Best Time to Post on TikTok: What we Found

You had one TikTok ready to publish. Then you looked up the best time to post and somehow ended up with seven tabs and an appointment with Sunday at 9 a.m. The video took 20 minutes. Picking a time is threatening to become a second shoot.

Start with the seven-day table below. Then pick two times, schedule comparable videos and see how each slot performs for your audience.

Quick answer: The best time to post on TikTok depends on when your audience is active. For a starting point, Buffer’s strongest individual slot was Sunday at 9 a.m., while Sprout Social recommends Tuesday through Thursday afternoons in local time. Pick two windows from the table or your account analytics and compare posts at the same age.

Best times to post on TikTok by day

Find the day you want to publish. Each column shows the findings of a separate study. Sprout reports local times. Buffer publishes clock times and recommends using them as starting points wherever your audience lives. Try a window in your audience’s local time, then check how it performs on your account. Buffer’s posting-time study · Sprout Social’s posting-time study

If you can publish only a few times a week, choose days you can repeat. A consistent schedule makes it easier to compare how your posts do. Your Sunday can keep its pajamas while the scheduler does the work.

What’s the best time to post on TikTok today?

Find today’s weekday where your audience lives, then check its row. If it’s Friday and you’re deciding between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., both are reasonable starting points. Sprout’s Friday window includes 4 p.m. and Buffer’s Friday peak was 6 p.m. Use your audience activity to break the tie if you have it. Buffer’s Friday benchmark · Sprout Social’s Friday benchmark

If your chosen slot has passed, use another practical window or schedule the next comparable post for your next planned test day. You can close the stopwatch app.

Which time zone should you use for TikTok?

Choose posting times on your audience’s clock. Enter them on the clock your scheduler displays.

Say your viewers are mostly in New York and your calendar shows Los Angeles time. To publish at 1 p.m. Eastern, put the video in the 10 a.m. Pacific slot on the same day. Check the date too when the conversion crosses midnight. That’s how a perfectly sensible Tuesday post can quietly become a Wednesday post.

For a study that reports audience-local times, apply the clock time to the audience you’re trying to reach. For a study that gives a fixed Eastern time, convert that exact slot into the scheduler’s display zone if you’re testing it for a US Eastern audience. A conversion keeps the publish moment the same. Use account data to choose a local slot for a different audience. Sprout Social’s local-time methodology · RecurPost’s Eastern-time benchmarks

Why TikTok posting-time studies disagree

Buffer’s best individual slot was Sunday morning. Sprout found weaker engagement on Sundays. That’s a good reason to check what each dataset covers before putting your whole week on the calendar.

The studies cover different groups of accounts and measure different outcomes. Pick a benchmark that fits your goal. Metricool’s evening window is a useful candidate if you want more video views. Use views after 24 hours for both slots in your own test. Buffer’s methodology · Sprout Social’s methodology

How to find two posting times for your TikTok account

If you have audience activity data

Open your TikTok analytics and look for when your audience is active. TikTok’s guide for sellers shows Business Suite → Analytics → Audience in the app. Check which hours recur across the days you publish. Then choose two windows you can test, such as a lunch slot and an evening slot. TikTok’s audience activity instructions

If you serve several regions, pick one priority audience for this round. Write its time zone beside your slots. Otherwise, “7 p.m.” is a surprisingly efficient way to start a group argument.

If your account is new

Pick a realistic pair from the research, such as a weekday afternoon and an evening when you can publish similar videos. Run both windows on the same weekdays. Once you have your own audience activity and post data, use it to plan the next round. TikTok also recommends using audience analytics and experimenting with different times. TikTok’s scheduling guidance

Schedule a two-week TikTok test in Reloop

Illustrative example. A haircare brand wants to compare 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern for its US audience. It has eight short demos of the same product. The clips use different footage, a similar opening and length, and the same call to action. Give each weekday a comparable pair, such as two demos that answer the same product question.

Each window gets one Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. That gives you a fairer comparison than putting every afternoon video on a weekday and every evening video on the weekend. For help choosing your clips, see the TikTok video ideas guide.

1. Connect TikTok in Reloop. Have the videos ready in your workspace. Reloop can help you create the short product demos and schedule them from the same calendar.
2. Check the calendar’s display time zone. The screenshot below shows Europe/London. When London is five hours ahead of New York, 1 p.m. ET appears as 6 p.m. in London, and 7 p.m. ET appears as midnight the next day. So Tuesday’s 7 p.m. audience slot goes on Wednesday at midnight in that view. Check the offset for the actual dates you choose.
3. Drag a recent short-form video onto its calendar day. Set the publish time for TikTok and review the date and time before confirming. Repeat for the other clips. You get to eat dinner while your 7 p.m. post keeps its appointment.
4. Log the actual publish time. Once each video is live, note its time and flag any delayed or missed post. Set yourself a reminder to record its views 24 hours later.

The Reloop calendar below shows where to start. Recent posts are on the left, and the display time zone sits under the month.

How to decide which posting time to keep

In TikTok analytics, record each post’s views at 24 hours. Use the same interval for all eight posts. A Monday video with a week to collect views has had a generous head start over the Saturday video you checked at breakfast. TikTok’s guide to post analytics

Log the weekday, slot, actual publish time, format and view count. Flag any paid boost or unusual promotion and leave that post out of the organic comparison. Use both checks below to make your decision.

• Median views per slot. Sort each slot’s view counts. With four posts, average the two middle values. This gives a single breakout post less influence on your decision.
• Same-weekday pairs. Compare Monday at 1 p.m. with Monday at 7 p.m., then do the same for the other days. See if the same window wins consistently or if your audience behaves differently on different days.

Here’s how the calculation works with illustrative views.

The evening slot led on three of four days, and its median was about 9% higher. Saturday’s breakout makes the evening average look far more impressive. Give the evening slot another round before moving every post to 7 p.m. Eight videos can help you choose what to try next. Let the next round tell you whether the pattern holds.

If both slots perform similarly, keep the one that fits your schedule and test a creative change in a separate round. Use the short-form video marketing guide to decide which part of the video to improve. Record the result alongside other account experiments in your social media audit.

Once you’ve picked a slot, add it to your weekly plan. If you also need to decide which channels or formats deserve your time, start with the social media strategy template.