Search for the best time to post and you will find a chart. It will say something like Tuesday at 6pm. That chart is an average across millions of accounts in every timezone and every niche, which makes it an average of nothing in particular.
Why the averages mislead
Two accounts with identical follower counts can have opposite peaks. A lunchtime food account and a late-night music account share nothing but a platform. Averaging them produces a number that describes neither.
Worse, the charts are self-reinforcing. Everyone posts at the recommended hour, so the recommended hour is the most competitive hour, so your post has the most company it will ever have.
Finding your own hour
Your own history already contains the answer, and it needs less data than people expect — a few dozen posts is enough to see a shape.
- 1Take the publish time of each of your posts
- 2Take the engagement each one earned
- 3Group by hour of day and average
- 4Smooth the result so a single viral post does not invent a peak
That last step matters more than it sounds. One post that happened to land well at 3am will otherwise show up as a recommendation to post at 3am.
Postgust does this from your own published posts and shows the curve on the dashboard. Until you have published a few, it says so rather than showing you somebody else's numbers.
Then stop thinking about it
Once you know your hours, turn them into a weekly schedule and let the queue place posts for you. The point of finding your peak is to stop deciding it, one post at a time, forever.