October 9, 2024
Last update
10.9.2024
10 MIN.
Timing is crucial for boosting engagement on TikTok! Discover the best times to post each day to reach your audience when they're most active and maximize your content's impact.
Marvellous
When is the best time to post on TikTok? Ah, the age-old question! It’s a dilemma that can make or break your content strategy!
With TikTok’s unique algorithm and rapidly shifting trends, pinpointing the ideal posting times is crucial for maximizing your reach and engagement. After all, in a sea of endless scrolling, you want your content to stand out and capture attention at just the right moment.
You’ll find a plethora of advice online, with some sources suggesting specific days and times for posting. You can find anything and everything, and it’s enough to make your head spin!
In this article, we’ll sift through the noise and summarize insights from industry experts to help you discover the best times to post on TikTok. You’ll also learn how to leverage TikTok analytics to identify the optimal posting times tailored to your specific audience!
Together, we’ll enhance your TikTok strategy and ensure your content shines in the spotlight it deserves by getting more views on TikTok!
Timing is everything on TikTok! Posting when your audience is the most active boost your chances of getting quick likes and comments, which is key for algorithm success.
The more engagement your video gets right after you post, the more likely it is to land on the For You page and reach new viewers.
By knowing when your followers are online, you can maximize TikTok engagement and visibility, ensuring your content hits the mark. So, nail those following peak times and watch your TikTok presence soar!
When you dive into studies from sources like Sprout Social, Buffer, Hopper, Shopify, and Influencer Marketing Hub, it can feel overwhelming. They often present varying recommendations for the best times to post on TikTok.
And for good reason: these studies analyze thousands of data points! There’s no one-size-fits-all answer; your ideal posting time is unique. Each brand has its own audience, located in different time zones and exhibiting distinct behaviors and browsing habits.
But let’s take a look at the general data before we get into the specifics! This can be particularly useful if you haven't yet posted any content on the platform.
💡Weekdays generally have higher engagement than weekends.
The best time to post on TikTok on Monday is 6 am, 10 am, and 9 to 10 pm.
The best time to post on TikTok on Tuesday is 2 to 4 am (yes!), 9 am, and 4 pm.
The best time to post on TikTok on Wednesday is 7 to 9 am, 4 pm, and 11 pm.
The best time to post on TikTok on Thursday is 9 am, 12 pm, and 7 pm.
The best time to post on TikTok on Friday is 5 to 6 a.m, and 1 to 4 pm.
The best time to post on TikTok on Saturday is 9 to 11 am, and 7 to 8 pm.
The best time to post on TikTok on Sunday is 7 to 8 am, and 2 to 4 pm.
While studies are helpful, the reality is that your target audience will determine the best time for you to post. Every creator and brand 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 studies comes into play! They will help you get started. But 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!
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:
Next, select your category.
After you are done with the setup, your TikTok account will automatically reload to a Pro Account.
For mobile
For desktop
On the Analytics dashboard, you will find four main categories:
On Iconosquare, you can monitor over 30 TikTok KPIs on a single dashboard. In addition to an overview, you can access precise statistics on engagement, your community and the performance of your content (videos, photos and carousels).
The best time to post on TikTok will depend primarily on your audience location. Here is how you will go about it:
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.
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.
In the “Community” section of Iconosquare's “Analytics” tab, you can easily find the geographical distribution of your TikTok followers, country by country. The darker the country, the more followers you have in that country.
You will gain better insights on the best time to post on TikTok by identifying when your TikTok followers are most active. You will need to find out when your audience engages most with your content!
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 the least active.
In the example above, the followers are most active at around 5 pm. And if the majority of your followers are watching your videos from the US, you will have to consider the different time zones.
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.
On Iconosquare, you can easily see when your TikTok followers are the most present thanks to a simple visual representation!
You can see when your followers are most active (indicated by the highest engagement levels) and when they’re less likely to be online (showing minimal activity). You can find this data in the Community section, in the Analytics tab.
To maximize your reach, simply identify the times when the majority of your followers are active and schedule your posts for those specific hours. This strategy will help ensure your content gets the visibility it deserves!
Another way you can find out the best time to post on TikTok is by monitoring the performance of your content.
To do this:
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 metrics will help you identify where the viewers of the video are located.
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.
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.
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.
The previous step can take a long time, can't it? What if we told you that you could find out the best times to post on TikTok in just a few seconds on Iconosquare?
In the Engagement section of the Analytics tab, you can find out when to post to boost the performance of your content, if you have posted enough content! You can filter on views, likes and engagements.
Our TikTok Scheduler will also show you when you should schedule and post your next content, whereas it is a TikTok video, TikTok Photos, or TikTok Carousels.
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 and the best time to post on Instagram 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.
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 higher your engagement rate is, 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.
Hi! I'm Marvellous, huge fan of Iconosquare as a product, and determined to help experienced social media marketers thrive in the various aspects of their career.
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