Most people scroll social media at night, in bed, before they sleep. That part is true. It is also the reason night is not the best time to post, because everybody else has worked it out too and the feed at 9 in the evening carries about twice as many posts as the feed at midday. The map below scores all seven days and all 24 hours, converted into your own time zone, for whichever country you are trying to reach.
Interactive social media posting time heat map by day and time zone
my local time
0%
| Region | Their local time | People awake there | Worth posting |
|---|
How this is calculated
The score for a slot is the share of that audience scrolling divided by how many posts are already sitting in their feed, so it rewards attention and punishes competition.
Each region is scored on its own local day and its own local hour, so a region can be wide awake and still be a poor place to post at that moment. That is the point of the two columns in the table. "People awake there" is a plain count and carries no judgement, which is why its bar is always the same colour. "Worth posting" is the judgement, and it uses the same five words and colours as the map.
Weekends use a separate curve, because people wake later and far fewer businesses publish. The day weighting puts Wednesday highest and Sunday lowest, and Friday tapers from late afternoon, which is what the published studies found.
User counts are each country's population multiplied by its published social media penetration rate, split across time zones by population. The shape is modelled on those studies rather than one measured data set, so treat the ranking of the slots as reliable and the exact percentages as indicative.
All conversions use real time zone rules for today's date, so daylight saving is already handled. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Use Camera to Clipboard to move phone photos to your computer before you schedule
The tool above usually lands on an hour when you are at work, which means writing the post in advance at a computer, and the picture is almost always stuck on a phone. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, puts a photo you have just taken straight onto your computer's clipboard so you can paste it into the scheduler.
- Camera to Clipboard sends the photo to your computer over your own Wi-Fi, with no cable and no emailing pictures to yourself.
- The photo arrives on the clipboard ready to paste, so it goes straight into the scheduling tool.
- Preparing posts in advance is what makes a Tuesday midday slot possible when you are asleep or at work.
Post any time from 9 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon, which is what the studies support
Three separate studies, run on different data by companies that compete with each other, all put the best time inside the working day and flatly disagree about where inside it. The 9 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon band is my compromise between them, not a measured finding.
- Sprout Social measured nearly 2 billion engagements and found 11 in the morning to 6 in the evening is the best window.
- Buffer looked at 52 million posts and found 9 in the morning, while Hootsuite looked at over a million and found 8 in the morning.
- All three land between 8 in the morning and 6 in the evening, and none of them lands at night.
Do not post at night, even though that is when the most people are scrolling
Those two things sound like a contradiction, so here they are side by side. The section above says when to post. This one says why the busiest hour of the day is not it.
- More people scrolling does not mean more people seeing your post, because a feed shows each person a limited number of posts and picks them from everything published recently.
- Posting at 9 in the evening puts you in the biggest queue of the day, which is why that extra audience never reaches you.
- On Instagram and LinkedIn a post published at midday is still collecting likes and comments at 9 that evening, so the midday post gets the daytime crowd and the night crowd.
- Posting at 9 in the evening gets you the night crowd only, because the next thing that happens is everybody sleeps and then a fresh flood of morning posts buries you.
Check how long your post lives, because that decides how much the hour matters
Half-life is the time a post takes to collect half of all the engagement it will ever get. Scott Graffius measured it across 5.6 million posts published during 2025, and the platforms are not remotely alike.
| Platform⇅ | Half-life of a post⇅ | How much the posting hour matters⇅ |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) | 52 minutes | Almost everything, the post is half finished within the hour |
| 86 minutes | Almost everything, the post is half finished in under 90 minutes | |
| 150 minutes | Almost everything, and its ranking is settled in the same window | |
| 18 hours | A lot, but a morning post is still working that evening | |
| 23 hours | A lot, but a morning post is still working that evening | |
| YouTube | 10.6 days | Very little, the video keeps being recommended for weeks |
| 4 months | Nothing worth planning around |
- On X, Facebook and Reddit the hour you post is nearly the only thing that decides who sees the post, because it is half finished in under three hours.
- On Instagram and LinkedIn a post lives most of a day, which is why a morning post also picks up the evening scrollers.
- On YouTube and Pinterest the posting hour barely matters, so spend the effort on the thumbnail and the title instead.
- TikTok has almost no half-life at all in this data, because its For You feed can resurface a video days or weeks after it was posted.
Post on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and skip Sunday
The day matters about as much as the hour, and the studies agree on the day more tightly than they agree on the hour. Wednesday around midday is the single strongest slot of the week.
| Day⇅ | Strength⇅ | What to watch for⇅ |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday | Strongest day of the week | Nothing, this is the safe default |
| Tuesday | Level with Wednesday | Nothing, this is the safe default |
| Thursday | Just behind the top two | Fades earlier in the afternoon than Wednesday |
| Monday | Slightly behind Thursday | The morning is strong, the afternoon is not |
| Friday | Clearly below the midweek days | Falls away from 4 in the afternoon as people stop checking |
| Saturday | Weak | Nothing before 10 in the morning, everyone wakes later |
| Sunday | Weakest day on every major platform | TikTok is the one exception, where Sunday 9 in the morning is its peak |
- Tuesday and Wednesday are the two strongest days on almost every platform Sprout Social measured.
- Sunday is the worst day of the week across every major platform except TikTok.
- Friday drops away from about 4 in the afternoon, because the working audience has stopped checking.
- Weekend traffic starts about two hours later than weekday traffic and peaks in the early afternoon rather than at lunchtime, because people get up later.
Use Repeat Recorder to rehearse what you say before you film a video post
Posting in the midday window usually means recording the video the night before, and a first take rarely survives contact with a camera. Repeat Recorder, one of my own apps, records a line and plays it straight back to you on a loop so you can hear what you actually sound like before you commit it to a post.
- Repeat Recorder replays what you just said automatically, so you can rehearse without touching the phone between takes.
- Hearing your own opening line back is the fastest way to find the words you stumble on.
- Repeat Recorder is free and works with headphones or a Bluetooth microphone.
Conclusion: the best time to post on social media, in one glance
Every line below is in the local time of the people you want to reach, not your own. Use the map at the top of this page to convert them to your clock.
- Post at midday.
- Anywhere from 9 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon still works.
- Post on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, with Wednesday the strongest day of the week.
- Do not post on a Sunday, the worst day on every major platform.
- Do not post between 2 and 5 in the morning, which is about eleven times worse than midday.
- Do not save your post for 9 in the evening, because the feed then holds about twice as many rival posts.
- Hit the window exactly on X, Facebook and Reddit, because those posts are half finished within three hours.
- Do not bother timing YouTube or Pinterest, because those posts keep working for weeks or months.
- Post on US Eastern time for a mixed English-speaking audience.