How to find your best time to post on social media

An account that reaches students and one that reaches office workers won't see the same attention at the same hour. Neither will a café that's busiest at weekends and a software company that sells on weekdays. A generic list can at most give you a guess for your first try; your own account's numbers give you the answer.

Before you start testing, think about a day in your audience's life. When can they look at their phone? On the way to work, at lunch, after dinner? Pull three time windows out of those questions. They are the candidates for your test.

1. Pick three candidate time windows, for example morning, lunchtime and evening.
2. For two weeks, rotate your posts across those windows.
3. Post similar types of content in each window. If your strongest post always goes in the same slot, you're measuring the content, not the time.
4. Note each post's reach and engagement at the same point, for example 24 hours after publishing.
5. After two weeks, compare the averages for each window.

With only a few posts, a single week can mislead you. One post doing unexpectedly well can shift the whole average. Wait at least two weeks and don't decide based on one outlier.

Put your notes into a simple table by day and time window, and colour each cell by average engagement. The darker cells are your strong times. A spreadsheet is enough for this.

Most platform feeds today aren't purely chronological; posts that are expected to interest a user get pushed up. So timing matters, but it doesn't decide everything on its own. When you read your results, also consider:

• The content itself: the topic, the first frame, the first sentence.
• Format: a video and a single image can perform differently at the same time.
• The first hour after publishing: replying to comments quickly keeps the conversation going.
• Special days: holidays and big events break the usual pattern.

Once you've found your best times, make them permanent instead of picking a time for every post. In Fourdeck you can set weekly queue times for each social account. Posts you add to the queue without a specific date drop into the next free time.

If your audience lives in a different time zone, set the workspace time zone to match, so the time you plan is the time your audience sees.

As your audience grows and changes, your best times can shift. Run a short check every three months: swap one of your current times for a new candidate for a week and compare the results. A change of season, schools reopening or moving into a new market are also good moments to test again.