Your best time to post on TikTok can seem mysterious, but once you have it figured out, you’ll soon start to reap the benefits.
From reaching new engaged audiences to seeing a boost in likes, comments, and followers, your best time to post is the key to unlocking your best TikTok engagement.
To help you find your best time to post and build a killer TikTok strategy in 2021, we’re covering everything you need to know in this blog post.
What is the Best Time to Post on TikTok?
The first thing to know is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to finding your best time to post — every brand, business, or influencer on TikTok will have a slightly different best time to post.
As just by knowing your best time to post, you’re giving yourself a unique advantage.
Plus, once you’ve discovered your best time to post, you can get early access to Later’s TikTok scheduling tools.
With TikTok Planning and Scheduling, you’ll always be able to share your videos at the perfect time for your audience — so you’ll never miss an engagement opportunity again.
Get exclusive early access to visual planning and scheduling for TikTok on web and mobile.
Ready to discover your best time to post on TikTok? Here are 4 steps to help you get started:
Step #1: Create A Pro Account
TikTok’s analytics are only available on Pro Accounts, which means that if you’re serious about growing on TikTok, now’s the time to make the upgrade.
Switching to a Pro TikTok account will unlock your profile’s metrics and data insights, and these analytics are key to figuring out your best time to post.
Here’s how to switch to a Pro TikTok Account:
Go to the “Manage my account” section by tapping the three dots in the top right corner of your profile page
Select “Switch to Pro account”
Choose your business industry
Your TikTok account will reload a Pro Account with a new analytics section
Within the analytics section of a Pro account, you’ll find 3 tabs: Overview, Content, and Followers.
Tap the Followers tab to track your follower growth, top territories, and followers’ activities:
TIP: Keep track of your follower growth on a separate reporting template and log it daily, as the app only stores the last 28 days of data.
Not only will sparks in your follower growth be indicators of your best time to post each week, but it will also indicate that you’ve shared content your audience loves! Use that to inform your content and posting strategy for the future.
Step #2: Identify Your Top Territories
Thanks to TikTok’s Top Territories analytics, it’s easy to find out where your audience is based, which will help you figure out your best time to post.
In this example, a good portion of our audience is based in the US, with smaller percentages scattered across Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
However, unlike Instagram, TikTok doesn’t break this info down into cities, so while we know the US is the main audience, there’s a lot of different time zones to take into account.
For example, if you’re a brand based in NYC and assume the majority of your audience is living on Eastern Standard Time, you’ll definitely want to capture audiences within that time zone when you post.
But you have to take into account that most people on the West Coast are asleep at 8 am EST, so you could be missing out on engagement if you don’t take this into account.
So your business’ best times to post on TikTok could go beyond a schedule you’re used to.
“At Later, a majority of our audience on TikTok is US-based so we try not to post too early or too late to exclude any of our audience. Our sweet spot tends to be midday PST to catch most people and timezones.”
– lindsay ashcraft, social media coordinator at later
Plus, the TikTok algorithm factors in where you post content from.
The Later team is based all over the world, across multiple time zones and we all take part in creating content for our TikTok profile — that’s why you’ll see so many different faces there!
That also means we post from all over the world, from Northern California to London.
So if you’re consistently posting from the same location, the chances are you’ll build a stronger audience there.
It’s important to identify where the majority of your audience is based, and then try to predict when they’ll most be active online.
Looking to level-up your TikTok skills? Join Later’s 10-day Challenge! Each day we’ll show you a new TikTok skill or hack that you can use on your own TikTok feed.
Step #3: Know When Your Audience is Most Active
TikTok’s built-in analytics may seem a little basic, but don’t be fooled.
Everything you need to figure out the best time to post is in the Analytics tab, especially when it comes to knowing when your audience is most active.
Under the Follower tab of your TikTok Analytics, scroll down to find the “Follower Activity” section.
Here you’ll find detailed information on your audience’s most active hours and days.
NOTE: All information in TikTok analytics is recorded in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). As a result, you’ll need to convert the hours that your followers are most active into the timezones of your audience’s location.
From this example, you can see that our followers are most active at 7pm UTC, which is 12pm PST and 3pm EST.
TIP: Use a timezone conversion tool to easily switch between time zones.
Step #4: Track and Measure Your Content Performance
The final step to understanding your best time to post is to monitor your content performance.
Delving into the analytics for top posts is a great way to learn how your posting times correlate to performance.
Under the Content tab in TikTok Analytics, you’ll be able to see all your posts’ performance over the last 7 days.
Once you click on a video, you’ll be able to see tons of performance data on your content — like total views, average watch time, traffic source time, as well as where in the world your views came from.
To help you figure out your best time to post, first take a look at the overall performance — how many likes, comments, and shares the video received.
Take a look and see, is there a connection between when the TikTok video was posted and how well it performed?
It’s really useful to keep a spreadsheet or reporting document to track all your TikTok content performance, especially as TikTok only captures data for the last 7 days.
Here’s a couple of metrics you’ll want to keep track of per video:
Posting Date and Time
Video Likes
Video Comments
Video Shares
Total Play Time
Total Video Views
Traffic Source Types
Total Reached Audience
Top Audience Territories
We’ve created our own reporting template to make it easier for you to get started: Later Social Media Reporting Template:
When it comes to honing in on your best time to post, take note of the content that performed the best each week and identify when it was posted.
Video Performance + Time Posted + Audience Timezone = Best Time to Post
Of course, there is still a bit of guesswork left in the mix — as we already mention, there is no definitive answer of when every brand should post to TikTok!
But this should give you a strong indication of what time will work for you and your audience.
From here, you can fine-tune as you start to manage and measure your content performance.
You may notice that as your profile grows, your audience location and online behaviors change too, so keep checking in on your reporting and altering your strategy.
While getting to grips with TikTok analytics and the best time to post can feel daunting, there’s a huge payoff for your brand.
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