Schedule posts at recommended times

Oct 14, 2026
Knowledge

Procedure Steps

Article updated: June 20, 2026

Schedule posts at recommended times

Hootsuite takes the guesswork out of when to publish by providing recommended times to post. Schedule your posts at optimal times with confidence, and drive engagement on your social accounts. You can see recommended times when you create and schedule posts and in your content calendar.

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Hootsuite tailors recommendations for you based on your own historical data. Hootsuite uses the engagement rate on your social posts from the last 30 days to calculate the best time ranges to reach your audience. The more you publish, the smarter and more specific Hootsuite’s recommendations will be.

A social account must have at least three posts with some engagement in the last 30 days to be included in Hootsuite's calculation. Your posts can be published from Hootsuite or directly from a social network. If you don’t have enough data yet, Hootsuite suggests an optimal time range for posting, based on industry standards for when people are most online.

Tip: Hootsuite checks to see if you have any scheduled posts in Plan before recommending times to post. Hootsuite will not publish posts to the same social account at the same time, unless you select the same date and time when scheduling a post using the manual date picker.

Scheduling at recommended times when creating a post

Hootsuite makes recommendations for Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Pages, Instagram Business profiles, X, and TikTok. Recommendations for LinkedIn profiles are restricted to certain plan types (visit the Hootsuite plans page to see if it is included in your plan).

Go to Perch, then select Calendar to start and schedule your post in a calendar view, or select Create a post.Create.
Select Schedule for later.
In the Schedule post window, select the day you want to schedule the post.
Select Recommended times. You can then select a recommended time range, or manually set a specific time for the post to publish.

Go to Create and create your post.
Select Schedule for later.
In the Schedule post window, select the day you want to schedule the post.
Select Recommended times. You can then select a recommended time range, or manually set a specific time for the post to publish.

When you schedule a post to a single social account, Hootsuite recommends specific time ranges in hourly intervals. With more than one social account selected, you may see larger time ranges. Past posts from your selected accounts are grouped into two-hour intervals to find the best three time intervals across all of them. Hootsuite schedules your post at the best time for each account within the time range you select.

Tip: Look at the Best time to publish view in Analytics for even more personalized suggestions based on your goals. See Discover the best times to post

Viewing recommended times in your content calendar

Hootsuite recommends up to three time slots per week in your calendar to help you confidently schedule posts that reach your audience when they're online. Recommended times display by default. You can select Settings and then Show recommended times to turn recommended times on or off in your view.

Settings selected with Show recommended times highlighted.

Point to a recommended time to view the social accounts that Hootsuite recommends you publish to.

A cursor pointing to a recommended time, which shows more detail about the account targeted by the recommendation.

Hootsuite calculates recommended times using a maximum of 100 social accounts. If you have more than 100 connected accounts, Hootsuite uses the accounts with the most followers. You can apply filters to get recommendations for specific social accounts. You can also filter by campaign or team to get recommendations for a set of accounts that you often publish to together. See Filter your content calendar for more details.

Tip: Look at the Best time to publish view in Analytics for even more personalized suggestions based on your goals. See Discover the best times to post

Select Explore the data behind your recommendations to view the analytics in detail. See Discover the best times to post for more information.

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Schedule posts at recommended times

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