Best Times to Post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn

As we can see from the chart, the best times to post on Facebook are Mondays through Fridays at 3am, and Tuesdays at 10am and noon. Now this one is definitely an odd one. Why 3am? It’s likely because there is much less competition at that time, and it also lines up with users waking up across the pond in the UK. But just because that appears to be the best time, it doesn’t mean you should post then.

Tuesday’s at 10am and noon are much more “normal” times to see a new post go out, so that will be our baseline rather than the 3am mark.

Going down the color scale in the image, it seems that Tuesdays through Fridays are the best days to post, specifically in the morning to the end of lunch break. Why these times though? It’s because those are the times when people are most likely to be using their phones.

It’s no surprise that one of the first things people do when they wake up is to immediately go on their phone. Users will then occasionally check their phones throughout the work day, and then heavily start using again during their lunch break, which is why we see a drop after 2pm on every weekday.

The Sprout Social report shows that Mondays at 11am, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10am to 1pm, and Thursdays and Fridays between 10am and 11am are the best times to post on Instagram.

Just like with Facebook, it looks like mid-morning is the best time of day to post. And luckily for Instagram, there isn’t an odd 3am outlier in the data that could throw anyone off.

While the report doesn’t specify whether the data relates to Stories, Reels, or the Feed, it would be worth testing all of these. Most users engage with content during their lunch break, so the results should be similar for all 3.

According to the data, the best times to tweet are Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 9am.

This trend just shows how people use different social media platforms for different reasons. People typically use Facebook and Instagram for general entertainment and socializing, and that could take up a fairly long amount of time. This could also be a skewing of Sprout Social’s data, due to most of Sprout customers are business users checking in on the newest business news as soon as they get to work.

So while it appears that 9am is the best time to post on Twitter, this one might need to be taken with a grain of salt since it might not apply to your business nearly as well as it does for Sprout’s userbase.

Sprout Social’s data suggests that weekdays between 7am and 3pm are the best time for overall LinkedIn activity. Since LinkedIn is the social media platform for professionals, it would benefit you to not make any posts outside of typical business hours.

Through looking at all 4 of these social media platforms, we have noticed one thing that is consistent across all of them: do not post on the weekends.

But why is that the case? Shouldn’t your users have the most free time on the weekends to mindlessly scroll through their social media feeds? Yes, that is true. But that also means that they have more free time to do literally anything else that they find entertaining.

Your particular audience might be on your social media platform of choice during the weekend more than the week, but the data here shows that most users are not engaging as much on weekends because they have better things to do. While we are at work, it’s normal to want to break up the monotony with a bit of scrolling through social media, and that’s what you need to take advantage of.