Facebook posting schedule: best times

Each row is one published analysis, read from its own page on 2026-11-03. They measure different samples over different periods, so they are listed side by side rather than merged into one number.

They agree on midweek and on a weak weekend, and disagree on the time of day: Buffer’s morning peak sits where Sprout Social’s window has not yet started, and Buffer’s weakest hours (12–5 p.m.) sit inside Sprout Social’s best window. That is the clearest direct conflict of any platform in this series, so run both a morning and an afternoon test before committing.

Both large studies express times as the audience’s local time: Sprout Social records every time in local time (a 9 a.m. window is 9 a.m. in Los Angeles, London and Sydney alike), and Buffer says to “consider all the recommendations local time”. If your audience is spread across time zones, schedule for the zone where most of your followers are.

Every figure here is an aggregate across many accounts and industries. It tells you where to start testing, not when your audience is online.

Day by day the conflict is plain. Buffer’s best slot is a morning on every weekday except Monday, whose top slots are 7–10 p.m.; Sprout Social’s windows start at noon on every weekday. Both studies are weakest at the weekend, though Buffer still finds Sunday 10 a.m. among its three best slots of the week. If you can test only two slots, take Thursday 9 a.m. from Buffer and Tuesday or Wednesday early afternoon from Sprout Social.

Sprout Social is the only one of the two studies that splits Facebook by industry. Its windows below are in local time, as published on 31 March 2026. They are narrower than the all-industry average because each industry’s audience keeps its own hours: a software audience is online early, a food or retail audience around lunch.

The sources differ on scale: managers surveyed by HeyOrca most often post 2–5 times a week (36% at 2–3, 37% at 4–5), while Buffer’s roundup cites a HubSpot study recommending 1–2 posts a day. Start at the low end of the weekly range and raise it only if engagement per post holds.

Facebook Pages can schedule posts natively in Meta’s own tools (Page composer and Meta Business Suite). Meta’s documentation has described a window of up to 75 days ahead, though some Page owners have reported being limited to about 30 days, so check your own Page. Unlike most platforms, Facebook Pages’ publishing API also accepts a future publish time, so Facebook itself can hold a scheduled Page post.

Facebook posts through SkedCast follow the same rules as the composer: up to 63,206 characters, with text-only posts allowed.

SkedCast holds a scheduled post and publishes it at the time you set, from one content calendar shared with every other connected account, with the same per-platform limits checked when you schedule rather than at publish time. Scheduling never changes when your audience is online; it only makes sure the post goes out in the window you chose.

A study average is a starting hypothesis. Your account’s own results are the evidence. The best time to post tool lists the study windows for every platform side by side, and the posting frequency calculator turns a weekly target into slots. A simple test:

SkedCast’s best-times feature does the “find your own window” step for you where the data exists: a daily job reads each connected account’s own publish history and the engagement analytics SkedCast has ingested for it, and recommends the day-and-hour slots where that account’s posts did best, in the account’s own time zone. It never invents a slot — an account with no analytics data yet simply has none — and how much it can derive depends on what each platform exposes to third-party apps. The same slots are available through the API (GET /v1/best-times, scope besttimes.read) and the MCP get_best_times tool. Best times is included from the Solo plan.