Best times to post on social media in 2026

The short answer

Across social media, post on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, between late morning and late afternoon in your audience’s local time, and expect the weekend to be weakest. Sprout Social, across nearly 2 billion engagements, puts the overall best window at 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and finds Tuesday and Wednesday strongest on almost every network, with Sunday the weakest day. Buffer, across more than 52 million posts, finds most platforms’ single best slot on a weekday morning, from 9 to 10 a.m.

Two platforms break the pattern. Long YouTube videos do best on a weekend morning, and TikTok’s studies disagree about the weekend entirely. The table below gives each platform’s best day and hour, and each platform’s own guide goes further.

The best time to post on each platform

Each row comes from the largest recent study of that platform, mostly Buffer’s, with the weakest day where the studies agree on one. All times are local to your audience.

What every study agrees on

Read enough of these studies and three findings repeat on almost every network:

• Midweek is strongest. Wednesday is the best day on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X and Threads in Buffer’s data, and Sprout Social finds Tuesday and Wednesday strongest on almost every network.
• The weekend is weakest for anything people read at work. LinkedIn, Facebook and X all bottom out on Saturday or Sunday. The exceptions are formats people watch in free time: long YouTube videos, and in Buffer’s data, TikTok and Bluesky.
• Late night is weak almost everywhere. Hootsuite finds posts after 10 p.m. among the least effective on Instagram and Facebook, and Buffer finds Threads posts from 6 to 11 p.m. underperform every day. The exceptions are Shorts and Bluesky, which peak in the evening.

Where timing matters most, and where it matters least

Timing matters most where the newest post shows first. X’s Following tab and Bluesky’s Following feed both list posts newest first, so a post published while your followers are asleep is buried by the time they look. Facebook’s and Instagram’s feeds start from recent posts by people you follow, so the first hour counts there too.

Timing matters least where the platform recommends content to people who do not follow you. TikTok says follower count is not a direct factor in For You, and a YouTube video keeps being found through search and suggestions long after upload. On those platforms the hour gets a post its first viewers; the post itself decides how far it travels. Buffer reaches the same conclusion across its 52 million posts: the right time is not the secret of content that works, and consistency and quality matter more.

How to find your own best times

A published best time is an average across hundreds of thousands of accounts. Yours is in your own data, and a month of testing finds it:

• Start with the platform’s best slot from the table above, as a control.
• Test it against one slot the studies disagree on, such as an afternoon instead of a morning. Post the same kind of post in each slot for three or four weeks.
• Compare the typical result in each slot, not the single best post, and keep the winner. Re-check each quarter, because audiences move with seasons and growth.

Posting to several platforms on the same day

The best slots differ by platform, so posting everything at once wastes most of them. A sensible day for someone on several networks staggers the posts: X and Threads around 9 a.m., LinkedIn and Instagram later in the morning or afternoon, a Short in the late afternoon, and Bluesky in the evening. Each post then meets its audience at the moment that app is busiest.

That is a lot of clocks to watch, which is what scheduling is for. PostEase puts every channel on one calendar, posts each one at the time you set, and its Performance page shows the median views your posts got at each hour they went out, so your own best times replace the averages above.

Questions

Sources

1. Buffer, Best time to post on social media in 2026: every platform, March 2026.
2. Sprout Social, Best times to post on social media in 2026, March 2026.
3. Buffer, The best time to post on Bluesky, August 2026.