Best Time to Post Planner – Heatmap From Your Own Analytics

A best time to post planner built on your own audience data

Searching for the best time to post on Instagram or TikTok turns up dozens of studies, and they do not agree. They average millions of posts from different accounts, countries and time zones, so a slot that wins on average may be wrong for your followers. The most reliable answer is already in your own insights, which show when your audience is active.

This planner takes those active hours, lets you type them in a few plain lines, converts them between time zones (including daylight saving), and draws a weekly heatmap with your strongest slots and a posting schedule. A short table of published studies, with publisher, date and sample, sits underneath for comparison. No heat map is invented: the colours come only from what you enter. Everything runs in your browser.

How to use the Best Time to Post Planner

1. Open your account’s insights and note the days and hours your audience is most active.
2. Type them as lines such as Tue 7pm 90 or Mon-Fri 18-21 70. The number is optional and shows how strong the hour is.
3. Choose the time zone your analytics display and the zone you want to schedule in, and the week to convert for.
4. Read the heatmap, the strongest slots and the suggested schedule for the number of posts you plan each week.
5. Copy the schedule, post for a few weeks, then compare results and adjust.

Best Time to Post Planner features

How the conversion works

For the date you choose, the tool asks your browser’s time-zone database for each zone’s offset from UTC. The difference is the shift. Every hour cell moves by that many minutes, wrapping from Sunday back to Monday at the end of the week. New York in July is UTC−4 and India is UTC+5:30, so the shift is +9.5 hours: Tuesday 7 pm in New York becomes Wednesday 4:30 am in India, shown as half in the 4 am cell and half in the 5 am cell. In December New York is UTC−5, so the gap is 10.5 hours. For a quick one-off check use the time zone converter.

What published studies say, and why to be careful (as of 24 October 2026)

Buffer’s study, published 25 March 2026, reports Thursday at 9 am as the best time on Instagram (nearly 10 million posts analysed) and Sunday at 9 am for TikTok (7.1 million posts), and treats its times as local to the audience. It is a clear example of an average from one company’s users. Other large studies by other publishers have named different hours, so treat each as a starting hypothesis, not a rule. Searches such as “best time to post on Instagram on Sunday” or “on TikTok on Monday” are best answered by your own insights for that day, which you can enter here.

Using the plan

• Post at the start of a strong window or a little before it, so the post is fresh when the audience arrives. Test that against posting inside the window.
• Change one thing at a time and judge on reach and engagement over several weeks; the engagement rate calculator helps compare posts.
• Pair the schedule with a content plan in the social media calendar generator.
• Active hours are not the same as hours when posts perform. Algorithms also weigh content, recent behaviour and format.