Whenever your audience is most likely to see and engage with your great content. A well-timed post can lead to more likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs.

In this guide, we’ll tell you the best times to post—according to Hootsuite data. Our findings are based on years of testing on our own channels, as well as an analysis of over 400 million posts from Hootsuite users. We’ll also teach you how to use the data to inform your own publishing schedule.

The best time to post on Instagram

When people scroll through Instagram, they almost always do so on a mobile device. Does this mean off-work hours work best? After posting over 1,000 photos and videos throughout the day and night, the Hootsuite social marketing team found that…

The best time to post on Instagram is from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Monday to Friday.

“There’s no doubt our community scrolls through Instagram during their lunch hour,” Hootsuite social media team lead Amanda Wood explains. “We find that time also works best on the weekends, but since we are a B2B [business-to-business] brand, our Instagram strategy is weekday-focused.”

Instagram moved away from the reverse-chronological feed, but timing is still important. Instagram explains on their blog that posts are ordered “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” (Emphasis ours.)

To find the best posting schedule on Instagram, our own social team considered our audience and what their typical day looks like. Do they check Instagram as soon as they get up? On their way to work? At work?

We used those considerations to begin testing blocks of time and tracking when we received the most engagement.

Your results will likely be different—especially if your relationship with the audience is more business-to-consumer (B2C). In that case, you should test off-work hours like 7 p.m. during the week and various times throughout the weekend.

Finding the best time to post on Instagram—or any social network for that matter—is about knowing your audience, testing different times, and measuring results.
 

More on that later. 

The best time to post on Facebook

Pew Research found that 71 percent of Facebook users visit the site every day—more than any other social network. People login from both their desktop and mobile devices (at work, home, and elsewhere), but mobile use is increasing. In fact, at least a quarter of Facebook users in 14 markets around the world are mobile-only users.

The best time to post on Facebook is between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
And on the weekends from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Despite the complex News Feed algorithm, our social team discovered those publishing times often see a higher number of likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs.

“For us, Tuesdays are a bit behind other weekdays in terms of Facebook engagement,” Wood explains. “But 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. is still the most effective window on that day.”

We see lower engagement on the weekends, but there is often a spike in click-throughs for posts published between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

There are a number of other studies out there that report Thursdays and Fridays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. work well. And we see similar results for many industries in our analysis of Hootsuite userdata.

As always, you should test and track results for yourself. Use engagement data from Facebook Page Insights or other measurement tools such as Hootsuite Analytics to determine what works best for you.

Best time to post on Twitter
A lot of people use Twitter like a sort of digital newspaper, scrolling through content on their downtime or when they sneak in a break at work. With that in mind, we analyzed nearly 60,000 tweets from the @Hootsuite twitter handle and found that…

The best time to post on Twitter is at 3 p.m. Monday to Friday.
“For us as a B2B organization, the best times to tweet are between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays, with the highest amount of clicks and retweets occurring at 3 p.m.,” explains Wood.

But again, this will differ depending on your audience, location, and content strategy.

If you’re a business-to-consumer (B2C) brand, you may find that tweeting when your followers aren’t working—before 9 a.m., at noon, and after 5 p.m. during the week—is best.

Looking at an aggregate of Hootsuite userdata shows us the most popular days to post on Twitter are Monday to Friday, and the most popular times to post fall between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.

But those insights aren’t industry-specific. If we focus on consumer staples, for example, we see that 58 percent of all tweets are sent during working hours.

Use the data as a starting point, test different posting schedules, and compare results.

The best time to post on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional network, so posting during working hours makes sense. That said, 57 percentof all LinkedIn traffic comes via mobile. Like Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn’s algorithm is designed to show you the most relevant content. Here’s what the Hootsuite social team has learned about LinkedIn publishing.

The best times to post on Linkedin are 7:45 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m., and 5:45 p.m. Monday to Thursday.
“The Hootsuite social team posts on the 45-minute mark because most brands are posting on the hour,” Wood says.

And that brings up an interesting point. When you hear about the best or most popular time to post, we recommend you test and measure the results against a wildly different schedule.

Think your audience only engages with your content on the weekends when they are at home relaxing? Try workday hours. The results may surprise you.

And yes, maybe a larger share of your audience is online over the weekend, but are all your competitors flooding those times with content? You might benefit from posting off peak hours when competition is low.