Meeting planners & scheduling
Best time to post
Reach each audience when they're actually online. Choose the cities you're posting to and see which hours of your day catch the most people awake and active.
How to use the best time to post
Choose your audience's cities
Add the places your readers or customers actually are, not where you are. If your audience is split, add each major concentration.
Compare the local hours
The view maps each audience's local day onto your clock, so you can see when their commute, lunch and evening fall relative to your own working hours.
Find the shared peak
Look for the hours where several audiences are simultaneously in a high-attention part of their day, and treat those as your primary slots.
Schedule against your own clock
Read the equivalent time in your zone and set your scheduler to that, so you are not doing the conversion at posting time.
Posting into someone else's day, not your own
Every published "best time to post" table has a hidden assumption baked into it: a time zone, usually a North American one. A study that says 9am performs well is describing 9am for the audience, not 9am wherever you happen to sit. If your readers are in Europe and you are in California, following that advice literally puts your post into their late afternoon.
The useful way to think about it is in terms of your audience's day rather than the clock. Attention concentrates in a few predictable windows — the morning commute and first coffee, the lunch break, and the couple of hours after the working day ends. Those windows exist in every zone; they just happen at different absolute instants.
A split audience forces a real choice. If half your readers are in London and half in Sydney, no single post time serves both — the overlap between their attention windows is nearly nil. The answer is usually to post twice or to accept that one audience is primary, and it is better to make that decision deliberately than to discover it in your analytics.
Treat all of this as a starting hypothesis. Timing effects are real but modest, and the platform's own analytics, measured against your own audience, will beat any general rule. What this tool gives you is a sensible first guess and a clear picture of who you are choosing to reach.
When you'd reach for it
Scheduling social posts
Pick slots that land in your audience's attention windows rather than yours.
Newsletter send times
Aim for the top of an inbox at the moment subscribers actually open it.
Product launch timing
Coordinate an announcement so it lands well in more than one major market.
Community announcements
Post when the largest share of a global community is awake and online.
Ad scheduling
Concentrate spend in the local hours that convert instead of spreading it flat.
Support content
Publish documentation and status updates before the region that needs them wakes up.
Questions & answers
- How does it choose the best hours?
- For each hour of your day, it scores every audience city by how active people usually are at their local time — with morning, lunch, and evening peaks — then ranks the totals.
- Is this specific to one platform?
- No. It's a general audience-activity model across time zones, so it works as a starting point for any channel. Combine it with your own analytics for the final call.
- How do I represent a bigger audience in one region?
- Add more cities from that region; each city contributes to the score, so weighting comes naturally from how many you include.