Best Time to Post

There's no single magic hour. The best time to post is when your audience is online. PostFriendly figures out a starter answer for you and improves it over time.

How PostFriendly picks times

After you've published 10–15 posts on a channel, PostFriendly looks at:

• When your past posts got the most reach and engagement.
• When the people who follow you tend to be active (where the network shares this).
• The day of the week and the time of day each of those happened.

It blends those into a heatmap — a grid showing the best times to post for each channel.

Where to see it

Analytics → Best Times. A grid for each channel: darker green means stronger past engagement at that hour. The top three suggested slots are highlighted.

Use it in the queue

Settings → Queue → Use suggested slots. PostFriendly auto-fills your queue slots with the best times for each connected channel. You can edit any slot manually after.

When the data is too thin

In your first few weeks, there isn't enough history. PostFriendly falls back to industry averages by channel:

• Facebook — weekday mornings, 7–9 a.m., and lunch, 12–1 p.m.
• Instagram — weekday lunch, 11 a.m.–1 p.m., and evenings, 7–9 p.m.
• X — weekday business hours, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.
• LinkedIn — Tuesday–Thursday, 8–10 a.m. and 4–5 p.m.
• TikTok — evenings, 6–10 p.m. and weekends.

Treat these as a starting point. Your real audience may behave differently — check after a month.

Time zone

Make sure Settings → Timezone matches your customers, not your office. If your business is in New York and your assistant logs in from Manila, the timezone should still be New York.

Posting frequency

More is not better. A consistent rhythm beats a flood:

• Facebook / LinkedIn — 3–5 times a week.
• Instagram — 4–7 times a week, plus stories.
• X — 1–5 times a day.
• TikTok — 1 video a day, every day, for the first 30 days; then 3–5 a week.

PostFriendly's queue makes the rhythm part easy. Stick to it for a month before you decide it isn't working.

Holidays and big moments

Best-time data assumes a normal week. The day before a holiday, a sale launch, or your local big event, override the suggestion and post when your customers are paying attention to your business — not whatever the average says.

Watch the pattern, not the post

A single post that performed great at 8 p.m. doesn't make 8 p.m. your magic hour. Look at the heatmap after 30+ posts. Patterns at scale beat one good night.