The Best Time to Post on TikTok in 2020
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 real 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 business’ personalized best time to post, we’re covering everything you need to know in this blog post:
What is the Best Time to Post on TikTok?
In the social media world, TikTok is relatively new on the scene and audiences are still adapting to the super-scrollable and highly-addictive format of the app.
That means how people are using TikTok, both for business and for entertainment, is still changing and growing — so you can expect your best time to post to follow suit.
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.
Which is good news — that means there’s less competition and more opportunity for your audience to like and engage with your content once you’ve identified your best time to post!
After some audience and content analysis, and some experimentation, you’ll be able to figure out when and how often you should be posting.
As trends and behaviors on TikTok shift and change, the best time to post on TikTok will remain unique to your brand and your audience — you just have to dedicate time to figure it out and continue to monitor it!
Ready to take your TikTok strategy up a notch? Watch our free 30-minute video on how to use TikTok to grow your brand!
Ready to jump into the details? Here are 4 steps to help you identify when your best time to post on TikTok is for your brand:
Step #1 to Find Your Best Time to Post on TikTok: 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!
First up, switching to a free Pro TikTok account will unlock your profile’s metrics and data insights and it’s these analytics are the 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. For now, tap the Follower tab:
Here you can track your follower growth, top territories, and your followers’ activities, like what videos your followers watched.
TIP: Keep track of your follower growth on a separate reporting template and mark 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 be a sure sign you’ve shared content your audience loves! Use that to inform your content and posting strategy for the future.
If you want to jump into the details of Pro TikTok accounts, check out our Ultimate Guide to TikTok Marketing where we share strategic tips and tricks to growing your brand on TikTok!
Step #2 to Find Your Best Time to Post on TikTok: Identifying Your Audiences’ Location
Thanks to TikTok’s Top Territories section, 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 timezones 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 capture audiences within that timezone when you post.
But you have to take into account that most people on the West Coast are asleep at 8 am EST, or just starting their afternoon social scroll sessions when you’re heading to bed, 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!
Plus, the TikTok algorithm comes into play for your audience’s locations and where you’re posting from!
The Later team is based all over the world, across multiple timezones and we all take part in creating content for our TikTok profile — that’s why you’ll see so many different faces there!
@later.comTell us which one you care about most ##socialmediamanager ##smm ##marketing ##foryoupage ##socialmediagotmelike ##instagram♬ Tonight Tonight – Hot Chelle Rae
That also means we post from all over the world — from Northern California (Lindsay, our social media coordinator lives there!) or London (Content Marketer, Jill’s home base!) we’ve tried posted from lots of different locations.
But it ultimately comes down to planning content around where the majority of your audience is based and most active online to get that initial traction on your post!
“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 mid-day PST to catch most people and timezones.”
– LINDSAY ASHCRAFT, SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR AT LATER
As we get to grips with the TikTok algorithm, knowing when to post can feel like a guessing game.
But what’s important is to identify where the majority of your audience is based, and then try to predict when they’ll most be active online!
Step #3 to Find Your Best Time to Post on TikTok: Know When Your Audience is Most Active
TikTok’s built-in analytics may seem a little basic if you’re used to Instagram’s detailed breakdown, but don’t be fooled!
Everything you need to figure out the best time to post is in the Analytics tab, especially for 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 the days of the week your followers consume your content.
NOTE: TikTok data is recorded in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).
That means that you’ll need to convert your follower activity hours into the timezones of your audience’s location to know when to post.
From this example, you can see that our followers are most active at 7 pm UTC — but we know that the majority of our audience is based in the US, so we want to account for EST and PST times zones.
Working back, we can convert 7 pm UTC to 12pm PST and 3pm EST, so we know when to post to reach those audiences!
TIP: You can use a timezone conversion tool like this to help!
It could also be helpful to look at the best times to post on other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook!
If your brand has a presence on other platforms, and the most active, engaged times are similar, chances are the best time to post on TikTok will be along those lines too.
Want to take the guesswork out of finding your best time to post on Instagram? Later can do that for you, cutting down time spent experimenting and tracking!
Step #4 to Find Your Best Time to Post on TikTok: Track and Measure Your Content Performance
The final step in understanding your best time to post is reporting!
It’s all too easy for brands to skip this part (because it can be time-consuming!) but all the data you need is available in TikTok’s Analytics tab.
So it’s time to take advantage of all these metrics as it will help you determine the best time to post on TikTok and save you a lot of guesswork in the future!
Under the Content tab, you’ll be able to see your posts’ performance over the last 7 days.
Once you click on a video, you’ll be able to see tons 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.
If your video was a success, scroll down to Audience Territories. Here you’ll find a breakdown of where your views came from — similar to when we looked at the Followers tab, but this time it’s specific to who watched this particular video.
Can you make a connection to when that TikTok video was posted?
Remember to do the UTC conversion to your target audience’s timezone to know when the best posting time was!
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:
- 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:
And when it comes to honing in on your best time to post, it’s a case of finding the content that performed the best each week, identifying when it was posted, and where the majority of your audience was based.
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 there, 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 you might need to revise your best time to post too!
While getting to grips with TikTok analytics and the best time to post can feel daunting, there’s a huge payoff for your brand.
So now’s the time to start experimenting with TikTok and taking (detailed!) notes on how your content performed!
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.
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