What is it?

Discover when sharing content on Facebook, Instagram ,TikTok (business accounts only) , X (Twitter), Linkedin and Youtube is best.

Go to the Planning section after connecting your social networks. Then, click on the Best times button at the top right. After choosing the platform you want to analyze, you will see different shades of color, where a darker hue means a better time to post.

The best time to post on X (Twitter) is available in the Advanced and Custom plans only. Check here access to X depending on your plan.

📊 How to read the heatmap

Each column is a day of the week
Each row is a time slot
The darker the cell, the better the performance

This helps you spot your best posting times at a glance!

💡Need more detail? You can check the percentage of most active users for each time slot.

How do we get this data?

The Best Times might take up to 7 days to show up after connecting to Metricool, depending on the platform. Keep in mind that there's no historical data: every week, past and future, shows the same best times since only the latest calculated or collected ones are saved for each day. Below, we explain how we get this data:

⚠️ Due to the deprecation of the best times for Facebook in the Meta API, as of September 24, 2024, they are shown based on behavioral studies.

Instagram and TikTok: the data is provided for each platform .For these social networks to generate the data, the account typically requires at least 100 followers.

X (Twitter): our tool calculates this based on your community's activity on the social network the previous week.In this case, to enable the calculation, you need to have around 300 active followers. (This means that even if you have more than 300 followers, if only 100 generate activity, it will not be possible to display the information).

Note that the calculation is based on the total number of your active followers for that time slot and not the total number of followers on your account. In addition, Facebook and Instagram tell us the most active users at a specific time, whereas X (Twitter) tells us what time our followers published the most.

Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube: we have conducted behavioral studies on the use of these social networks to have a global visibility of the best times to post content, however, keep in mind that they are not specific to your account.

🤔 Why does this look different from the Instagram chart? (spoiler: it’s to help you out)

The best times we show you in this section come directly from Instagram. That means we’re using the same data source you see in your professional account’s Insights.

But there’s one key difference: We changed the way we display the data to help you interpret it more easily.

🔍 Instead of bars, we use a heatmap:
Darker cells mean higher activity or better performance
Lighter ones show lower impact

This format makes it super easy to spot your peak hours without needing to compare bar heights.

Best times are not displayed

If your accounts have the number of followers needed to show the best times and they are not displayed, go to Metricool with your browser in incognito mode.

If they are displayed in incognito mode, it is because a browser extension or ad blocker is interfering with Metricool; disabling them will display them in the browser.
It is also possible that an antivirus program is blocking this content.

TikTok: To access TikTok's best times, they must be visible in your TikTok (professional) account's analytics. Check by following these steps:

Go to your profile, select the three lines in the upper right corner, and go to "Creator Tools."

Select "Analytics" or "Statistics."

Look for the best times.

In the "Audience" section, you can see when your followers are most active.

Depending on the color hues (the darker, the better), you will know when there is a higher probability that your audience will see your posts. You also have the option to get the best hours data as a percentage.

Updated on: 22/04/2025