X 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 the shape of the week (Tuesday–Thursday strong, weekend weak) and disagree on the hour: Buffer’s data points to the morning and calls evenings the weakest, Sprout Social’s to the afternoon. We cannot tell from the published pages exactly why — different samples, engagement definitions and periods all differ — so test both windows rather than picking a side.

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.

Buffer’s X data is the most uniform of any platform: the top slot is 9 or 10 a.m. on every day of the week, and evenings (6–11 p.m.) are the weakest hours everywhere. Sprout Social instead finds long midday-to-evening windows from Tuesday to Thursday and says to avoid Saturday. The two meet late morning to midday on Tuesday to Thursday, the window to test first.

Sprout Social is the only one of the two studies that splits X 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 only published X figure we found in the frequency roundups we reviewed is Buffer’s 3–4 posts a day, which Buffer takes from a study of 30 top X accounts rather than its own data; the HeyOrca manager survey has no X figure. That is a benchmark for high-output accounts, not a rule: what matters more is a cadence you can keep up without repeating yourself. Buffer’s roundup also reports, from more than 100,000 Buffer users, that regular posting goes with about five times the engagement of sporadic posting.

X’s automation rules say you may not post duplicative or substantially similar posts on one account, or across multiple accounts you operate. A calendar that repeats identical text at fixed times is exactly what that rule is aimed at, so schedule a fresh variation each time — a new hook, a different image, a different angle on the same link — rather than re-queueing the same wording.

X has its own scheduler, available on the web (not the mobile app), which per Sprout Social’s guide can schedule posts up to 18 months ahead one post at a time. It has no bulk import and no calendar shared with your other platforms.

X posts through SkedCast follow the same rules as the composer: up to 280 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.