Finding the best time to post on TikTok is one of the optimizations you can make to improve your chances of getting plenty of views. Generally, the best times to post on TikTok are early morning, noon, and late evening on weekdays. On weekends, the best times are late morning, late afternoon, and early evening.
What are the best hours to post on TikTok?
Influencer Marketing Hub studied the engagement on over 100,000 posts and concluded that the following were the best time to post on TikTok:
| Day | Best posting time (Eastern Standard Time) |
| Monday: | 6 am, 10 am, 10 pm |
| Tuesday | 2 am, 4 am, 9 am |
| Wednesday | 7 am, 8 am, 11 pm |
| Thursday | 9 am, 12 am, 7 pm |
| Friday | 5 am, 1 pm, 3 pm |
| Saturday | 11 am, 7 pm, 8 pm |
| Sunday | 7 am, 8 am, 4 pm |
Why do these hours work?
When it comes to peak usage times, many TikTok users are most active on the app right after they wake up or during their morning commutes.
That’s why posting in the morning is an excellent choice on weekdays. Users also seem to be checking the app at lunch, just before bed, and even when they wake up to pee in the middle of the night.
Early morning posts don’t perform as well on Saturdays as on other days since most people tend to sleep in. Evening posts tend to struggle on Fridays and Sundays because a lot of people go out on Friday evenings and retire early on Sundays.
Still, the above hours aren’t set in stone. The general rule of thumb is to post when your target audience is most likely to be free. They might not be the same hours that everybody else is free. If you want your content to be seen by night shift workers, posting at 8 am might not work as well as posting at midnight would. Expect your engagement rates to vary depending on the hours you post on Tiktok.
Best day to post on TikTok
The day of the week when you post on Tiktok also matters. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to post. At its core, TikTok is a platform generally used when people want to be entertained but can’t afford to sink too much time into the entertainment itself. The platform’s growing popularity can be described as nothing short of phenomenal, even outpacing other widely used social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
The average user spends 46 minutes a day on TikTok. The total time spent by a TikTok user is rarely accumulated in a single session. It’s instead a product of multiple short sessions.
As such, it makes weekdays perfect for TikTok. People spend their weekdays either at work, at school, or commuting to and from those places. TikTok is attractive precisely because it provides a fun way to burn those ten extra minutes during a commute or on a break.
Weekends aren’t as big for TikTok simply because people have lots of free time. It means loads of other entertainment options are competing for their attention. They could binge-watch a series on Netflix, go to the cinema, go on a date, or a hike, etc.
If people are doing all these other things then they aren’t scrolling TikTok, which means they’re less likely to see your content. That’s why weekdays are your friend.
The worst time to post on TikTok
The middle of the night on a weekend.
What time zone should you use if you have a global audience?
Timing your post might seem complicated if you have a global audience but it really isn’t. Even if your audience is global, it’s not going to be evenly distributed. Thus, posting time would ultimately be a tradeoff. You’ll need to see where most of your audience is located and post accordingly.
Take the United States, for example. It’s a massive country. It is made up of three time zones and 150 million TikTok users or nearly half the nation’s population. But that population isn’t evenly spread across the country. The east is very densely populated while the west tends to be emptier.
The Eastern Time Zone of the United States is home to nearly half the population (47.6%). The Central Time Zone in the middle of the country is home to 29.1%. Some 6.7% of Americans are based in the Mountain Time Zone, while the Pacific Time Zone is home to the remainder (16.6%). Despite the low figures, the best times to post on TikTok in the Mountain Zone is still worth considering.
So, unless you’re specifically targeting people in Utah or Oregon, it makes more sense to just use Eastern Standard Time if you want to tap into a wider American audience. The same applies to other countries, regions, and continents. Just take a few minutes to Google population distributions and find the top territories to target.
Alternatively, you can use different national and regional accounts to target audiences in different locations.
Why does the timing of your post matter?
TikTok’s algorithm serves up your content to a small audience on the “For You” page. The audience will be made up of a small fraction of your followers plus other people that TikTok thinks would like your content.
If the test audience likes your video, the algorithm serves it up to a slightly larger audience with similar characteristics, and then another, and another, on and on until your content either goes viral or reaches an audience that doesn’t like it as much and dies.
While the content on the “For You” page can be up to three months old, the value of freshness can never be overlooked. If the initial test audience doesn’t like your video, the algorithm won’t recommend it.
Let’s say, for example, you post a video you know will mainly appeal to night shift workers at 10 am. The people who would love the video are already asleep. The ones who watch it first might not relate as strongly to the content and therefore not like it as much. The algorithm classifies it as a bad video and doesn’t recommend it further.
A bunch of night shift workers may wake up at noon, watch your video, and like it. This would prompt the algorithm to start recommending it again but is that a chance you’re willing to take? If the reaction from the first test audience is bad enough, the TikTok algorithm may fail to recommend the video to the night shift workers you’re targeting when they actually wake up.
Without the algorithm recommending your content, it’s impossible to get views on TikTok. The best way to get views is to get a receptive test audience when you first post.
Posting when your target audience is online and scrolling increases your odds of getting a favorable test audience for round one of recommendations. That’s why Tiktok posting times matter. Don’t forget to check out your follower activity (from the app’s Followers tab) to know when the best time to post on TikTok is for your audience.
What tools can you use to optimize and set the best time to post on TikTok automatically?
If you signed up for a business or creator account, you can schedule your TikTok posts up to 10 days in advance from the web version of the app. We recommend that you use the tool to manage your post easily. You can easily change your TikTok account type or switch to a TikTok Pro account in the Settings tab to enable scheduling.
If TikTok’s internal scheduler doesn’t work for you, there are plenty of third-party sites you can link to your account and schedule posts from.
How to increase views on TikTok
- Keep up with TikTok trends
- Participate in TikTok challenges
- Use trending music and effects
- Select the proper hashtags
- Create content that encourages engagement
- Post multiple times a day
How to go viral on TikTok
You would often hear content creators ask, “How can I go viral on Tiktok?” Here’s what we can say. There’s no reliable step-by-step guide to going viral.
Virality is not something that can be reliably predicted. The best you can do is make your videos as entertaining as possible and then pray. Knowing the best time to post on TikTok will help you maximize views, but it won’t necessarily help you go viral.
How long does it take for a video on TikTok to go viral?
Going viral can take hours, weeks, or even months. TikTok’s algorithm checks how test audiences respond to a video. Do they like it, comment, or follow you? Positive feedback leads to more recommendations is a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle.
TikTok will only recommend your video, and hence help you go viral if audiences go gaga over your video. If an audience’s reaction to your video is “meh” then you won’t get recommended. The key is to keep testing, so keep a close eye on your analytics.
How much does Tiktok pay for one million views?
Anywhere between $20 and $40. TikTok videos tend to be very short, so there isn’t enough of a time window for ads. Coupled with the edgy nature of popular TiTok content, it means the platform isn’t as popular with advertisers compared to a site like YouTube. Lower ad revenue naturally results in lower payouts.
What’s TikTok heating?
Heating is when TikTok employees pick a video and artificially recommend it to lots of people. The TikTok algorithm typically recommends a video based on the response from test audiences. So when you make a post, it’s first recommended to, say 100 people. Let’s say 50 of these people watch it.
If the response from these first 50 watchers is good, your video is then pushed to 200 people, then 500, then 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, a million and so on in an ever-expanding concentric circle. Your video only gets pushed to a larger audience if it performs well with a smaller audience.
But as reported by Forbes, TikTok employees sometimes put their thumbs on the metaphorical scale and don’t use Tiktok analytics. Instead of letting the recommendation algorithm do its work, these employees ignore all that and just recommend a particular video to say 10 million people. This phenomenon is known internally as heating.
If your video is “heated”, you are going to go viral because even if it’s a mediocre video, it’s still going to get a truckload of views if it’s recommended to 10 or 20 million people. But you shouldn’t count on heating— unless you know someone who works at TikTok.
TikTok employees typically “heat” videos overlooked by the algorithm that the company thinks should be seen by more people. Some employees also “heat” their accounts and those of their spouses. But most of the videos that go viral are pushed by the recommendation algorithm, which is in turn driven by audience reactions.
Does TikTok pick who goes viral?
TikTok ultimately does pick and choose who goes viral. While the algorithm does the heavy lifting, TikTok can and does intervene to either promote or suppress certain videos depending on the biases of the company and its employees.
Conclusion: The best time to post on TikTok
Getting big on TikTok requires a combination of entertaining content, trend jacking, posting optimization, and a sprinkling of luck. Use the table provided above to decide when you should be posting!
Sources
- Influencer Marketing Hub. Best Times to Post on TikTok for 2023.
- Statista. Average time spent per day on Netflix, TikTok, and YouTube by adults in the United States from 2020 to 2024.
- TikTok. Celebrating our thriving community of 150 million Americans.
- TikTok. Introducing Video Scheduler: Now you can plan TikToks in advance!
- U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. and World Population Clock.
- New York Times. Mountain Time Is the Best Time Zone in America.
- Forbes Magazine. TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral.
