TikTok posting schedule: best times

Each row is one published analysis, read from its own page on 2026-11-04. They measure different samples over different periods, so they are listed side by side rather than merged into one number.

This is the most direct conflict in the series: what Buffer calls its strongest day (Saturday) is inside what Sprout Social calls the weakest (the weekend), and Buffer’s lowest-engagement hours (12–5 p.m.) overlap Sprout Social’s best window. The published pages do not explain why, so do not try to split the difference — test one weekday-afternoon window and one evening or weekend window against your own audience.

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.

The per-day view shows why the two TikTok studies cannot be averaged. Buffer’s best slots run from early morning to late evening and its strongest days are Saturday, Monday and Sunday; Sprout Social’s windows are weekday afternoons only and it gives no best time on Saturday or Sunday at all. The one shape both share is Monday and Thursday around 1 p.m., which falls inside Sprout Social’s window and is Buffer’s top slot on both days.

Sprout Social is the only one of the two studies that splits TikTok 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.

Buffer’s own data points to 2–5 videos a week (up to 17% more views per post than one a week), while HeyOrca’s survey found 1–3 a week common with some teams pushing to 4–7. Because a TikTok video needs real production time, the sustainable end of the range beats an ambitious schedule you abandon.

TikTok’s own web upload page can schedule a video, and TikTok’s announcement gives the window as 15 minutes to 10 days ahead (it required a Business account at the time). That is much shorter than the months ahead LinkedIn or X allow, so a month-long TikTok calendar needs an outside scheduler.

TikTok posts through SkedCast follow the same rules as the composer: up to 2,200 characters, with at least one image or video required.

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.