What Experts Have To Say About The Optimum Time To Post On TikTok

Now that the UK has opened back up, video sharing apps can be a great place to share incredible moments with your friends. It’s also the perfect time to jump into building a following, but figuring out the right time to post on social media can be a mammoth task. For TikTok users, this can be even more difficult due to the lack of timestamps on videos and the seemingly random feed of the app's "For You" page. So if you're wanting to figure out the best time to post on TikTok in the UK, here's how.

According to influencer advice site Influencer Marketing Hub, the best time differs daily. They've put together a handy chart ranking the best times to post globally after conducting a study analysing over 100,000 videos on the app. After converting the times from EST to GMT, the best periods to post are in the early morning and late evening, as well as around 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to catch those travelling back from school or work. It can also depend on the day of the week, with Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays being optimum times to post where you can expect the highest levels of engagement, according to social media scheduling site Hootsuite, which recommends posting at 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, 6 p.m. on Thursdays, and 1 p.m. on Fridays (when converting PST to GMT).

However, social media consultant Elizabeth Harmon tells Bustle that she advises her clients that there isn’t really a best time to post. “This is because there is no single time that will work for every business. Every business and every audience is different,” she explains. Instead, she advises that companies use recommended times “as a very rough guide” and “test, test, test.” By that, she means experimenting with “posting at different times and days to see what works best” for them and their audience. “This may even change over time, so continual testing is essential,” she adds.

As Harmon points out, “there are many variables for every business” including where they’re located. Timezones can mean all the difference, as Sammy Alderson, the Official Lens Creator at Snapchat, explained on Q&A site Quora. "Even if the majority of followers are in one timezone, the way the algorithm works on TikTok (and Instagram, FB, etc for that matter) means that your content will be shown at a completely different time to when you post it," he said. "We rarely see content chronologically on social media these days."

Tech marketing site Later thinks the same, but explains how you can counteract this somewhat by learning exactly who your audience is and where they're watching from. If you switch your account to TikTok Pro (it's free), it provides access to your analytics which tells you which countries your content is most popular in, which videos have received the most views and engagement, and the most popular time blocks.

But as Later points out, this data is only based on countries and not specific cities. So if the majority of your audience is U.S. based, you'd have to take the two different time zones into account to figure out the best upload schedule.

Harmon adds that the pandemic will have had an affect on the best times to post, too, as “everyone’s habits changed overnight” which highlights “that the time that worked best, may not always work in the future (due to big habit changes or smaller more gradual changes), hence why continual testing is vital.”

Basically, the best time to post on TikTok is about getting to know exactly where your audience is from and predicting — to the best possibility — when they'll be online and able to view and interact with your content.