The best time to post on TikTok, Reels and Shorts

Less than most advice suggests. All three apps say they pick videos for each viewer by what that viewer watches and enjoys, and none of them lists the hour a short video went up as a reason it gets shown.

• TikTok says its For You feed is built from what you interact with (videos you like, share or comment on, accounts you follow), from information about the video such as its captions, sounds and hashtags, and, with less weight, from device and account settings like your language and country. It adds that “neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors”.
• Instagram lists when a post was shared among the signals for its Feed of posts from people you follow. For Reels it lists your activity, your history with the person who posted, information about the reel and information about the person who posted: the time isn't one of them.
• YouTube says it looks at whether viewers choose to watch a video, how long they watch and how much of it, whether they like it, and what they say in surveys. Its report on when your viewers are online is meant, in its words, to help you “understand when to schedule a Premiere, or to plan your next live stream”.

So the hour you post mostly decides who's around to see a video first. After that, how the first viewers react decides how far it goes. A good hour can't rescue a video people swipe past, and a video people watch to the end doesn't need a perfect hour.

Scheduling tools publish best-time studies from the accounts that use them. These are the largest recent ones. They're third-party research, not anything TikTok, Instagram or YouTube have said, and all times are local.

Sprout Social also gives a window for each weekday. Its best hours on Monday to Thursday were:

For long YouTube videos, SocialPilot found 2 to 4 pm on Wednesday to Friday did best, a little different from its Shorts results.

Before you plan around a study, look at what it measured:

• Whose accounts. Sprout Social and SocialPilot are tools businesses use to schedule posts, so their data comes from the brands and teams using them, not from clip channels or new creators.
• What counts as doing well. Sprout Social measured engagement (likes, comments and shares), not views. A time that gets more comments from a brand's followers isn't always the time a clip reaches the most new people.
• Averages. A best time across 307,000 profiles is the middle of very different audiences. Yours may be students, night workers, or people in another country.

What the studies agree on is still useful: none of them puts the best window in the morning, and afternoons and early evenings do well on all three apps. If you have no data of your own yet, start there, in your audience's time zone, and then test.

Each app shows when your own audience is online, which tells you more than any study:

• TikTok: the analytics in TikTok Studio show when your followers are most active, by hour and by day.
• Instagram: with a professional (creator or business) account, Insights show when your followers are most active.
• YouTube: in YouTube Studio, the Audience tab of Analytics has a report on when your viewers are on YouTube, over the last 28 days. It counts your viewers' time on all of YouTube, not only on your channel.

Then test it. A simple way:

1. Pick two or three times: the peak in your analytics, and one or two of the study windows.
2. Post at each of them for a couple of weeks, keeping everything else the same.
3. Compare each video at the same age, for example after its first two days, so a video that's been up longer doesn't look better.
4. Keep the time that does best, and test again every few months as your audience grows.

Compare engagement as well as views: the engagement rate calculator works it out per post, and what is a good engagement rate says what's typical.

Every best time is in the viewer's local time, so post for when your audience is awake, not you. That matters most for clippers. If a campaign says which countries' views count, or the creator you're clipping has an audience mostly in one country, post for that country's afternoon.

For most of the year, 2 pm in New York is 11 am in Los Angeles and 7 pm in London. So a US afternoon post from the UK goes out in your evening, and one aimed at the whole US is better around mid-afternoon on the East Coast, when the West Coast is up too.

You don't have to be awake for it. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube all let you schedule a video ahead, so you can make clips in your day and have them go out in your audience's. For how to find campaigns to post for, see how to find clipping campaigns that pay.

The clearest data on frequency is a study by Buffer, another scheduling tool, reported in October 2025. It looked at 11.4 million TikTok posts from more than 150,000 accounts, comparing each account with itself over time rather than with other accounts.

The typical post didn't change: the median stayed around 500 views at every frequency. What changed was the top, where the best 10% of posts got far more views. As Buffer's Julian Winternheimer put it, posting more helps, “but mostly because it increases your chances of getting lucky.”

Buffer's study covers TikTok only, but the reason it works applies to Reels and Shorts too: each video is another chance to reach people who'll watch it. Going from one post a week to a few already gave half the gain of posting 11 or more, so pick a number you can keep up for months rather than a burst you'll drop.

Since the apps show videos by how viewers react, the things that make people stop and keep watching do far more than a good hour:

• The first second. Open on the line that makes people stay, not on a greeting or setup. More in how to make viral clips.
• The right length. Cut to how long the moment needs, so people reach the end. See how long a short video should be.
• Consistency. Posting at the same times most days gives your followers a habit and gives you clean data to compare.
• Captions and a clear subject. TikTok uses a video's captions and hashtags in choosing who to show it to, so say what it's about in words.

For YouTube in particular, the steps that move views are in how to get more views on YouTube Shorts.

Putting it together, a plan that works on all three apps:

1. Choose your times. Use your analytics if you have them, or afternoons in your audience's time zone if you don't.
2. Choose how often. Several posts a week on each app, at a pace you can hold.
3. Schedule a week ahead, so a busy day doesn't mean a missed post.
4. Review monthly. Compare videos at the same age, keep what works, and change one thing at a time.

The hard part is having enough good clips to fill those slots. The quickest source is the long videos you or the creator you clip already have: one podcast episode or stream holds many moments that stand on their own. See how to repurpose video content for how to plan it.