What is TikTok?
TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes. Since their launches, TikTok and Douyin have gained global popularity.
What Is The Best Time To Post On TikTok In South Africa?
Before we move on to find your personal best time to post on TikTok, let’s check out the study conducted by the Influencer marketing hub that tells us a few sweet time spots to post on.
According to research by Influencer Marketing Hub, the average best time to post on TikTok for each day of the week is Monday 6 a.m. Tuesday 2 a.m. Wednesday 7 a.m. Thursday 9 a.m. Friday 5 a.m. Saturday 11 a.m. and Sunday 7 a.m. These times are expressed in EST.
| Day | Best time to post on TikTok (EST) |
| Monday | 6 am, 10 am, 10 pm |
| Tuesday | 2 am, 4 am, 9 am |
| Wednesday | 7 am, 8 am, 11 pm |
| Thursday | 9 am, 12 am, 7 pm |
| Friday | 5 am, 1 pm, 3 pm |
| Saturday | 11 am, 7 pm, 8 pm |
| Sunday | 7 am, 8 am, 4 pm |
How Can You Find Your Best Time to Post on TikTok?
It’s hard to say that the average best time to post for a wide range of businesses, based on different companies’ data in other parts of the world, would also apply to your business.
Still, if you are new to TikTok, then having the average best times to post will come in very handy to kick off your video sharing.
On the other hand, if you have been using TikTok for a while, it is time to find the best time to post specifically for your TikTok profile by digging into the analytics section.
Let’s run through the step-by-step process to find out the best time to post on TikTok, so you never miss an engagement opportunity.
Step 1: Switch to a TikTok Pro Account
Before we cut to the chase, you must convert your basic account into a pro-Tiktok account. You can only see the detailed profile analytics necessary to gauge your best time to post on a TikTok Pro account.
Here are the steps:
- Head to the “Manage my account” section by tapping the three dots in the upper right corner of your profile page.
- Inside the section, click on the ”Switch to a Pro Account.”
- Further, choose your business category, and click ”Done.”
Once you are done with all the steps, a dialogue box will welcome you to your pro account. Now you will be able to see the “Analytics” section in your Settings menu.
The next step is to dive into your Analytics section. TikTok’s analytics section is divided into three tabs: Overview, Content, and Followers.
To find out when is the best time to post on TikTok, you will first need to identify where your audience lives.
Step 2: Find Your Top Territories
Identifying the top territories where your audience resides is crucial in finding out the best time to post on TikTok, especially when catering to a global audience across time zones.
It will allow you to settle for a common time across multiple time zones when most of your audience will be online to gobble down your content.
To find out where your audience lives, go to the “Followers” tab and scroll down to view the “Top Territories.”
Unfortunately, unlike Instagram, TikTok only segregates the territories’ data based on countries and not specific cities. It presents a problem for marketers whose audience lives in countries spanning multiple time zones.
For example, say your followers reside in New York City (EST) and California (PT), then posting according to a one-time standard will lose the engagement you could get from the other. The video posted at 7 am EST won’t find the fellow Californians because they would still be in bed.
So you see, even though the timings look similar to some extent, there is a ton of differences due to the disparity of time zones. But don’t worry. There is a workaround to get out of this metric black hole in the further steps.
Step 3: Check When Your Followers are Most Active
Another exciting thing in the TikTok analytics section is the Follower activity metric. It lets you identify the hours and days on which your audience was most active.
Isn’t that great?
To find the “Followers Activity” representation, scroll down inside the Followers tab. Here, you can see how many followers were active on a particular day of the week. It can be seen that follower activity for this account is constant throughout the week.
Step 4: Leverage Data of Your High-Performing Content
The final key to getting closer to your best time to post on TikTok lies in tracking your previous content’s performance.
See if you can find a pattern between your high-performing content and its posting day and time.
TikTok analytics “Content” tab gives in-depth insights to gauge the performance of the content you have posted over the last 7 days.
For each post, you will see tons of performance metrics, such as the number of likes, comments, shares, reach, and average watch time it received.
Also, you can figure out how much traffic your video is getting from the “For You” and “Following” pages, along with the number of views it is receiving from different countries around the world.
Once you sort out all the best-performing content, check out its posting time and date to trace out a pattern there.
Step 5: Create a Spreadsheet for Tracking
Since TikTok only provides you with the post-performance data of the last 7 days, you must create a spreadsheet to track all your content performance.
Having a month of the best TikTok post-times data will help you make informed decisions. You can keep track of the following metrics in your spreadsheet:
- Posting Day and Time
- Video Title
- Video Likes
- Video Comments
- Video Reach
- Video Shares
- Video Average watch time
- Video Views
- Traffic Source
- Primary and Secondary Audience Territories
After a month or quarter of tracking, you can go back to find out which days and times brought you the best results. Make it your best time to post on TikTok.
Doing this exercise will also let you know which of your content generates the most playtime and gets traffic from the “For You” section and which one is not performing well.