The best time to post on social media, and how to find yours

Why best-time charts disagree

A published “best time to post” is an average across many accounts, industries and time zones. Your audience isn’t average. Followers who are students, night-shift workers or parents of toddlers are on their phones at very different hours, and a local bakery’s customers keep a different day from a gaming creator’s viewers.

Feeds have also changed. On platforms that rank posts with an algorithm, a post can keep reaching people for hours or days, so posting time is one factor among several. It still matters, because early reactions help a post travel, but it matters for your audience, not everyone’s.

A sensible place to start

You need somewhere to begin testing. Bloom’s auto-schedule starts with four everyday windows in your local time, chosen to line up with common breaks in a day:

These are starting points to test, not research findings. Drop any that don’t work for you.

How to find your own best time in four weeks

1. Pick three or four windowsUse the windows above, or your platform’s own insights. Instagram professional accounts show when followers are most active.
2. Rotate similar content through themPost comparable content in each window, so you’re testing the time rather than the post.
3. Measure after the same delayCheck each post’s results after the same amount of time, such as 48 hours, using one number that matches your goal.
4. Compare after a few posts per windowOne post proves nothing. After several per window, the pattern is usually clear.
5. Keep the winners, test one new windowMove most posts to your best windows and keep testing one new slot, because audiences change.

Choose the right number to measure

• Views or reach if you want to be discovered by new people.
• Saves and shares if you want content people come back to.
• Followers gained if you’re building an audience.
• Clicks or sales if your posts exist to sell something. This is the most honest measure, because it’s what pays.

Bloom works this way: once you’ve logged enough sales, it ranks your windows by what actually earned, and until then it uses the results you log.

Should the time differ by platform?

Often, yes. The same person might check Instagram on a lunch break and scroll Bluesky or X late at night, and a Facebook Page audience can skew older with different daily habits. Test each platform separately rather than assuming one winning hour applies everywhere. When you cross-post, it’s fine to schedule the same post at different times on different platforms: publish where each audience is most active, and stay around to reply.

If your audience spans time zones

Check where your followers are in each platform’s insights and schedule for the largest group first. If two regions matter, test a window for each. Bloom schedules in your device’s time zone, so do the conversion once and save the times you settle on.

Let Bloom keep track for you

Log each post’s views, likes, followers gained or earnings in Bloom and it ranks your strongest days and hours. Auto-schedule then puts new posts in those hours, 30 minutes apart, so testing and scheduling become the same job. Start with the social media scheduler.

Frequently asked questions