With one billion active users in 2022, TikTok has become an unavoidable must for brands and influencers. However, producing the most engaging content isn’t always enough to guarantee getting thousands of views. As with other social networks, how visible you are on TikTok also depends on when you post.
The best times and days to post on TikTok according to official figures
TikTok is an exception in the world of social networks. While all other platforms recorded a slowdown in their growth in 2022, TikTok’s growth continued to increase. There are countless success stories of everyday people propelled to the rank of influencer in a few short weeks, thanks to the success of their short videos.
It’s true that making it big and going viral on TikTok depends above all on content quality, but other parameters are also at play, such as the times of day and days of the week you post. This is why several studies have been carried out to find out the ultimate time to post on TikTok.
According to an Influencer Marketing Hub study, the most productive slots for sharing a video on TikTok are:
- In the morning, between 6 and 9 a.m.
- In the evening, between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.
- Every day of the week, except Saturday
These results seem pretty intuitive, since the times match when users are available outside traditional working and school hours. Conversely, engagement on TikTok is at its lowest at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
It should be said that these are global trends, which don’t take into account your segment or your niche. To find out more about your audience and their behaviours, a more in-depth analysis is necessary.
How to post at the ideal time for your target on TikTok?
Know your audience’s behaviour
The first step is to define who your audience is, in order to put yourself in their shoes. For example, try to come up with different personas that represent members of your audience, and map out a standard day in their lives. First and foremost, it’s important to work out if your target audience is made up of students or working people, since their weekday routines aren’t the same. Working people are available during their lunch break and late in the evening, while students often have less predictable timetables.
Again, this is an overview, based on estimates and generalities. To understand when your audience is at its most active on TikTok, there are statistics you can find on your professional account.
How to use advanced statistics to define the best posting strategy
TikTok stats are only available on business accounts, and can be found in the “Analytics” part of the “Privacy and settings” section of the menu. Statistics are split into three sections:
- Overview, which totals your video views, profile views, and new followers over the past seven or 28 days.
- Content, which gathers data about your different videos (views, interactions, watch time).
- Followers, which presents statistics about your followers, their demographic characteristics, and the content they’ve viewed.
We’re mainly interested in the “Followers” tab here, and in particular, the graphs allowing you to visualise your subscribers’ activity by time of day or by day of the week. By noticing the peaks in activity, you can identify the best times to post content. Be careful to convert the times shown, though, since TikTok statistics are configured by default to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
You can also find valuable information in the Content section, where you can view your latest videos’ performance. The idea is to select your best-performing videos in terms of views and engagement, and spot a pattern. Are these high-performing videos often posted at the same time, or on a particular day of the week?
Of course, for the statistics to be meaningful, you must have enough data available. This means that you’ll get the best statistics after using the app for some time. If you’re new on TikTok and can’t rely on historical data, it could be worth trying to work out what your competition’s posting strategy is.
Take inspiration from the competition
To determine the best times or days to post, take inspiration from your most successful competitors! Carry out an audit of the most popular accounts in your field, and see what time they usually post their content. There’s no such thing as coincidence in this game. You’ll notice that, in general, successful accounts stick to a rigorous timeframe for posting their videos.
Taking inspiration from this timing can be a good starting point, until you have enough data to analyse your own audience.
Posting on TikTok on Saturdays: a false good idea
At first glance, you might think that Saturday is the ideal day to share content on TikTok, after all, it’s a day when the majority of people are neither working not at school.
That said, statistics show that Saturday is the day of the week with the least engagement. And that makes perfect sense! On Saturdays, people devote their time to their hobbies and their social lives, which leaves little time for scrolling social media. You should therefore save your best videos for other days of the week.
What is the ideal posting frequency on TikTok?
You can’t wonder about what time of day to post on TikTok without also tackling the subject of how often to post. It’s true, in order to build and retain your community, it’s essential to post regularly and consistently, without compromising on content quality.
How many times should you post per day to boost your TikTok account?
Influencers and specialists agree that the ideal number of TikTok posts varies between one and three per day. Frequently posting new content allows for both reaching a wider audience, and remaining visible to your existing audience.
If you’re new to TikTok, one video per day is already a good starting point. If, in addition to that, you post at a time that is conducive to engagement, you’ll start getting good results in no time at all! The more you get used to posting regularly, the easier the whole thing will seem to you. Also, you will quickly have enough data to identify which types of content perform best. Perfect for refining your strategy over time!
Prioritise quality and avoid spam
The frequency and timing of your posts will never be as important as the quality of the content. On TikTok, only the most engaging videos are picked up and shared massively by users! To get the best results, it’s better to publish one good quality video per day than three suboptimal videos. Video quality on TikTok can be judged on several criteria such as your storytelling, humour, and the choice of music.
Similarly, spam (i.e., a large number of videos posted in a small window of time) is to be avoided. The algorithm doesn’t directly penalise spamming, but your followers will probably get bored quite quickly.
To summarise, the winning strategy on TikTok is to post:
- At the right time (i.e., morning or evening) or at other times depending on your account statistics
- At least once a day
- Always remembering to focus on producing quality content.
By Nathan Elmaleh
