The Time Zone Converter to perform time zone conversions.

How to identify the best time to post on TikTok based on your audience

While studies like the one conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub are helpful, the reality is that your target audience will determine the best time for you to post. Every creator on TikTok will have slightly different best TikTok post times.

Why?

The location, interests, gender, and age of your audience play a role in influencing when you should post.

New TikTok accounts will not be able to analyze these metrics. This is where the global post times study comes into play. (The study will help you get started). After a couple of weeks, you will have enough data to create your posting schedule. For more accuracy, you will have to analyze your audience engagement and content performance to decide when you should be posting.

Let’s see how you can do this:

Step 1: create a Pro Account

To get access to TikTok Analytics, you will need to create a Pro Account. It is free to upgrade from TikTok’s normal account to the Pro Account.

Here is how to upgrade to a Pro Account:

First, go to your profile page and click on the three dots in the top right corner. Next, select manage my account and click on Switch to Pro Account.

Next, select your account type. You can either be a Creator or a Business.

Next, choose your gender. After you are done with the setup, your TikTok account will automatically reload to a Pro Account.

Here is how you can view your TikTok Analytics:

For mobile:

Go to your profile. Click on the three dots at the upper right corner and tap on the Settings and Privacy tab. Under the account section, you will find your Analytics.

For desktop:

On your desktop, hover over your TikTok profile. A small pop-up will appear. Click on View Analytics.

On the Analytics dashboard, you will find three main categories:

• Profile overview: this tab will help you keep track of your video views, profile views, and follower count.

• Content insights: this tab offers insights on the performance of your videos. You will be able to keep track of trending content and determine which of your videos see the highest engagement.

• Follower insights: this tab offers insights on your audience demographics and follower activities.

To familiarize yourself better with TikTok analytics, check out this complete guide to TikTok Analytics.

Step 2: find out where your audience is located

The best time to post on TikTok will depend primarily on your audience location. Here is how you will go about it:

Go to the Analytics section and click on the Followers tab. Scroll down to Top Territories. This section of the Followers tab will help you identify where your followers are located.

From the example above, you can see that most of the followers are from the United States.

When you know where your followers are based, you can use the global post times in the study above to check when you should post. All you have to do is convert the global post times to your followers’ time zone

Unfortunately, unlike Instagram, TikTok doesn’t break down the Top Territories into cities. This can pose a significant problem when your main audience is in a country like the US where there are multiple time zones in the country.

For example, if most of your US followers are in New York City and California, they will be in different time zones. New York City uses Eastern Standard Time (EST) and California uses Pacific Time (PT). So when your followers in New York are already active on TikTok by 9 am, your Californian followers might still be in bed (at 6 am).

Tip: Here are all the countries with multiple time zones –  Russia, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kiribati, Micronesia, Chile, Spain, Portugal, and Ecuador.

So what should you do when your followers are located in countries with multiple time zones?

Find out in the next couple of steps.

Step 3: identify when your followers are most active

You will gain better insights on the best time to post on TikTok by identifying when your followers are most active. You will need to find out when your audience engages most with your content.

To do this, go to the Analytics section and click on the Followers tab. Scroll down to see your Follower activity. This section of the Followers tab shows you the hours and days of the week your followers are most active on the platform. The data also shows the times your followers are least active.

Note: TikTok data are shown in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). So you will have to convert the hours in TikTok analytics to your audience’s time zones for accurate results.

In the example above, the followers are most active at around 5 pm UTC. And if the majority of your followers are watching your videos from the US, you will have to consider the different time zones.

For this example, we will use New York’s Eastern Standard Time Zone and California’s Pacific Time Zone. So for New York, you will convert 5 pm UTC to 1 pm EST. For California, 5 pm UTC to 10 am PT.

To find out the days your followers are most active, click on Days.

In this example, you can see that the follower activity is consistent across the various days of the week.

Since TikTok does not break down top territories into cities, how will you identify the cities your followers are engaging from? This is very important when the majority of your followers are from countries with multiple time zones.

Step 4: check out other social media platforms

If your brand has an active presence on other social media platforms (especially Instagram), you can use their in-built analytics to find out when your followers are most active.

For example, Instagram analytics breaks down the country’s location into cities. So if your Instagram content, engagement times, and audience territories are similar to what you have on TikTok, you can use Instagram’s analytics to develop a good idea of the cities your followers are located in.

Tip: this strategy works best when you post similar content on TikTok and Instagram. That way, your audience demographic will be similar.

To learn more, check out our guide on Instagram analytics.

Step 5: track your content performance

Another way you can find out the best time to post on TikTok is by monitoring the performance of your content.

To do this, go to the Analytics section and click on the Content tab. In this section, you will see the performance of all your videos in the past seven days.

Next, scroll down to see your trending videos. Tap to see the posts that had the highest engagement in the past seven days. For each trending video, you will see the number of views, comments, likes, and shares. You will also see important metrics like average watch times, audience territories, and traffic source types.

The audience territories metric will help you identify where the viewers of the video are located.

How can the content insights tab help you identify the best time to post on TikTok?

Here is how to do it:

On every selected trending post, look at the time and date you shared the post. You will find this info at the top of the page under the video thumbnail.

Next, try and make a connection between the time and day you shared the video and the trending videos you have had in the past. If you post most of your trending videos on the same day and around the same time, then that is one of the best times for you to post on TikTok.

The only issue is that since TikTok analytics only show data for the last seven days of content uploads, it can be challenging to accurately monitor the days and times of all your highest performing videos.

To avoid guesswork, you will have to manually track all of your TikTok content performance using a spreadsheet. Over time, you will be able to identify the days and times your followers engage most with your content.

Other metrics you should track in the spreadsheet include video likes, video comments, video shares, total playtime, total video views, traffic source types, total reached audience, and top audience territories.

Here is an example of what the spreadsheet will look like:

From this spreadsheet, you can see that the highest performing videos were posted around 5 pm – 6:30 pm on Fridays. According to the data, the best day to post on TikTok is Friday. And the best time to post will be around 5 pm – 6:30 pm.

Tip: to find the best posting time, sum up the “time posted” of your highest performing videos, and divide it by the total number of videos.

Using the values in my spreadsheet –

(5:55 + 4:00 + 6:00 + 5:30 + 6:20) / 5 = 5:33

So, the best time to post according to these values is 5:33 pm.

Note: make it a habit to add new trending video data to your spreadsheet. Every two weeks, recalculate your average time to make sure it’s still the same. A change in TikTok’s algorithm, user behavior, or your audience’s top territories can affect your post times. So revise the data frequently.

Remember that TikTok displays its data in UTC. So always convert to the time zone where your audience is located.

Using a spreadsheet will also help you identify the kind of content your audience engages with the most. If you want to increase your TikTok following, you need to create content that your audience will love.

Conclusion

By now, you should have a good idea of how to use TikTok analytics to determine the best time to post on TikTok. The last step might be a little stressful, but it’s worth it if you are serious about marketing your brand on TikTok.

TikTok’s algorithm rewards posts with a high level of engagement. The more engagement you get, the better the chances of your videos getting featured on the “For You” page. To achieve TikTok success, you need to post when your audience is likely to engage with your videos. This article will help you begin.

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