Best time to post guide
Most "best time to post" charts average millions of accounts that aren't yours. Here's what can actually be said, and how to work out your own times.
How to use it
- Read what can and can't be said about timing below.
- Use the schedule planner to space posts through your audience's day.
- After a month, check your own analytics for the hours your posts do best.
What X's open-sourced code says about timing
X's open-sourced recommendation code (github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm) drops posts older than 48 hours from feeds. For accounts under 50,000 followers, it can give a new original post a slot in non-followers' feeds during roughly its first two hours, depending on early likes. It also lowers the weight of each extra post from the same author that competes for one person's feed. In practice: post when your audience is awake and able to respond, space your posts out, and don't expect a fifth post in an hour to add much. The code shows the rules and their default values, but X can tune them and the trained models aren't public.
What LinkedIn has said
LinkedIn hasn't published timing rules. It has said its feed ranks posts by how relevant they are to each member's professional interests and by the response they earn. So timing mostly matters because it decides who sees the post first.
Why generic charts mislead
"Best time to post" charts average huge numbers of accounts with different audiences in different countries. Your audience might be developers in Berlin or founders in San Francisco. The only reliable answer comes from your own posts.
Finding your own best times
- Start with posts spread through your audience's waking hours, in their time zone.
- Keep content quality steady while you test, and post at each time for a few weeks.
- Compare engagement rate by impressions (not raw likes) by hour of posting.
Prospel's Growth Intelligence does this last step for you from your own published posts, and shows your best posting hours.
Runs entirely in your browser. Prospel doesn't receive or store anything you enter here.
Related free tools
X posting schedule planner
Evenly spaced posting times for your audience's timezone, and what each extra post a day is worth.
OpenPosting time zone converter
Convert a posting time (say 9am ET) into the zones your audience lives in, clock changes included.
OpenPosting frequency planner
Turn posts a week into posts a month, writing time and a day-by-day spread.
OpenWant posts that pass these checks without the busywork?
Prospel learns how you write, drafts X and LinkedIn posts from things that really happened, cleans out the AI tells and waits for your approval before anything goes out.
See how Prospel works