Social Media 101: Best Time To Post On TikTok

If you’re using social media as a marketing tool for your company, chances are high that you have a TikTok account for your business. While the video app is blowing up right now, there are a lot of questions that come with using a new platform, like when is the best time to post on TikTok? If you’ve been asking yourself this question lately, never fear. We’re going to be diving into this today so you can confidently post those videos you know your audience is going to love.

Before we get into the details, we need to be clear on one thing. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to any aspect of social media, and that includes the best time to post on TikTok. As always, you’ll need to do some experimentation and see what really works for your audience before you stick with any particular time. Now, let’s get into the good stuff.

Best Time To Post On TikTok By Day Of The Week

It probably won’t surprise you too much to learn that the best time to post on TikTok will vary depending on the day of the week. It might surprise you to learn that Saturday isn’t a great day to be posting content. Many people are off work or out of school and they have lists of things they want to do and explore. As such, they tend to be disconnected from their phones a little more. Generally, it might be a good idea to avoid posting on Saturdays. If you really want to, though, here are the best times to post on Saturday and every other day of the week:

Monday: 6am, 10am, 10pm

Tuesday: 2am, 4am, 9am

Wednesday: 7am, 8am, 11pm

Thursday: 9am, 12pm, 7pm

Friday: 5am, 1pm, 3pm

Saturday: 11am, 7pm, 8pm

Sunday: 7am, 8am, 4pm

As you can see, the times really vary throughout the week. Some people like to check before work, others might check on their coffee break, while others are ready to watch some videos as they wind down for the night. While these are the overall best hours to post on the platform, like we mentioned earlier, you want to tailor your post timing to your audience. 

How To Discover The Best Time To Post For Your Audience

Because planning your posting schedule for your audience is so important, we’re going to walk you through what information you need and how to find it. This way you’ll always be able to check, verify, and make changes as needed if your audience changes down the road.

Know Where Your Audience Is Located

First of all, the most important thing is to know where your audience is. If they’re all from Europe, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to post a new video at 5pm Pacific Time – that would be 2am in much of Europe, and they’re likely not awake and checking TikTok at that time.

So, how do you find out where your audience is located? You’ll want to go into your TikTok app and go to analytics. (It’s located under “Business Suite.”)

From there, assuming you’ve posted at least one video, you can see information on your viewers, followers, and statistics on the videos you’ve posted.

Click on the “Followers” tab and you can see information like where they’re from, times they’re most active, and your change in follower growth. That second piece – times they’re most active – is also incredibly helpful for timing your TikToks correctly. It’s one thing to plan your video posting based on time zones, but planning it around when your audience is actually active is even more important. With these two pieces of information, you can post at the best time for that particular day of the week for the majority of your audience. Moreover, you can increase your website traffic; just improve your website by speeding up WordPress for fast loading time and smooth transition of your page visitors from TikTok to your website.

Look At The Analytics On Your Best Performing TikTok

It’s important to note that if you’ve had a video or two go viral, those aren’t necessarily great examples here. There’s not really a strong reason as to why posts go viral, and you could post a similar video at the same time of day and have it not blow up as much. That’s okay! Enjoy the viral videos you do have and keep creating for your audience who’s seeing everything.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s take a look at what you can learn from your best-performing TikTok. Look closely at those analytics and see what you can learn. This is especially helpful if you decided to do something a little out of the ordinary with this particular video. Maybe you didn’t quite have it finished by the time you wanted to post, so it went live a little later. Or maybe you had a hectic day coming up and you didn’t want to forget, so you posted earlier than usual. 

It’s important to know that granular analytics are only available in TikTok for the last 7 days, but you can see valuable information like where people found your video. This can help you understand if it got pushed onto many people’s For You pages, or if your audience was sending it to their friends to watch. 

Learn From Your Competitors

This is actually a really helpful tip. You don’t have to just rely on your information to try out new times to post on TikTok. You should, however, always rely on your data to understand what’s working and what isn’t. However, if you’re just looking to try some new things and new posting times, consider learning from your competitors.

Just because you see a competitor posting at 2:12pm every single day doesn’t mean that’s working for them, so you can’t be sure it’ll be a great idea for you. However, when you’re in the testing phase, it doesn’t hurt at all to try posting at a time your competitor is. It just might work for you! It will be great if you use time tracking software to help you stay productive and ready to post on TikTok when your audience prefers.

Before you just decide to post based off of one video you see, scroll through their profile and see what their pattern is. Look at their most popular videos and see what day of the week they were posted. That alone can give you great insight for times to post on TikTok.

Why Is The Time You Post Important For TikTok?

Just like Instagram or any other social media platform, the algorithm is crucial to the success (or failure) of any video you post. When you post a video, TikTok initially shows it to a small group of users – some of them are followers, some aren’t. Then, depending on how well your video performs with them, the algorithm will decide if it’s going to push it to more people’s pages. If the initial small group enjoys the video, watches it all the way through, and engages with it by liking, commenting, or sharing, the algorithm can see that this video is popular and valuable. 

Now, part of this certainly depends on how good the video actually is. If people don’t like your video, they don’t like it, and it won’t be pushed onto others. However, if you create an amazing video that people would like, but you post it when a large percentage of your audience is asleep, you’re not going to generate those initial views and engagement that are so critical.

This can also work in reverse – if you’re just getting started on TikTok and you want to get some practice posting videos without having too many people see them, you can try posting in the “off” times. It’s a good way to get some practice, but it’s not something you want to do too often. The TikTok algorithm learns from each of your videos, so if you spend too much time posting when your audience isn’t around, the algorithm might think your videos just aren’t valuable.

At the end of the day, the best time to post on TikTok is the time that you’ll be consistent with it. Consistency is key with TikTok and any social media platform. If your research shows you that 3am your time is the best time to post for your audience, but you know there’s no way you’re going to post at 3am, that’s okay. Commit to posting as early as you can in the morning and see how that works for your audience. Don’t let an alarming “best time to post on TikTok” scare you off from posting at all.

It’s Time To Start Posting

You have all the secrets now, so it’s up to you to determine the best times to post on TikTok for your audience. Be methodical and test various times to see what really works. Keep track of your TikTok analytics and compare data from one week to the next. Take detailed notes so you can understand what your audience does and doesn’t like. 

Remember: it’s a good idea to only change one thing at a time, so keep the type of content, captions, and hashtags the same throughout. Obviously, you should create and post new, different videos, but they should all be somewhat similar in terms of what you’re posting. (An educational post specifically about what your company does will likely perform differently from a trending dance video no matter when you post each of these videos!) 

Overall, have fun and enjoy these experiments. Before you know it you’ll know exactly what the best time to post on TikTok is for your audience!