Posting times
Best time to post on social media
Four studies, four measuring sticks. This site puts their per-platform answers side by side, marks where they agree and where they split, and gives you the tool each platform's own data supports.
Platforms
| Platform | Best days | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Best time to post on Instagram | Mon–Thu | varies by format & region |
Each platform page is researched separately and ships its own tool — a format and region picker on Instagram, something else where the data demands it. Pages appear here only when every number traces back to a study.
Method
Every window on this site comes from a study that published its sample. The four we lean on:
- Buffer — 52M posts, normalised to local time (published March 2026), the widest sample.
- RecurPost — 400,000+ profiles; 2M+ scheduled posts per platform, which measures what people chose to schedule.
- Sprout Social — close to 2 billion engagements across roughly 307,000 profiles, so it measures engagement rather than volume.
- SocialPilot — 50,000+ accounts; 7 million Instagram posts measured hour by hour.
Two things decide whether a "best time" chart means anything. Sample scope: change who was measured and the same day can produce a different peak. Interaction window: whether the feed treats a post as worth pushing in the first hour or two, which is about when people scroll, not what the algorithm prefers.
Where the studies agree, the page says so. Where they split, the page says that too instead of averaging the disagreement away.
Timezones
The studies do not share a clock. Buffer normalises its numbers to the reader's local time and says no conversion is needed. Sprout Social and RecurPost report local time to the audience being measured.
Each page here states which clock its sources use, above the tool, and no page silently shifts a number. If your audience is not where you are, set the region in the tool: the window stays in your audience's clock and the page names that clock.