Best time to post short videos: how to find yours from your own data

No hour works for everyone. A chart that says "post at 7 pm on Tuesdays" describes some other group of accounts, with its own audience and time zones. It might match yours, but the only way to know is to check your own numbers, and that takes less work than it sounds.

What the platforms say

All three publish something on this, and none of them names a best hour.

• YouTube is the most direct. Its help center says "Publish time is not known to impact a video's long-term performance." The same page adds that publishing when your audience is most active "can be beneficial for early viewership" and that timing matters for Live and Premiere videos.
• Instagram answers the question in one line in its creator FAQ: "When your audience is awake and most active. Use your insights to understand their habits." Its ranking explainer lists when a post went up among the signals for Feed, next to how quickly people are interacting with it.
• TikTok says its recommendations rest on user interactions, content information and user information, with interactions generally weighted most heavily. The page doesn't name posting hour as a factor. It does give you a report of when your viewers are active, which we come to below.

Put together, the hour can affect who sees a video first, while what happens after that depends mostly on how people respond to it. A good hour won't rescue a weak video, and you shouldn't expect a test like this to change your numbers dramatically. You may find no real difference between slots, and that's useful to learn too.

Where to find your audience's hours

These reports show when your audience is around, and they can't tell you when your videos do best. On Instagram the report is about followers, and short videos are often watched by people who don't follow you. Use the reports to choose which hours to test.

A test you can run in four weeks

The steps below are our own suggestion, based on ordinary good practice for small comparisons. It isn't a formal experiment, and the sample sizes are rules of thumb.

1. Pick one app. Run the test there first. The apps count things differently, so results don't carry over.
2. Choose two or three time slots. Take one at your audience's peak, one a couple of hours before it, and one well away from it. The odd one out keeps you from just confirming what you already assumed.
3. Decide what you'll measure before you start. Views at a fixed age is the simplest: for example, the count once each video is 7 days old. Comparing a three-day-old video with a three-week-old one tells you nothing about the hour.
4. Rotate the slots. Don't give one slot all the weekends or all your best topics. Going through the slots in order, day after day, spreads them out.
5. Keep a simple log. Date, slot, topic, views at 7 days. A spreadsheet is enough.
6. Wait for about 8 to 10 videos per slot. At one video a day with three slots, that's about four weeks of posting, plus the last week's videos reaching age 7 days.
7. Compare medians. See the example below for why.
8. Act only on a clear gap. If one slot's median beats another's by a little, treat them as equal and pick the one that's easiest for you to keep.

Why the median and not the average

Short video numbers are lopsided: one video can do many times better than the rest. Here's an example with made-up numbers:

By the average, slot A wins by six times, and all of that comes from one video. By the median, slot B is ahead, because a typical video there does better. Five videos isn't enough to decide anything. That is exactly why you want the median and a longer test.

Traps to watch for

• Comparing counts across apps. Since March 31, 2025 YouTube counts a Shorts view each time it starts or replays, with no minimum watch time, and keeps the old measure as "Engaged views". Instagram says reel views can include several views by the same account. A view on one app is a different thing from a view on another, so run the comparison inside each app.
• Reading the time zone wrong. Check which time zone a report uses before you schedule from it, and check what your scheduler uses too. YouTube Studio asks you to set the time zone when you schedule.
• Changing something else mid-test. A new format or a viral hit in week two will swamp any effect from the hour. If that happens, note it in the log, and consider restarting.
• Treating the answer as permanent. Audiences shift as a channel grows. Repeat the check every few months, or whenever the audience report starts to look different.

Where Reeladay fits

We build Reeladay, so take this as a disclosure as well as a pointer. The panel shows a weekday-by-hour grid of the views your own posts got, by the hour they went out, with blank cells for hours you haven't tried. It also compares each video with your channel's own median. That saves you the spreadsheet. It only knows what you've already posted, so a new account has to run the same test first, and it won't name a best hour on day one. You can schedule each app at its own time if the results differ.

Everything above works without it, using the free reports in each app and a spreadsheet.