Free tool
Best time to post on social media
A starting point rather than a law. Pick a network and see the windows most accounts find work, hour by hour across the week - along with an honest account of why you should stop trusting it once you have your own data.
Network
Best times to post on Instagram
- Good windows
Tue–Thu, 11am–2pm
Mon, Fri, 11am–1pm
- Best days
- Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
| 9am | 12pm | 3pm | 6pm | 9pm | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | Good | Peak | ||||||||||||||
| Tue | Peak | Good | Peak | |||||||||||||
| Wed | Peak | Good | Peak | |||||||||||||
| Thu | Peak | Good | Peak | |||||||||||||
| Fri | Good | Peak | ||||||||||||||
| Sat | ||||||||||||||||
| Sun |
Late morning into lunch is the steadiest window. Consumer and creator accounts also do well in the evening, from about 7pm, and at weekends. The grid makes your cadence visible, so a steady rhythm beats bursts.
Times are local - to wherever your audience is, not where you are. If you post from London for a mostly American audience, shift everything to their working day. These are the same times Fluxi suggests when you schedule a post, worked out in your audience’s time zone for you.
Where these numbers come from, honestly
They are a rounded summary of the yearly industry studies from Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Buffer, and they are the same table Fluxi suggests times from when you schedule a post. They are not measurements of your account, and no published benchmark is. Broadly, professional audiences track the working day while consumer and entertainment audiences drift later into evenings and weekends, which the note under each network covers. Anyone presenting a single global "best time to post" with decimal places is selling you a number derived from someone else’s followers.
Why timing matters less than it used to
Every major network has moved from a strictly chronological feed to a ranked one. That change quietly demoted posting time from a primary lever to a secondary one: your post is no longer racing to be seen in the twenty minutes after it goes out, it is being scored and shown to people over hours or days. Timing still gives you an early-engagement nudge, which the ranking then amplifies - so it is worth getting roughly right and not worth agonising over.
What matters more
If you have limited attention to spend on improving an account, spend it in roughly this order.
- Consistency - a steady cadence beats perfectly-timed sporadic posting
- The hook - the first line decides whether anything else gets read
- Format - matching what the network is currently favouring, usually video
- Frequency - more chances at distribution, especially on TikTok and X
- Timing - worth getting into the right few hours, not the right minute
Post in your audience’s time zone, not your own
This is the mistake that actually costs reach, and it is far larger than being an hour off the optimum. An agency in London scheduling a US client’s posts for a London morning is publishing in the middle of their audience’s night. Decide where the audience is, convert once, and schedule against that.
Replace this with your own data as soon as you can
After a month or two of consistent posting you will have something better than any benchmark: evidence about your own audience. Look for the posts that outperformed, note when they went out, and test the pattern deliberately - same content type, two different windows, a few weeks apart. Once your own data disagrees with this page, trust your own data.
Schedule it, do not just count it
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