The best time to post on social media is in your own data
Generic "best time to post" charts average millions of accounts. Here's how to find the times that work for your audience, using data you already have.
Search for "best time to post" and you'll find charts saying Tuesday at 11am, or Thursday evenings, or early mornings. These charts aren't wrong, exactly. They're just averages across millions of accounts, most of which have nothing in common with yours.
Your audience has its own habits. The good news: you already have the data to find them.
Why generic posting times don't fit you
A fitness coach's followers might scroll before work. A gaming channel's audience might be most active late at night. A local café's customers check Instagram around lunch. Average them together and you get a time that suits nobody in particular.
Time zones make it worse. If half your followers are in another country, "9am" means two very different things.
Where to find your own best times
1. Your social apps' own insights
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and most other networks show when your followers are online, usually as a chart by day and hour. It's a good starting point, but it measures when people are scrolling, not when they're likely to do something.
2. When people visit your link in bio page
This is the more useful signal. A visit to your link in bio page means someone was interested enough to tap through. If your page's analytics show most visits arriving on weekday evenings, that's when your audience is most ready to act.
Biotrail's social planner uses exactly this: it looks at when your own visitors arrive and suggests your best posting times per network, from your data rather than an industry average.
3. Which posts actually sent visitors
The best signal of all is which posts led to visits and clicks. If posts sent on Friday evening bring twice the visits of Monday mornings, that tells you more than any chart.
To track it, add a tag to the link in each post (often called a UTM tag), or use a scheduler that does it for you and credits each visit to the post and network it came from.
How to test your posting times
Treat it as a simple experiment:
- Pick two or three time slots based on your insights and your page visits.
- Post similar content in each slot for two to three weeks.
- Compare results by visits and clicks, not just likes.
- Keep the winner, then test a new slot against it.
Change one thing at a time. If you change the time, the format and the topic together, you won't know which one made the difference.
Make consistency easy with scheduling
Testing only works if you actually post in the slots you picked, every week. That's hard to do by hand. A scheduler helps:
- Write once, post everywhere. Draft a post once and get a version that fits each network's limits.
- Post at your best time automatically, or get a reminder where a network doesn't allow automatic posting.
- See what worked. Visits and clicks credited to the exact post and network.
A quick checklist
- Don't trust generic charts over your own numbers.
- Look at when people visit and click, not just when they scroll.
- Test two or three slots for a few weeks each.
- Judge by visits and clicks.
- Use a scheduler so you actually stick to the plan.
Want to see your own best times? Create a free Biotrail page, share it for a couple of weeks, and the social planner will start suggesting times from your real visitors. Need words to go with the timing? Try the free caption generator and hashtag generator.
Questions people ask
Is there one best time to post on Instagram?
Not one that suits every account. Your best time depends on when your followers are online and likely to act, which differs by audience, time zone and niche.
How long should I test posting times?
Give each time slot at least two or three weeks and several posts, so one unusually good or bad post doesn't decide it.
Should I post at the same time on every network?
Not necessarily. People use networks at different times of day, so compare each network on its own.