Schedule posts at recommended times

Recommended times take the guesswork out of when to publish. You can schedule posts with confidence at optimal times and drive engagement on your social accounts. You can see recommended times in Planner and when you schedule posts in Composer.

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 times to reach your audience. A social account must have at least three posts with some engagement in the last 30 days to be included. Your posts can be published from Hootsuite or directly to a social network. If you don’t have enough data yet, you’ll see general recommendations based on industry data for when people are most online. The more you publish, the smarter and more specific Hootsuite’s recommendations will be.

Hootsuite makes recommendations for Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Pages, Instagram Business and Personal profiles, Twitter, and TikTok. Business and Enterprise plan customers also get recommendations for their LinkedIn profiles.

Scheduling at recommended times from Composer

When you are ready to schedule a post that you’ve created in Composer, select Schedule for later. Select the calendar icon and choose the day you want to schedule the post. You can then select a recommended time, or manually set a specific time for the post to publish.

When available, you’ll see the three best times to publish on that day, with the top option indicated by a star and clock.

When you schedule a post to a single social account, Hootsuite recommends specific times. With more than one social account selected, you may see time ranges. Past posts from your selected accounts are grouped into hourly intervals to find the best three 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 Planner

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 Planner.

Hootsuite takes the average engagement rate on your posts over the last 30 days to find the best times for the week. Posts can be published from Hootsuite or directly to a social network. Each social account must have at least three posts with some engagement in the last 30 days to be included. If you don't have enough data yet, you'll see general recommendations, which will become more specific to your own accounts the more you publish.

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

Hootsuite calculates recommended times using a maximum of 100 social accounts. If you have more than 100 connected accounts, Hootsuite uses the ones with the most followers. You can apply filters in Planner 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.

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