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We pored over millions of posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn to pinpoint when the best-performing content was published.

One of my favorite things about TikTok is that it doesn’t play favorites. Even the newest accounts have a fair shot at reaching thousands (or millions!) of people.

The idea of a “welcoming” algorithm might feel strange to long-time creators and social media managers, but if there ever was one, it would be TikTok’s. 

The social media platform is bursting with potential. With over 1.58 billion users spending nearly an hour every day on the app, chances are your audience is already waiting to discover — and follow — you.

Now, follower count isn’t everything. But it does open doors. It helps you build trust, unlock cool features like the TikTok Shop, and grow a loyal community that vibes with your content.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get more followers on TikTok using 14 solid, no-fluff, actionable tips.

Just real, practical strategies that work. If you prefer watching over reading, we’ve summarized the top five tips for you in video form, too:

1. Choose a niche — and stick to it

It’s tempting to throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks — especially on TikTok, where the vibes are more chilled thaon n other social media platforms. But having a niche — even a broad one — has plenty of benefits:

• It tells the TikTok algorithm what your content is about
• It helps you filter your content ideas to a specific topic
• It helps you build authority and trust in your industry
• It makes you more memorable to TikTok users

Kirsti Lang, a Senior Content Writer at Buffer, grew her following by over 1,000% in 30 days. One of her core learnings was that a niche (or a handful of connected niches) is immensely valuable for growing a loyal following.

“If you do find a video you enjoy or find helpful in your FYP, you may tap over to the creator’s profile to see if there are more,” she says. “And if what you find there is a hot mess of all sorts of unrelated things, you’re going to bounce back to the FYP without tapping ‘follow’ real fast.”

Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of Girl Power Marketing, agrees: “People are wanting and searching for spaces and communities where they belong, where they can relate, and where they feel understood,” she says. “So they’re actively looking for creators who get them, or provide an experience for them like escaping — it’s why #BookTok is so huge.”

If you feel constricted by having a singular niche, have a broad one that can fit multiple content pillars — quenching your desire for spontaneity and creativity without violating the algorithm’s preference for cohesiveness.

For example, Kirsti first posted about various topics: her job at Buffer, her love of Taylor Swift, and her fitness routine. But despite one of her Swiftie videos going viral, her watcher-to-follower conversion rate remained low.

Her other videos about how to land a remote job did much better for that metric, even if they didn’t go viral.

“The Swifties were tapping over to my profile and didn’t find a Taylor Swift fan account,” she says. “The remote work video netted a very pleasing 70K views, and I earned a huge chunk of new followers — 757, to be exact — and a much healthier conversation rate.”

Lessons learned: Going viral doesn’t guarantee higher follower counts. You need a niche to establish yourself as an authority on the topic to gain followers and tell TikTok users (and the algorithm) what your TikTok account is about.

If you’re having too much trouble deciding what your niche will be, shift gears a little bit and think about who you’re creating TikTok videos for. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Understand your target audience

Having a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re looking for is the bedrock of getting more followers on all social media platforms, TikTok included.

CEO of Fashivly, Ashlyn Greer, has grown the brand’s TikTok account to over 100k followers. Her core principle has always been to use TikTok to resonate with her audience by understanding (and catering to) her audience’s struggles. Take her video about sizing discrepancies in the fashion industry — it went viral because it struck a chord.

“We’ve continued to create inclusive content based on [audience] insights,” she says. “Understanding their pain points has guided our content creation and ensured we stay as inclusive as possible because we know this approach resonates with our audience.”

Solidifying your niche will lay the groundwork to help you pinpoint the segment of TikTok users you want to reach. The second step is doing your research to figure out your target audience’s pain points and content preferences.

Audience research tools like SparkToro or AnswerThePublic can help you find your audience’s burning questions. But you can also work on understanding your target audience by spending time on TikTok and conducting a competitor analysis. For example, if you’re a creator focusing on creating healthy vegan recipes:

• Search for “healthy vegan recipes” on TikTok and see what pops up
• Analyze the best-performing TikTok videos and creators to understand what topics they’re creating videos on and which are resonating
• Pay attention to the comments on your fellow creators’ videos to dive even further into your audience’s questions, preferences, and recommendations

Understanding your target audience is an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-off task. The more you post (and experiment!), the more feedback you get — in comments, direct messages (DMs), and your TikTok analytics.

3. Write a clear and compelling bio

Your potential followers on TikTok will likely discover your content in the For You Page (FYP). But they might often navigate to your TikTok profile to learn more about who you are and what you post about.

If your TikTok bio is empty, you’re leaving valuable space that could work to get you more followers.

Your bio should tell what content you create — establish your niche and your unique selling point. Instead of making it about you though, focus on your audience and make it about them.

For example, Parker York Smith’s bio says, “Helping you look good and feel confident,” which is an instant value prop for why you should follow him.

While you’re at it, also ensure that your TikTok profile is up to date — have a clear profile picture and an easy-to-read username. All of the factors in your profile will work together to help build trust and make it tempting to follow you.

4. Build a content calendar to post consistently

TikTok, like all other social media platforms, loves consistency. The ideal posting frequency for TikTok is two short-form videos a day. 

But take that number with a grain of salt. You can adjust this based on your capacity — more important to maintain the quality of your TikTok videos. 

Kirsti, for example, has seen solid audience growth with two or three videos a month.

A smart way to increase your posting cadence without burning out is to repurpose your content. If you already have a YouTube channel, for instance, you can chop up some videos from there to post on your TikTok account. You can also shoot b-roll in bulk (hello, content batching) and reuse it for future videos.

Alice Kim, founder of PerfectDD, used TikTok to generate $25,000 in sales for her business in a month. She found that many of her old videos would resurface to new TikTok users, thanks to the algorithm. Having a consistent branding (alongside regular posting) helped her immensely in this scenario.

“I’ve found consistency in messaging is more important than consistency of posting,” she says. “This means that any of my videos could be seen by a new potential customer at any time."

"That’s why I’m unafraid to reiterate my brand promise and message over and over again, so people who are new to my videos always know what PerfectDD is all about.”

The easiest way to maintain a consistent posting schedule is by creating a content calendar and using a tool like Buffer to automate posting (Buffer also doubles as a content calendar — so you don’t need both!). This way, you can visually spot your content gaps and fill them.

Remember to leave some room in that content calendar for trending content.

5. Create trending content

Let’s be clear: Trending content isn’t a magic bullet to increase your TikTok followers. But it can help you become more visible on the For You Page — which can, by extension, help you get more followers on TikTok.

While creating your content calendar, leave some gaps for trending videos. Or you could treat them as bonus posts! There can be three kinds of trends:

• TikTok trends: A trend that’s unique to the TikTok app, like challenge videos.
• Trending songs: You can often find trending songs used behind TikTok videos.
• Industry-specific trends: Trends related to a specific news or event in your niche.

If you scroll on TikTok regularly, you’ll automatically start finding these trends on your FYP. Some trends are also tied to a specific period, like the holidays or the fall season. Most trending content will be time-sensitive, so you need to jump on trends before they fade.

Keep two things in mind before hopping on trends:

• Your trending videos still need to fit your niche. Don’t participate in a trend if it’s not true to your brand values or can’t be molded for your industry.
• Balance trending content with evergreen content. Trending posts can provide you with viral moments and boost visibility, but the real gold is the evergreen content that makes people follow you and stick around.

Alice experienced this herself:

“Sometimes, trendy TikToks didn’t work because the trend wasn’t authentic enough to me and my brand. The trends that have most benefited my business are the ones I personally had an emotional reaction to,” she said. 

“I still try the trends when they’re easy and fun for me, but what people really pick up on are the videos in which I’m authentically sharing my experience and talking about my brand.”

Your TikTok strategy should include a healthy mix of trending and evergreen content. Trending videos might bring in a large TikTok audience to your profile, but evergreen content is what will make them stick around.

And while you’re creating that content calendar (hopefully using a smart tool like Buffer!), you also want to select the right time to post.

6. Post at the right time

There’s no such thing as the right time to start working on your goals. Or meet your soulmate. Or having a sweet treat. But posting on TikTok? Yep, there’s a right time for that one.

You don’t want to post when your engagement will be low. Or when there’ll be too much competition and your video will drown in the noise. Or when your audience is fast asleep.

The goal is to post when video discoverability is at an all-time high so you get more engagement. Based on our analysis of one million TikTok posts, that time is between 4-5 p.m. mid-week.

Posting at the right time might sound like a small, insignificant thing. And it is a relatively small piece of the puzzle of how to get more followers on TikTok. But it can help your TikTok content get that initial boost it needs to get in front of the right audience at the perfect time.

7. Focus on scroll-stopping hooks

Short-form video content (whether it’s TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts) thrives when the first few seconds of your video can quickly grab attention.

Take this video by Erin McGoff: The “I got the job!” phrase quickly piques interest and curiosity. The following line, “Ugh, that salary is way too low,” holds it. You want to know what the character would do next.

Your hook can be the audio, the visual, the text on the screen, or all three combined. The goal is to stop the scroll. Think: What would my audience see or hear and immediately stop in their tracks?

Use copywriting formulas and closely observe the hooks that make you want to watch more. Slowly but surely, you’ll learn to craft impeccable hooks.

Hooks might not seem like a TikTok strategy for follower growth, but a strong hook is what gets your foot in the door. Once someone is hooked (pun intended) to your TikTok content, they’ll stick around till the end to see it through. And if they like what they see, they’ll tap the follow button to see more of it.

8. End your videos with a strong call-to-action

Here’s something I learned in therapy that applies to TikTok marketing, too (the parallels of life remain unparalleled, amirite?): You gotta ask for what you need.

Maybe your TikTok videos are epic, but are you asking viewers to follow you? It could be something as simple as “Follow me for more [your niche] tips!”

Another thing you could do is tease what you’re going to post about in the future that might also interest your potential TikTok followers. For example, Kallie Baker ends with a call-to-action of “Tomorrow, I’ll teach you [this new thing],” in one of her videos.

If you’ve watched her video till the end, she’s already succeeded in making you see the value in her content. The call to action gives you a great reason to follow (‘I can learn this too if I follow Kallie!’), too.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. If you can’t say the ‘follow me’ using a voiceover because you’re using music, use overlay text somewhere at the bottom or top of your video to nudge the same behavior and get more followers on TikTok.

9. Start a content series

A content series is when you create episodic content on a specific topic. It has the binge-able value that keeps your audience returning for more. Plus, a series makes it easier for you to come up with new video ideas.

Tiffany Yu — who landed $160k in brand partnerships and a book deal using her TikTok account — says her anti-ableism series put her on the map.

“Since launching it, I was named to the inaugural API TikTok Trailblazers list alongside creators like Bella Poarch, and a literary agent who saw it reached out about writing a book,” she said. “The series has nearly 300 posts and over 5 million views.”

She also explains why she thinks the series helped her with follower growth: “For one, it helps new followers engage more deeply in my content,” she said. “When someone discovers a video and sees it’s ‘part 273,’ they’ll likely be curious to explore other content from the series.”

Annie-Mai also believes in the power of content series: “Audiences are craving something to latch onto, something that feels familiar, consistent and worth returning to,” she says. “That’s why series content works so well.”

A series can also help you stay consistent because you can create content on a broad topic without starting from scratch each time. Choose a topic that’s broad enough to require multiple videos and one that your audience is interested in.

10. Use relevant hashtags and SEO terms

The TikTok algorithm uses hashtags and keywords within your post to understand what your post is about and put it in front of people who like watching similar videos. SEO also comes into the picture because more and more people are using the TikTok app as a search engine.

This is why it’s important to use the right hashtags and SEO terms. Use three to five relevant hashtags with each post alongside naturally-woven keywords your audience might be searching for.

Follow this evergreen TikTok checklist each time before posting:

• Did your caption contain relevant keywords?
• Have you included 3-5 hashtags?
• Did you film within TikTok or use their affiliated app, CapCut?
• Have you included a TikTok audio?

According to TikTok’s Creator Academy: “Avoid including irrelevant or misleading keywords based solely on popularity — irrelevant text stacking will actually negatively affect your video traffic,” they say.

“If you want your video to do well in search, describe your video content accurately and objectively.”

11. Engage with your community

Someone who commented on your video might not follow you. Engaging with them by responding to their comment is an easy way to make them return to your video and become more memorable — leading to an eventual follow.

The TikTok algorithm — like many other platforms — pushes posts with more engagement at the frontline. If you regularly create engaging content that makes people comment and you reply back, you play in favor of the TikTok game.

But it’s not just about playing the game; it’s also the foundation of building a strong community: Social media is a two-way street. Instead of posting and ghosting, engage with your followers and learn from their feedback.

Tiffany focused on going the extra mile and giving video replies to her audience:

“Early on in growing my channel, I not only made sure to try to respond to most of the comments, but I would also respond to questions with video replies,” she says.

“Not only does that person get notified that you replied, but it also signals to your audience that you are reading the comments and willing to engage with them, making them more excited to stick around.”

Gaining followers is not in a silo, after all. You don’t want an inflated follower count alone, you want a loyal and engaged community. And responding to every comment you can is the first step to make your followers feel valued and heard.

12. Collaborate with fellow creators or influencers

If you’re a creator, collaborating with other creators in the same industry can be a win-win for both parties: Both of you can cross-promote your content in front of new, vetted audiences who will like your content (and potentially follow you).

There are also TikTok features like a duet or stitch — where you can add your own spin to a popular video. This can be helpful when you want to add to a conversation that’s already a hot topic on TikTok.

Alice says many of her popular videos were created using stitches.

“Some of our most popular videos lately have been duets or stitches with other women complaining about the exact problems that we’re trying to solve,” she says.

If you’re a business owner, you can also collaborate with TikTok influencers using influencer marketing and sharing user-generated content.

• Via influencer marketing, you want to choose relevant creators with a tight-knit, loyal audience to talk about your brand authentically. You can gift them your products with no strings attached or do a paid partnership if you have the budget.
• Via user-generated content, you can reshare your customers' organic posts and testimonials on your TikTok account. These serve to build trust and help you gain more followers.

Whether you use duets, stitches, or user-generated content, remember to credit the original creator before reposting (along with asking for permission to repost).

13. Experiment with video length

We analyzed over one million posts and found TikTok videos over one minute in length get:

• 43.2% more reach than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 70.3% more reach than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 95.7% more reach than videos in the 5-10 second range

The numbers were similar for average watch time (a crucial ingredient of the TikTok algorithm). TikToks longer than a minute got:

• 63.8% more watch time than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 175.6% more watch time than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 264.5% more watch time than videos in the 5-10 second range

While TikTok became famous for short-form video content, videos under 10 seconds are no longer the only way to keep your audience engaged. Instead, create content that focuses on providing value and experiment with various video lengths to find the one that works best for you.

Engaging content has no ideal length — it all depends on the topic at hand, your video editing chops, and your audience’s preferences.

14. Don’t buy TikTok followers

You’ll see loads of companies trying to sell bots as TikTok followers. But taking this shortcut isn’t just against TikTok’s Community Guidelines, it also doesn’t fulfill your larger purpose: building a loyal following.

In fact, gaining followers this way could hurt your TikTok presence because it harms your personal brand and overall reputation.

Your actual TikTok followers might put two and two together when they don’t see your engagement and follower count number adding up (or when bots comment generic compliments on all your videos). This will hurt your brand presence immensely in the long run.

There’s no denying that getting more followers on TikTok is hard work — it requires a lot of patience.

But buying followers isn’t going to make that any easier. Focusing on creating high-quality content for your target audience — without fussing too much over that follower count — might make it a bit more enjoyable.

Growing on TikTok isn’t a one-time affair

TikTok marketing is a whole host of things — increasing your follower count is a small, ongoing part of it.

What you don’t need in addition to creating content regularly, engaging with your followers, and keeping up with new features (along with algorithmic changes and potential ban fears), is also taking up the admin work of posting everything manually and tracking the results of your efforts.

Outsource those tasks to Buffer so you can focus on the important things that’ll give you a better ROI on your time. Take it for a free spin today.

More TikTok resources:

My TikTok Experiment: How I Grew My Following by More Than 1,000% in 30 Days

TikTok Has Landed Me $160K in Brand Partnerships and a 6-Figure Book Deal — Here’s How I Did ItHow to Use TikTok Studio: A Handy Tool for Growing on the Platform15 Trending Songs on TikTok in 2025 (+ How to Use Them)

I recently attended SXSW London – here are my top insights for creators.

One of my favorite things about TikTok is that it doesn’t play favorites. Even the newest accounts have a fair shot at reaching thousands (or millions!) of people.

The idea of a “welcoming” algorithm might feel strange to long-time creators and social media managers, but if there ever was one, it would be TikTok’s. 

The social media platform is bursting with potential. With over 1.58 billion users spending nearly an hour every day on the app, chances are your audience is already waiting to discover — and follow — you.

Now, follower count isn’t everything. But it does open doors. It helps you build trust, unlock cool features like the TikTok Shop, and grow a loyal community that vibes with your content.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get more followers on TikTok using 14 solid, no-fluff, actionable tips.

Just real, practical strategies that work. If you prefer watching over reading, we’ve summarized the top five tips for you in video form, too:

1. Choose a niche — and stick to it

It’s tempting to throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks — especially on TikTok, where the vibes are more chilled thaon n other social media platforms. But having a niche — even a broad one — has plenty of benefits:

• It tells the TikTok algorithm what your content is about
• It helps you filter your content ideas to a specific topic
• It helps you build authority and trust in your industry
• It makes you more memorable to TikTok users

Kirsti Lang, a Senior Content Writer at Buffer, grew her following by over 1,000% in 30 days. One of her core learnings was that a niche (or a handful of connected niches) is immensely valuable for growing a loyal following.

“If you do find a video you enjoy or find helpful in your FYP, you may tap over to the creator’s profile to see if there are more,” she says. “And if what you find there is a hot mess of all sorts of unrelated things, you’re going to bounce back to the FYP without tapping ‘follow’ real fast.”

Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of Girl Power Marketing, agrees: “People are wanting and searching for spaces and communities where they belong, where they can relate, and where they feel understood,” she says. “So they’re actively looking for creators who get them, or provide an experience for them like escaping — it’s why #BookTok is so huge.”

If you feel constricted by having a singular niche, have a broad one that can fit multiple content pillars — quenching your desire for spontaneity and creativity without violating the algorithm’s preference for cohesiveness.

For example, Kirsti first posted about various topics: her job at Buffer, her love of Taylor Swift, and her fitness routine. But despite one of her Swiftie videos going viral, her watcher-to-follower conversion rate remained low.

Her other videos about how to land a remote job did much better for that metric, even if they didn’t go viral.

“The Swifties were tapping over to my profile and didn’t find a Taylor Swift fan account,” she says. “The remote work video netted a very pleasing 70K views, and I earned a huge chunk of new followers — 757, to be exact — and a much healthier conversation rate.”

Lessons learned: Going viral doesn’t guarantee higher follower counts. You need a niche to establish yourself as an authority on the topic to gain followers and tell TikTok users (and the algorithm) what your TikTok account is about.

If you’re having too much trouble deciding what your niche will be, shift gears a little bit and think about who you’re creating TikTok videos for. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Understand your target audience

Having a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re looking for is the bedrock of getting more followers on all social media platforms, TikTok included.

CEO of Fashivly, Ashlyn Greer, has grown the brand’s TikTok account to over 100k followers. Her core principle has always been to use TikTok to resonate with her audience by understanding (and catering to) her audience’s struggles. Take her video about sizing discrepancies in the fashion industry — it went viral because it struck a chord.

“We’ve continued to create inclusive content based on [audience] insights,” she says. “Understanding their pain points has guided our content creation and ensured we stay as inclusive as possible because we know this approach resonates with our audience.”

Solidifying your niche will lay the groundwork to help you pinpoint the segment of TikTok users you want to reach. The second step is doing your research to figure out your target audience’s pain points and content preferences.

Audience research tools like SparkToro or AnswerThePublic can help you find your audience’s burning questions. But you can also work on understanding your target audience by spending time on TikTok and conducting a competitor analysis. For example, if you’re a creator focusing on creating healthy vegan recipes:

• Search for “healthy vegan recipes” on TikTok and see what pops up
• Analyze the best-performing TikTok videos and creators to understand what topics they’re creating videos on and which are resonating
• Pay attention to the comments on your fellow creators’ videos to dive even further into your audience’s questions, preferences, and recommendations

Understanding your target audience is an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-off task. The more you post (and experiment!), the more feedback you get — in comments, direct messages (DMs), and your TikTok analytics.

3. Write a clear and compelling bio

Your potential followers on TikTok will likely discover your content in the For You Page (FYP). But they might often navigate to your TikTok profile to learn more about who you are and what you post about.

If your TikTok bio is empty, you’re leaving valuable space that could work to get you more followers.

Your bio should tell what content you create — establish your niche and your unique selling point. Instead of making it about you though, focus on your audience and make it about them.

For example, Parker York Smith’s bio says, “Helping you look good and feel confident,” which is an instant value prop for why you should follow him.

While you’re at it, also ensure that your TikTok profile is up to date — have a clear profile picture and an easy-to-read username. All of the factors in your profile will work together to help build trust and make it tempting to follow you.

4. Build a content calendar to post consistently

TikTok, like all other social media platforms, loves consistency. The ideal posting frequency for TikTok is two short-form videos a day. 

But take that number with a grain of salt. You can adjust this based on your capacity — more important to maintain the quality of your TikTok videos. 

Kirsti, for example, has seen solid audience growth with two or three videos a month.

A smart way to increase your posting cadence without burning out is to repurpose your content. If you already have a YouTube channel, for instance, you can chop up some videos from there to post on your TikTok account. You can also shoot b-roll in bulk (hello, content batching) and reuse it for future videos.

Alice Kim, founder of PerfectDD, used TikTok to generate $25,000 in sales for her business in a month. She found that many of her old videos would resurface to new TikTok users, thanks to the algorithm. Having a consistent branding (alongside regular posting) helped her immensely in this scenario.

“I’ve found consistency in messaging is more important than consistency of posting,” she says. “This means that any of my videos could be seen by a new potential customer at any time."

"That’s why I’m unafraid to reiterate my brand promise and message over and over again, so people who are new to my videos always know what PerfectDD is all about.”

The easiest way to maintain a consistent posting schedule is by creating a content calendar and using a tool like Buffer to automate posting (Buffer also doubles as a content calendar — so you don’t need both!). This way, you can visually spot your content gaps and fill them.

Remember to leave some room in that content calendar for trending content.

5. Create trending content

Let’s be clear: Trending content isn’t a magic bullet to increase your TikTok followers. But it can help you become more visible on the For You Page — which can, by extension, help you get more followers on TikTok.

While creating your content calendar, leave some gaps for trending videos. Or you could treat them as bonus posts! There can be three kinds of trends:

• TikTok trends: A trend that’s unique to the TikTok app, like challenge videos.
• Trending songs: You can often find trending songs used behind TikTok videos.
• Industry-specific trends: Trends related to a specific news or event in your niche.

If you scroll on TikTok regularly, you’ll automatically start finding these trends on your FYP. Some trends are also tied to a specific period, like the holidays or the fall season. Most trending content will be time-sensitive, so you need to jump on trends before they fade.

Keep two things in mind before hopping on trends:

• Your trending videos still need to fit your niche. Don’t participate in a trend if it’s not true to your brand values or can’t be molded for your industry.
• Balance trending content with evergreen content. Trending posts can provide you with viral moments and boost visibility, but the real gold is the evergreen content that makes people follow you and stick around.

Alice experienced this herself:

“Sometimes, trendy TikToks didn’t work because the trend wasn’t authentic enough to me and my brand. The trends that have most benefited my business are the ones I personally had an emotional reaction to,” she said. 

“I still try the trends when they’re easy and fun for me, but what people really pick up on are the videos in which I’m authentically sharing my experience and talking about my brand.”

Your TikTok strategy should include a healthy mix of trending and evergreen content. Trending videos might bring in a large TikTok audience to your profile, but evergreen content is what will make them stick around.

And while you’re creating that content calendar (hopefully using a smart tool like Buffer!), you also want to select the right time to post.

6. Post at the right time

There’s no such thing as the right time to start working on your goals. Or meet your soulmate. Or having a sweet treat. But posting on TikTok? Yep, there’s a right time for that one.

You don’t want to post when your engagement will be low. Or when there’ll be too much competition and your video will drown in the noise. Or when your audience is fast asleep.

The goal is to post when video discoverability is at an all-time high so you get more engagement. Based on our analysis of one million TikTok posts, that time is between 4-5 p.m. mid-week.

Posting at the right time might sound like a small, insignificant thing. And it is a relatively small piece of the puzzle of how to get more followers on TikTok. But it can help your TikTok content get that initial boost it needs to get in front of the right audience at the perfect time.

7. Focus on scroll-stopping hooks

Short-form video content (whether it’s TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts) thrives when the first few seconds of your video can quickly grab attention.

Take this video by Erin McGoff: The “I got the job!” phrase quickly piques interest and curiosity. The following line, “Ugh, that salary is way too low,” holds it. You want to know what the character would do next.

Your hook can be the audio, the visual, the text on the screen, or all three combined. The goal is to stop the scroll. Think: What would my audience see or hear and immediately stop in their tracks?

Use copywriting formulas and closely observe the hooks that make you want to watch more. Slowly but surely, you’ll learn to craft impeccable hooks.

Hooks might not seem like a TikTok strategy for follower growth, but a strong hook is what gets your foot in the door. Once someone is hooked (pun intended) to your TikTok content, they’ll stick around till the end to see it through. And if they like what they see, they’ll tap the follow button to see more of it.

8. End your videos with a strong call-to-action

Here’s something I learned in therapy that applies to TikTok marketing, too (the parallels of life remain unparalleled, amirite?): You gotta ask for what you need.

Maybe your TikTok videos are epic, but are you asking viewers to follow you? It could be something as simple as “Follow me for more [your niche] tips!”

Another thing you could do is tease what you’re going to post about in the future that might also interest your potential TikTok followers. For example, Kallie Baker ends with a call-to-action of “Tomorrow, I’ll teach you [this new thing],” in one of her videos.

If you’ve watched her video till the end, she’s already succeeded in making you see the value in her content. The call to action gives you a great reason to follow (‘I can learn this too if I follow Kallie!’), too.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. If you can’t say the ‘follow me’ using a voiceover because you’re using music, use overlay text somewhere at the bottom or top of your video to nudge the same behavior and get more followers on TikTok.

9. Start a content series

A content series is when you create episodic content on a specific topic. It has the binge-able value that keeps your audience returning for more. Plus, a series makes it easier for you to come up with new video ideas.

Tiffany Yu — who landed $160k in brand partnerships and a book deal using her TikTok account — says her anti-ableism series put her on the map.

“Since launching it, I was named to the inaugural API TikTok Trailblazers list alongside creators like Bella Poarch, and a literary agent who saw it reached out about writing a book,” she said. “The series has nearly 300 posts and over 5 million views.”

She also explains why she thinks the series helped her with follower growth: “For one, it helps new followers engage more deeply in my content,” she said. “When someone discovers a video and sees it’s ‘part 273,’ they’ll likely be curious to explore other content from the series.”

Annie-Mai also believes in the power of content series: “Audiences are craving something to latch onto, something that feels familiar, consistent and worth returning to,” she says. “That’s why series content works so well.”

A series can also help you stay consistent because you can create content on a broad topic without starting from scratch each time. Choose a topic that’s broad enough to require multiple videos and one that your audience is interested in.

10. Use relevant hashtags and SEO terms

The TikTok algorithm uses hashtags and keywords within your post to understand what your post is about and put it in front of people who like watching similar videos. SEO also comes into the picture because more and more people are using the TikTok app as a search engine.

This is why it’s important to use the right hashtags and SEO terms. Use three to five relevant hashtags with each post alongside naturally-woven keywords your audience might be searching for.

Follow this evergreen TikTok checklist each time before posting:

• Did your caption contain relevant keywords?
• Have you included 3-5 hashtags?
• Did you film within TikTok or use their affiliated app, CapCut?
• Have you included a TikTok audio?

According to TikTok’s Creator Academy: “Avoid including irrelevant or misleading keywords based solely on popularity — irrelevant text stacking will actually negatively affect your video traffic,” they say.

“If you want your video to do well in search, describe your video content accurately and objectively.”

11. Engage with your community

Someone who commented on your video might not follow you. Engaging with them by responding to their comment is an easy way to make them return to your video and become more memorable — leading to an eventual follow.

The TikTok algorithm — like many other platforms — pushes posts with more engagement at the frontline. If you regularly create engaging content that makes people comment and you reply back, you play in favor of the TikTok game.

But it’s not just about playing the game; it’s also the foundation of building a strong community: Social media is a two-way street. Instead of posting and ghosting, engage with your followers and learn from their feedback.

Tiffany focused on going the extra mile and giving video replies to her audience:

“Early on in growing my channel, I not only made sure to try to respond to most of the comments, but I would also respond to questions with video replies,” she says.

“Not only does that person get notified that you replied, but it also signals to your audience that you are reading the comments and willing to engage with them, making them more excited to stick around.”

Gaining followers is not in a silo, after all. You don’t want an inflated follower count alone, you want a loyal and engaged community. And responding to every comment you can is the first step to make your followers feel valued and heard.

12. Collaborate with fellow creators or influencers

If you’re a creator, collaborating with other creators in the same industry can be a win-win for both parties: Both of you can cross-promote your content in front of new, vetted audiences who will like your content (and potentially follow you).

There are also TikTok features like a duet or stitch — where you can add your own spin to a popular video. This can be helpful when you want to add to a conversation that’s already a hot topic on TikTok.

Alice says many of her popular videos were created using stitches.

“Some of our most popular videos lately have been duets or stitches with other women complaining about the exact problems that we’re trying to solve,” she says.

If you’re a business owner, you can also collaborate with TikTok influencers using influencer marketing and sharing user-generated content.

• Via influencer marketing, you want to choose relevant creators with a tight-knit, loyal audience to talk about your brand authentically. You can gift them your products with no strings attached or do a paid partnership if you have the budget.
• Via user-generated content, you can reshare your customers' organic posts and testimonials on your TikTok account. These serve to build trust and help you gain more followers.

Whether you use duets, stitches, or user-generated content, remember to credit the original creator before reposting (along with asking for permission to repost).

13. Experiment with video length

We analyzed over one million posts and found TikTok videos over one minute in length get:

• 43.2% more reach than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 70.3% more reach than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 95.7% more reach than videos in the 5-10 second range

The numbers were similar for average watch time (a crucial ingredient of the TikTok algorithm). TikToks longer than a minute got:

• 63.8% more watch time than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 175.6% more watch time than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 264.5% more watch time than videos in the 5-10 second range

While TikTok became famous for short-form video content, videos under 10 seconds are no longer the only way to keep your audience engaged. Instead, create content that focuses on providing value and experiment with various video lengths to find the one that works best for you.

Engaging content has no ideal length — it all depends on the topic at hand, your video editing chops, and your audience’s preferences.

14. Don’t buy TikTok followers

You’ll see loads of companies trying to sell bots as TikTok followers. But taking this shortcut isn’t just against TikTok’s Community Guidelines, it also doesn’t fulfill your larger purpose: building a loyal following.

In fact, gaining followers this way could hurt your TikTok presence because it harms your personal brand and overall reputation.

Your actual TikTok followers might put two and two together when they don’t see your engagement and follower count number adding up (or when bots comment generic compliments on all your videos). This will hurt your brand presence immensely in the long run.

There’s no denying that getting more followers on TikTok is hard work — it requires a lot of patience.

But buying followers isn’t going to make that any easier. Focusing on creating high-quality content for your target audience — without fussing too much over that follower count — might make it a bit more enjoyable.

Growing on TikTok isn’t a one-time affair

TikTok marketing is a whole host of things — increasing your follower count is a small, ongoing part of it.

What you don’t need in addition to creating content regularly, engaging with your followers, and keeping up with new features (along with algorithmic changes and potential ban fears), is also taking up the admin work of posting everything manually and tracking the results of your efforts.

Outsource those tasks to Buffer so you can focus on the important things that’ll give you a better ROI on your time. Take it for a free spin today.

More TikTok resources:

My TikTok Experiment: How I Grew My Following by More Than 1,000% in 30 Days

TikTok Has Landed Me $160K in Brand Partnerships and a 6-Figure Book Deal — Here’s How I Did ItHow to Use TikTok Studio: A Handy Tool for Growing on the Platform15 Trending Songs on TikTok in 2025 (+ How to Use Them)

An up-to-date list of the most viral songs and sounds on TikTok in 2025 — and how to use them to boost your content.

One of my favorite things about TikTok is that it doesn’t play favorites. Even the newest accounts have a fair shot at reaching thousands (or millions!) of people.

The idea of a “welcoming” algorithm might feel strange to long-time creators and social media managers, but if there ever was one, it would be TikTok’s. 

The social media platform is bursting with potential. With over 1.58 billion users spending nearly an hour every day on the app, chances are your audience is already waiting to discover — and follow — you.

Now, follower count isn’t everything. But it does open doors. It helps you build trust, unlock cool features like the TikTok Shop, and grow a loyal community that vibes with your content.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get more followers on TikTok using 14 solid, no-fluff, actionable tips.

Just real, practical strategies that work. If you prefer watching over reading, we’ve summarized the top five tips for you in video form, too:

1. Choose a niche — and stick to it

It’s tempting to throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks — especially on TikTok, where the vibes are more chilled thaon n other social media platforms. But having a niche — even a broad one — has plenty of benefits:

• It tells the TikTok algorithm what your content is about
• It helps you filter your content ideas to a specific topic
• It helps you build authority and trust in your industry
• It makes you more memorable to TikTok users

Kirsti Lang, a Senior Content Writer at Buffer, grew her following by over 1,000% in 30 days. One of her core learnings was that a niche (or a handful of connected niches) is immensely valuable for growing a loyal following.

“If you do find a video you enjoy or find helpful in your FYP, you may tap over to the creator’s profile to see if there are more,” she says. “And if what you find there is a hot mess of all sorts of unrelated things, you’re going to bounce back to the FYP without tapping ‘follow’ real fast.”

Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of Girl Power Marketing, agrees: “People are wanting and searching for spaces and communities where they belong, where they can relate, and where they feel understood,” she says. “So they’re actively looking for creators who get them, or provide an experience for them like escaping — it’s why #BookTok is so huge.”

If you feel constricted by having a singular niche, have a broad one that can fit multiple content pillars — quenching your desire for spontaneity and creativity without violating the algorithm’s preference for cohesiveness.

For example, Kirsti first posted about various topics: her job at Buffer, her love of Taylor Swift, and her fitness routine. But despite one of her Swiftie videos going viral, her watcher-to-follower conversion rate remained low.

Her other videos about how to land a remote job did much better for that metric, even if they didn’t go viral.

“The Swifties were tapping over to my profile and didn’t find a Taylor Swift fan account,” she says. “The remote work video netted a very pleasing 70K views, and I earned a huge chunk of new followers — 757, to be exact — and a much healthier conversation rate.”

Lessons learned: Going viral doesn’t guarantee higher follower counts. You need a niche to establish yourself as an authority on the topic to gain followers and tell TikTok users (and the algorithm) what your TikTok account is about.

If you’re having too much trouble deciding what your niche will be, shift gears a little bit and think about who you’re creating TikTok videos for. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Understand your target audience

Having a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re looking for is the bedrock of getting more followers on all social media platforms, TikTok included.

CEO of Fashivly, Ashlyn Greer, has grown the brand’s TikTok account to over 100k followers. Her core principle has always been to use TikTok to resonate with her audience by understanding (and catering to) her audience’s struggles. Take her video about sizing discrepancies in the fashion industry — it went viral because it struck a chord.

“We’ve continued to create inclusive content based on [audience] insights,” she says. “Understanding their pain points has guided our content creation and ensured we stay as inclusive as possible because we know this approach resonates with our audience.”

Solidifying your niche will lay the groundwork to help you pinpoint the segment of TikTok users you want to reach. The second step is doing your research to figure out your target audience’s pain points and content preferences.

Audience research tools like SparkToro or AnswerThePublic can help you find your audience’s burning questions. But you can also work on understanding your target audience by spending time on TikTok and conducting a competitor analysis. For example, if you’re a creator focusing on creating healthy vegan recipes:

• Search for “healthy vegan recipes” on TikTok and see what pops up
• Analyze the best-performing TikTok videos and creators to understand what topics they’re creating videos on and which are resonating
• Pay attention to the comments on your fellow creators’ videos to dive even further into your audience’s questions, preferences, and recommendations

Understanding your target audience is an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-off task. The more you post (and experiment!), the more feedback you get — in comments, direct messages (DMs), and your TikTok analytics.

3. Write a clear and compelling bio

Your potential followers on TikTok will likely discover your content in the For You Page (FYP). But they might often navigate to your TikTok profile to learn more about who you are and what you post about.

If your TikTok bio is empty, you’re leaving valuable space that could work to get you more followers.

Your bio should tell what content you create — establish your niche and your unique selling point. Instead of making it about you though, focus on your audience and make it about them.

For example, Parker York Smith’s bio says, “Helping you look good and feel confident,” which is an instant value prop for why you should follow him.

While you’re at it, also ensure that your TikTok profile is up to date — have a clear profile picture and an easy-to-read username. All of the factors in your profile will work together to help build trust and make it tempting to follow you.

4. Build a content calendar to post consistently

TikTok, like all other social media platforms, loves consistency. The ideal posting frequency for TikTok is two short-form videos a day. 

But take that number with a grain of salt. You can adjust this based on your capacity — more important to maintain the quality of your TikTok videos. 

Kirsti, for example, has seen solid audience growth with two or three videos a month.

A smart way to increase your posting cadence without burning out is to repurpose your content. If you already have a YouTube channel, for instance, you can chop up some videos from there to post on your TikTok account. You can also shoot b-roll in bulk (hello, content batching) and reuse it for future videos.

Alice Kim, founder of PerfectDD, used TikTok to generate $25,000 in sales for her business in a month. She found that many of her old videos would resurface to new TikTok users, thanks to the algorithm. Having a consistent branding (alongside regular posting) helped her immensely in this scenario.

“I’ve found consistency in messaging is more important than consistency of posting,” she says. “This means that any of my videos could be seen by a new potential customer at any time."

"That’s why I’m unafraid to reiterate my brand promise and message over and over again, so people who are new to my videos always know what PerfectDD is all about.”

The easiest way to maintain a consistent posting schedule is by creating a content calendar and using a tool like Buffer to automate posting (Buffer also doubles as a content calendar — so you don’t need both!). This way, you can visually spot your content gaps and fill them.

Remember to leave some room in that content calendar for trending content.

5. Create trending content

Let’s be clear: Trending content isn’t a magic bullet to increase your TikTok followers. But it can help you become more visible on the For You Page — which can, by extension, help you get more followers on TikTok.

While creating your content calendar, leave some gaps for trending videos. Or you could treat them as bonus posts! There can be three kinds of trends:

• TikTok trends: A trend that’s unique to the TikTok app, like challenge videos.
• Trending songs: You can often find trending songs used behind TikTok videos.
• Industry-specific trends: Trends related to a specific news or event in your niche.

If you scroll on TikTok regularly, you’ll automatically start finding these trends on your FYP. Some trends are also tied to a specific period, like the holidays or the fall season. Most trending content will be time-sensitive, so you need to jump on trends before they fade.

Keep two things in mind before hopping on trends:

• Your trending videos still need to fit your niche. Don’t participate in a trend if it’s not true to your brand values or can’t be molded for your industry.
• Balance trending content with evergreen content. Trending posts can provide you with viral moments and boost visibility, but the real gold is the evergreen content that makes people follow you and stick around.

Alice experienced this herself:

“Sometimes, trendy TikToks didn’t work because the trend wasn’t authentic enough to me and my brand. The trends that have most benefited my business are the ones I personally had an emotional reaction to,” she said. 

“I still try the trends when they’re easy and fun for me, but what people really pick up on are the videos in which I’m authentically sharing my experience and talking about my brand.”

Your TikTok strategy should include a healthy mix of trending and evergreen content. Trending videos might bring in a large TikTok audience to your profile, but evergreen content is what will make them stick around.

And while you’re creating that content calendar (hopefully using a smart tool like Buffer!), you also want to select the right time to post.

6. Post at the right time

There’s no such thing as the right time to start working on your goals. Or meet your soulmate. Or having a sweet treat. But posting on TikTok? Yep, there’s a right time for that one.

You don’t want to post when your engagement will be low. Or when there’ll be too much competition and your video will drown in the noise. Or when your audience is fast asleep.

The goal is to post when video discoverability is at an all-time high so you get more engagement. Based on our analysis of one million TikTok posts, that time is between 4-5 p.m. mid-week.

Posting at the right time might sound like a small, insignificant thing. And it is a relatively small piece of the puzzle of how to get more followers on TikTok. But it can help your TikTok content get that initial boost it needs to get in front of the right audience at the perfect time.

7. Focus on scroll-stopping hooks

Short-form video content (whether it’s TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts) thrives when the first few seconds of your video can quickly grab attention.

Take this video by Erin McGoff: The “I got the job!” phrase quickly piques interest and curiosity. The following line, “Ugh, that salary is way too low,” holds it. You want to know what the character would do next.

Your hook can be the audio, the visual, the text on the screen, or all three combined. The goal is to stop the scroll. Think: What would my audience see or hear and immediately stop in their tracks?

Use copywriting formulas and closely observe the hooks that make you want to watch more. Slowly but surely, you’ll learn to craft impeccable hooks.

Hooks might not seem like a TikTok strategy for follower growth, but a strong hook is what gets your foot in the door. Once someone is hooked (pun intended) to your TikTok content, they’ll stick around till the end to see it through. And if they like what they see, they’ll tap the follow button to see more of it.

8. End your videos with a strong call-to-action

Here’s something I learned in therapy that applies to TikTok marketing, too (the parallels of life remain unparalleled, amirite?): You gotta ask for what you need.

Maybe your TikTok videos are epic, but are you asking viewers to follow you? It could be something as simple as “Follow me for more [your niche] tips!”

Another thing you could do is tease what you’re going to post about in the future that might also interest your potential TikTok followers. For example, Kallie Baker ends with a call-to-action of “Tomorrow, I’ll teach you [this new thing],” in one of her videos.

If you’ve watched her video till the end, she’s already succeeded in making you see the value in her content. The call to action gives you a great reason to follow (‘I can learn this too if I follow Kallie!’), too.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. If you can’t say the ‘follow me’ using a voiceover because you’re using music, use overlay text somewhere at the bottom or top of your video to nudge the same behavior and get more followers on TikTok.

9. Start a content series

A content series is when you create episodic content on a specific topic. It has the binge-able value that keeps your audience returning for more. Plus, a series makes it easier for you to come up with new video ideas.

Tiffany Yu — who landed $160k in brand partnerships and a book deal using her TikTok account — says her anti-ableism series put her on the map.

“Since launching it, I was named to the inaugural API TikTok Trailblazers list alongside creators like Bella Poarch, and a literary agent who saw it reached out about writing a book,” she said. “The series has nearly 300 posts and over 5 million views.”

She also explains why she thinks the series helped her with follower growth: “For one, it helps new followers engage more deeply in my content,” she said. “When someone discovers a video and sees it’s ‘part 273,’ they’ll likely be curious to explore other content from the series.”

Annie-Mai also believes in the power of content series: “Audiences are craving something to latch onto, something that feels familiar, consistent and worth returning to,” she says. “That’s why series content works so well.”

A series can also help you stay consistent because you can create content on a broad topic without starting from scratch each time. Choose a topic that’s broad enough to require multiple videos and one that your audience is interested in.

10. Use relevant hashtags and SEO terms

The TikTok algorithm uses hashtags and keywords within your post to understand what your post is about and put it in front of people who like watching similar videos. SEO also comes into the picture because more and more people are using the TikTok app as a search engine.

This is why it’s important to use the right hashtags and SEO terms. Use three to five relevant hashtags with each post alongside naturally-woven keywords your audience might be searching for.

Follow this evergreen TikTok checklist each time before posting:

• Did your caption contain relevant keywords?
• Have you included 3-5 hashtags?
• Did you film within TikTok or use their affiliated app, CapCut?
• Have you included a TikTok audio?

According to TikTok’s Creator Academy: “Avoid including irrelevant or misleading keywords based solely on popularity — irrelevant text stacking will actually negatively affect your video traffic,” they say.

“If you want your video to do well in search, describe your video content accurately and objectively.”

11. Engage with your community

Someone who commented on your video might not follow you. Engaging with them by responding to their comment is an easy way to make them return to your video and become more memorable — leading to an eventual follow.

The TikTok algorithm — like many other platforms — pushes posts with more engagement at the frontline. If you regularly create engaging content that makes people comment and you reply back, you play in favor of the TikTok game.

But it’s not just about playing the game; it’s also the foundation of building a strong community: Social media is a two-way street. Instead of posting and ghosting, engage with your followers and learn from their feedback.

Tiffany focused on going the extra mile and giving video replies to her audience:

“Early on in growing my channel, I not only made sure to try to respond to most of the comments, but I would also respond to questions with video replies,” she says.

“Not only does that person get notified that you replied, but it also signals to your audience that you are reading the comments and willing to engage with them, making them more excited to stick around.”

Gaining followers is not in a silo, after all. You don’t want an inflated follower count alone, you want a loyal and engaged community. And responding to every comment you can is the first step to make your followers feel valued and heard.

12. Collaborate with fellow creators or influencers

If you’re a creator, collaborating with other creators in the same industry can be a win-win for both parties: Both of you can cross-promote your content in front of new, vetted audiences who will like your content (and potentially follow you).

There are also TikTok features like a duet or stitch — where you can add your own spin to a popular video. This can be helpful when you want to add to a conversation that’s already a hot topic on TikTok.

Alice says many of her popular videos were created using stitches.

“Some of our most popular videos lately have been duets or stitches with other women complaining about the exact problems that we’re trying to solve,” she says.

If you’re a business owner, you can also collaborate with TikTok influencers using influencer marketing and sharing user-generated content.

• Via influencer marketing, you want to choose relevant creators with a tight-knit, loyal audience to talk about your brand authentically. You can gift them your products with no strings attached or do a paid partnership if you have the budget.
• Via user-generated content, you can reshare your customers' organic posts and testimonials on your TikTok account. These serve to build trust and help you gain more followers.

Whether you use duets, stitches, or user-generated content, remember to credit the original creator before reposting (along with asking for permission to repost).

13. Experiment with video length

We analyzed over one million posts and found TikTok videos over one minute in length get:

• 43.2% more reach than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 70.3% more reach than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 95.7% more reach than videos in the 5-10 second range

The numbers were similar for average watch time (a crucial ingredient of the TikTok algorithm). TikToks longer than a minute got:

• 63.8% more watch time than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 175.6% more watch time than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 264.5% more watch time than videos in the 5-10 second range

While TikTok became famous for short-form video content, videos under 10 seconds are no longer the only way to keep your audience engaged. Instead, create content that focuses on providing value and experiment with various video lengths to find the one that works best for you.

Engaging content has no ideal length — it all depends on the topic at hand, your video editing chops, and your audience’s preferences.

14. Don’t buy TikTok followers

You’ll see loads of companies trying to sell bots as TikTok followers. But taking this shortcut isn’t just against TikTok’s Community Guidelines, it also doesn’t fulfill your larger purpose: building a loyal following.

In fact, gaining followers this way could hurt your TikTok presence because it harms your personal brand and overall reputation.

Your actual TikTok followers might put two and two together when they don’t see your engagement and follower count number adding up (or when bots comment generic compliments on all your videos). This will hurt your brand presence immensely in the long run.

There’s no denying that getting more followers on TikTok is hard work — it requires a lot of patience.

But buying followers isn’t going to make that any easier. Focusing on creating high-quality content for your target audience — without fussing too much over that follower count — might make it a bit more enjoyable.

Growing on TikTok isn’t a one-time affair

TikTok marketing is a whole host of things — increasing your follower count is a small, ongoing part of it.

What you don’t need in addition to creating content regularly, engaging with your followers, and keeping up with new features (along with algorithmic changes and potential ban fears), is also taking up the admin work of posting everything manually and tracking the results of your efforts.

Outsource those tasks to Buffer so you can focus on the important things that’ll give you a better ROI on your time. Take it for a free spin today.

More TikTok resources:

My TikTok Experiment: How I Grew My Following by More Than 1,000% in 30 Days

TikTok Has Landed Me $160K in Brand Partnerships and a 6-Figure Book Deal — Here’s How I Did ItHow to Use TikTok Studio: A Handy Tool for Growing on the Platform15 Trending Songs on TikTok in 2025 (+ How to Use Them)

There’s no shortage of good reasons to post on LinkedIn.

Whether you are trying to grow an audience, aiming to cultivate a personal brand, trying to draw more attention to your work projects, or looking to grow your network for more job opportunities, posting to LinkedIn can support

One of my favorite things about TikTok is that it doesn’t play favorites. Even the newest accounts have a fair shot at reaching thousands (or millions!) of people.

The idea of a “welcoming” algorithm might feel strange to long-time creators and social media managers, but if there ever was one, it would be TikTok’s. 

The social media platform is bursting with potential. With over 1.58 billion users spending nearly an hour every day on the app, chances are your audience is already waiting to discover — and follow — you.

Now, follower count isn’t everything. But it does open doors. It helps you build trust, unlock cool features like the TikTok Shop, and grow a loyal community that vibes with your content.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get more followers on TikTok using 14 solid, no-fluff, actionable tips.

Just real, practical strategies that work. If you prefer watching over reading, we’ve summarized the top five tips for you in video form, too:

1. Choose a niche — and stick to it

It’s tempting to throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks — especially on TikTok, where the vibes are more chilled thaon n other social media platforms. But having a niche — even a broad one — has plenty of benefits:

• It tells the TikTok algorithm what your content is about
• It helps you filter your content ideas to a specific topic
• It helps you build authority and trust in your industry
• It makes you more memorable to TikTok users

Kirsti Lang, a Senior Content Writer at Buffer, grew her following by over 1,000% in 30 days. One of her core learnings was that a niche (or a handful of connected niches) is immensely valuable for growing a loyal following.

“If you do find a video you enjoy or find helpful in your FYP, you may tap over to the creator’s profile to see if there are more,” she says. “And if what you find there is a hot mess of all sorts of unrelated things, you’re going to bounce back to the FYP without tapping ‘follow’ real fast.”

Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of Girl Power Marketing, agrees: “People are wanting and searching for spaces and communities where they belong, where they can relate, and where they feel understood,” she says. “So they’re actively looking for creators who get them, or provide an experience for them like escaping — it’s why #BookTok is so huge.”

If you feel constricted by having a singular niche, have a broad one that can fit multiple content pillars — quenching your desire for spontaneity and creativity without violating the algorithm’s preference for cohesiveness.

For example, Kirsti first posted about various topics: her job at Buffer, her love of Taylor Swift, and her fitness routine. But despite one of her Swiftie videos going viral, her watcher-to-follower conversion rate remained low.

Her other videos about how to land a remote job did much better for that metric, even if they didn’t go viral.

“The Swifties were tapping over to my profile and didn’t find a Taylor Swift fan account,” she says. “The remote work video netted a very pleasing 70K views, and I earned a huge chunk of new followers — 757, to be exact — and a much healthier conversation rate.”

Lessons learned: Going viral doesn’t guarantee higher follower counts. You need a niche to establish yourself as an authority on the topic to gain followers and tell TikTok users (and the algorithm) what your TikTok account is about.

If you’re having too much trouble deciding what your niche will be, shift gears a little bit and think about who you’re creating TikTok videos for. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Understand your target audience

Having a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re looking for is the bedrock of getting more followers on all social media platforms, TikTok included.

CEO of Fashivly, Ashlyn Greer, has grown the brand’s TikTok account to over 100k followers. Her core principle has always been to use TikTok to resonate with her audience by understanding (and catering to) her audience’s struggles. Take her video about sizing discrepancies in the fashion industry — it went viral because it struck a chord.

“We’ve continued to create inclusive content based on [audience] insights,” she says. “Understanding their pain points has guided our content creation and ensured we stay as inclusive as possible because we know this approach resonates with our audience.”

Solidifying your niche will lay the groundwork to help you pinpoint the segment of TikTok users you want to reach. The second step is doing your research to figure out your target audience’s pain points and content preferences.

Audience research tools like SparkToro or AnswerThePublic can help you find your audience’s burning questions. But you can also work on understanding your target audience by spending time on TikTok and conducting a competitor analysis. For example, if you’re a creator focusing on creating healthy vegan recipes:

• Search for “healthy vegan recipes” on TikTok and see what pops up
• Analyze the best-performing TikTok videos and creators to understand what topics they’re creating videos on and which are resonating
• Pay attention to the comments on your fellow creators’ videos to dive even further into your audience’s questions, preferences, and recommendations

Understanding your target audience is an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-off task. The more you post (and experiment!), the more feedback you get — in comments, direct messages (DMs), and your TikTok analytics.

3. Write a clear and compelling bio

Your potential followers on TikTok will likely discover your content in the For You Page (FYP). But they might often navigate to your TikTok profile to learn more about who you are and what you post about.

If your TikTok bio is empty, you’re leaving valuable space that could work to get you more followers.

Your bio should tell what content you create — establish your niche and your unique selling point. Instead of making it about you though, focus on your audience and make it about them.

For example, Parker York Smith’s bio says, “Helping you look good and feel confident,” which is an instant value prop for why you should follow him.

While you’re at it, also ensure that your TikTok profile is up to date — have a clear profile picture and an easy-to-read username. All of the factors in your profile will work together to help build trust and make it tempting to follow you.

4. Build a content calendar to post consistently

TikTok, like all other social media platforms, loves consistency. The ideal posting frequency for TikTok is two short-form videos a day. 

But take that number with a grain of salt. You can adjust this based on your capacity — more important to maintain the quality of your TikTok videos. 

Kirsti, for example, has seen solid audience growth with two or three videos a month.

A smart way to increase your posting cadence without burning out is to repurpose your content. If you already have a YouTube channel, for instance, you can chop up some videos from there to post on your TikTok account. You can also shoot b-roll in bulk (hello, content batching) and reuse it for future videos.

Alice Kim, founder of PerfectDD, used TikTok to generate $25,000 in sales for her business in a month. She found that many of her old videos would resurface to new TikTok users, thanks to the algorithm. Having a consistent branding (alongside regular posting) helped her immensely in this scenario.

“I’ve found consistency in messaging is more important than consistency of posting,” she says. “This means that any of my videos could be seen by a new potential customer at any time."

"That’s why I’m unafraid to reiterate my brand promise and message over and over again, so people who are new to my videos always know what PerfectDD is all about.”

The easiest way to maintain a consistent posting schedule is by creating a content calendar and using a tool like Buffer to automate posting (Buffer also doubles as a content calendar — so you don’t need both!). This way, you can visually spot your content gaps and fill them.

Remember to leave some room in that content calendar for trending content.

5. Create trending content

Let’s be clear: Trending content isn’t a magic bullet to increase your TikTok followers. But it can help you become more visible on the For You Page — which can, by extension, help you get more followers on TikTok.

While creating your content calendar, leave some gaps for trending videos. Or you could treat them as bonus posts! There can be three kinds of trends:

• TikTok trends: A trend that’s unique to the TikTok app, like challenge videos.
• Trending songs: You can often find trending songs used behind TikTok videos.
• Industry-specific trends: Trends related to a specific news or event in your niche.

If you scroll on TikTok regularly, you’ll automatically start finding these trends on your FYP. Some trends are also tied to a specific period, like the holidays or the fall season. Most trending content will be time-sensitive, so you need to jump on trends before they fade.

Keep two things in mind before hopping on trends:

• Your trending videos still need to fit your niche. Don’t participate in a trend if it’s not true to your brand values or can’t be molded for your industry.
• Balance trending content with evergreen content. Trending posts can provide you with viral moments and boost visibility, but the real gold is the evergreen content that makes people follow you and stick around.

Alice experienced this herself:

“Sometimes, trendy TikToks didn’t work because the trend wasn’t authentic enough to me and my brand. The trends that have most benefited my business are the ones I personally had an emotional reaction to,” she said. 

“I still try the trends when they’re easy and fun for me, but what people really pick up on are the videos in which I’m authentically sharing my experience and talking about my brand.”

Your TikTok strategy should include a healthy mix of trending and evergreen content. Trending videos might bring in a large TikTok audience to your profile, but evergreen content is what will make them stick around.

And while you’re creating that content calendar (hopefully using a smart tool like Buffer!), you also want to select the right time to post.

6. Post at the right time

There’s no such thing as the right time to start working on your goals. Or meet your soulmate. Or having a sweet treat. But posting on TikTok? Yep, there’s a right time for that one.

You don’t want to post when your engagement will be low. Or when there’ll be too much competition and your video will drown in the noise. Or when your audience is fast asleep.

The goal is to post when video discoverability is at an all-time high so you get more engagement. Based on our analysis of one million TikTok posts, that time is between 4-5 p.m. mid-week.

Posting at the right time might sound like a small, insignificant thing. And it is a relatively small piece of the puzzle of how to get more followers on TikTok. But it can help your TikTok content get that initial boost it needs to get in front of the right audience at the perfect time.

7. Focus on scroll-stopping hooks

Short-form video content (whether it’s TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts) thrives when the first few seconds of your video can quickly grab attention.

Take this video by Erin McGoff: The “I got the job!” phrase quickly piques interest and curiosity. The following line, “Ugh, that salary is way too low,” holds it. You want to know what the character would do next.

Your hook can be the audio, the visual, the text on the screen, or all three combined. The goal is to stop the scroll. Think: What would my audience see or hear and immediately stop in their tracks?

Use copywriting formulas and closely observe the hooks that make you want to watch more. Slowly but surely, you’ll learn to craft impeccable hooks.

Hooks might not seem like a TikTok strategy for follower growth, but a strong hook is what gets your foot in the door. Once someone is hooked (pun intended) to your TikTok content, they’ll stick around till the end to see it through. And if they like what they see, they’ll tap the follow button to see more of it.

8. End your videos with a strong call-to-action

Here’s something I learned in therapy that applies to TikTok marketing, too (the parallels of life remain unparalleled, amirite?): You gotta ask for what you need.

Maybe your TikTok videos are epic, but are you asking viewers to follow you? It could be something as simple as “Follow me for more [your niche] tips!”

Another thing you could do is tease what you’re going to post about in the future that might also interest your potential TikTok followers. For example, Kallie Baker ends with a call-to-action of “Tomorrow, I’ll teach you [this new thing],” in one of her videos.

If you’ve watched her video till the end, she’s already succeeded in making you see the value in her content. The call to action gives you a great reason to follow (‘I can learn this too if I follow Kallie!’), too.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. If you can’t say the ‘follow me’ using a voiceover because you’re using music, use overlay text somewhere at the bottom or top of your video to nudge the same behavior and get more followers on TikTok.

9. Start a content series

A content series is when you create episodic content on a specific topic. It has the binge-able value that keeps your audience returning for more. Plus, a series makes it easier for you to come up with new video ideas.

Tiffany Yu — who landed $160k in brand partnerships and a book deal using her TikTok account — says her anti-ableism series put her on the map.

“Since launching it, I was named to the inaugural API TikTok Trailblazers list alongside creators like Bella Poarch, and a literary agent who saw it reached out about writing a book,” she said. “The series has nearly 300 posts and over 5 million views.”

She also explains why she thinks the series helped her with follower growth: “For one, it helps new followers engage more deeply in my content,” she said. “When someone discovers a video and sees it’s ‘part 273,’ they’ll likely be curious to explore other content from the series.”

Annie-Mai also believes in the power of content series: “Audiences are craving something to latch onto, something that feels familiar, consistent and worth returning to,” she says. “That’s why series content works so well.”

A series can also help you stay consistent because you can create content on a broad topic without starting from scratch each time. Choose a topic that’s broad enough to require multiple videos and one that your audience is interested in.

10. Use relevant hashtags and SEO terms

The TikTok algorithm uses hashtags and keywords within your post to understand what your post is about and put it in front of people who like watching similar videos. SEO also comes into the picture because more and more people are using the TikTok app as a search engine.

This is why it’s important to use the right hashtags and SEO terms. Use three to five relevant hashtags with each post alongside naturally-woven keywords your audience might be searching for.

Follow this evergreen TikTok checklist each time before posting:

• Did your caption contain relevant keywords?
• Have you included 3-5 hashtags?
• Did you film within TikTok or use their affiliated app, CapCut?
• Have you included a TikTok audio?

According to TikTok’s Creator Academy: “Avoid including irrelevant or misleading keywords based solely on popularity — irrelevant text stacking will actually negatively affect your video traffic,” they say.

“If you want your video to do well in search, describe your video content accurately and objectively.”

11. Engage with your community

Someone who commented on your video might not follow you. Engaging with them by responding to their comment is an easy way to make them return to your video and become more memorable — leading to an eventual follow.

The TikTok algorithm — like many other platforms — pushes posts with more engagement at the frontline. If you regularly create engaging content that makes people comment and you reply back, you play in favor of the TikTok game.

But it’s not just about playing the game; it’s also the foundation of building a strong community: Social media is a two-way street. Instead of posting and ghosting, engage with your followers and learn from their feedback.

Tiffany focused on going the extra mile and giving video replies to her audience:

“Early on in growing my channel, I not only made sure to try to respond to most of the comments, but I would also respond to questions with video replies,” she says.

“Not only does that person get notified that you replied, but it also signals to your audience that you are reading the comments and willing to engage with them, making them more excited to stick around.”

Gaining followers is not in a silo, after all. You don’t want an inflated follower count alone, you want a loyal and engaged community. And responding to every comment you can is the first step to make your followers feel valued and heard.

12. Collaborate with fellow creators or influencers

If you’re a creator, collaborating with other creators in the same industry can be a win-win for both parties: Both of you can cross-promote your content in front of new, vetted audiences who will like your content (and potentially follow you).

There are also TikTok features like a duet or stitch — where you can add your own spin to a popular video. This can be helpful when you want to add to a conversation that’s already a hot topic on TikTok.

Alice says many of her popular videos were created using stitches.

“Some of our most popular videos lately have been duets or stitches with other women complaining about the exact problems that we’re trying to solve,” she says.

If you’re a business owner, you can also collaborate with TikTok influencers using influencer marketing and sharing user-generated content.

• Via influencer marketing, you want to choose relevant creators with a tight-knit, loyal audience to talk about your brand authentically. You can gift them your products with no strings attached or do a paid partnership if you have the budget.
• Via user-generated content, you can reshare your customers' organic posts and testimonials on your TikTok account. These serve to build trust and help you gain more followers.

Whether you use duets, stitches, or user-generated content, remember to credit the original creator before reposting (along with asking for permission to repost).

13. Experiment with video length

We analyzed over one million posts and found TikTok videos over one minute in length get:

• 43.2% more reach than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 70.3% more reach than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 95.7% more reach than videos in the 5-10 second range

The numbers were similar for average watch time (a crucial ingredient of the TikTok algorithm). TikToks longer than a minute got:

• 63.8% more watch time than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 175.6% more watch time than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 264.5% more watch time than videos in the 5-10 second range

While TikTok became famous for short-form video content, videos under 10 seconds are no longer the only way to keep your audience engaged. Instead, create content that focuses on providing value and experiment with various video lengths to find the one that works best for you.

Engaging content has no ideal length — it all depends on the topic at hand, your video editing chops, and your audience’s preferences.

14. Don’t buy TikTok followers

You’ll see loads of companies trying to sell bots as TikTok followers. But taking this shortcut isn’t just against TikTok’s Community Guidelines, it also doesn’t fulfill your larger purpose: building a loyal following.

In fact, gaining followers this way could hurt your TikTok presence because it harms your personal brand and overall reputation.

Your actual TikTok followers might put two and two together when they don’t see your engagement and follower count number adding up (or when bots comment generic compliments on all your videos). This will hurt your brand presence immensely in the long run.

There’s no denying that getting more followers on TikTok is hard work — it requires a lot of patience.

But buying followers isn’t going to make that any easier. Focusing on creating high-quality content for your target audience — without fussing too much over that follower count — might make it a bit more enjoyable.

Growing on TikTok isn’t a one-time affair

TikTok marketing is a whole host of things — increasing your follower count is a small, ongoing part of it.

What you don’t need in addition to creating content regularly, engaging with your followers, and keeping up with new features (along with algorithmic changes and potential ban fears), is also taking up the admin work of posting everything manually and tracking the results of your efforts.

Outsource those tasks to Buffer so you can focus on the important things that’ll give you a better ROI on your time. Take it for a free spin today.

More TikTok resources:

My TikTok Experiment: How I Grew My Following by More Than 1,000% in 30 Days

TikTok Has Landed Me $160K in Brand Partnerships and a 6-Figure Book Deal — Here’s How I Did ItHow to Use TikTok Studio: A Handy Tool for Growing on the Platform15 Trending Songs on TikTok in 2025 (+ How to Use Them)

TikTok is bursting with potential. Learn 14 no-fluff strategies to get more followers authentically, build trust, and connect with your community.

One of my favorite things about TikTok is that it doesn’t play favorites. Even the newest accounts have a fair shot at reaching thousands (or millions!) of people.

The idea of a “welcoming” algorithm might feel strange to long-time creators and social media managers, but if there ever was one, it would be TikTok’s. 

The social media platform is bursting with potential. With over 1.58 billion users spending nearly an hour every day on the app, chances are your audience is already waiting to discover — and follow — you.

Now, follower count isn’t everything. But it does open doors. It helps you build trust, unlock cool features like the TikTok Shop, and grow a loyal community that vibes with your content.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get more followers on TikTok using 14 solid, no-fluff, actionable tips.

Just real, practical strategies that work. If you prefer watching over reading, we’ve summarized the top five tips for you in video form, too:

1. Choose a niche — and stick to it

It’s tempting to throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks — especially on TikTok, where the vibes are more chilled thaon n other social media platforms. But having a niche — even a broad one — has plenty of benefits:

• It tells the TikTok algorithm what your content is about
• It helps you filter your content ideas to a specific topic
• It helps you build authority and trust in your industry
• It makes you more memorable to TikTok users

Kirsti Lang, a Senior Content Writer at Buffer, grew her following by over 1,000% in 30 days. One of her core learnings was that a niche (or a handful of connected niches) is immensely valuable for growing a loyal following.

“If you do find a video you enjoy or find helpful in your FYP, you may tap over to the creator’s profile to see if there are more,” she says. “And if what you find there is a hot mess of all sorts of unrelated things, you’re going to bounce back to the FYP without tapping ‘follow’ real fast.”

Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of Girl Power Marketing, agrees: “People are wanting and searching for spaces and communities where they belong, where they can relate, and where they feel understood,” she says. “So they’re actively looking for creators who get them, or provide an experience for them like escaping — it’s why #BookTok is so huge.”

If you feel constricted by having a singular niche, have a broad one that can fit multiple content pillars — quenching your desire for spontaneity and creativity without violating the algorithm’s preference for cohesiveness.

For example, Kirsti first posted about various topics: her job at Buffer, her love of Taylor Swift, and her fitness routine. But despite one of her Swiftie videos going viral, her watcher-to-follower conversion rate remained low.

Her other videos about how to land a remote job did much better for that metric, even if they didn’t go viral.

“The Swifties were tapping over to my profile and didn’t find a Taylor Swift fan account,” she says. “The remote work video netted a very pleasing 70K views, and I earned a huge chunk of new followers — 757, to be exact — and a much healthier conversation rate.”

Lessons learned: Going viral doesn’t guarantee higher follower counts. You need a niche to establish yourself as an authority on the topic to gain followers and tell TikTok users (and the algorithm) what your TikTok account is about.

If you’re having too much trouble deciding what your niche will be, shift gears a little bit and think about who you’re creating TikTok videos for. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Understand your target audience

Having a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re looking for is the bedrock of getting more followers on all social media platforms, TikTok included.

CEO of Fashivly, Ashlyn Greer, has grown the brand’s TikTok account to over 100k followers. Her core principle has always been to use TikTok to resonate with her audience by understanding (and catering to) her audience’s struggles. Take her video about sizing discrepancies in the fashion industry — it went viral because it struck a chord.

“We’ve continued to create inclusive content based on [audience] insights,” she says. “Understanding their pain points has guided our content creation and ensured we stay as inclusive as possible because we know this approach resonates with our audience.”

Solidifying your niche will lay the groundwork to help you pinpoint the segment of TikTok users you want to reach. The second step is doing your research to figure out your target audience’s pain points and content preferences.

Audience research tools like SparkToro or AnswerThePublic can help you find your audience’s burning questions. But you can also work on understanding your target audience by spending time on TikTok and conducting a competitor analysis. For example, if you’re a creator focusing on creating healthy vegan recipes:

• Search for “healthy vegan recipes” on TikTok and see what pops up
• Analyze the best-performing TikTok videos and creators to understand what topics they’re creating videos on and which are resonating
• Pay attention to the comments on your fellow creators’ videos to dive even further into your audience’s questions, preferences, and recommendations

Understanding your target audience is an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-off task. The more you post (and experiment!), the more feedback you get — in comments, direct messages (DMs), and your TikTok analytics.

3. Write a clear and compelling bio

Your potential followers on TikTok will likely discover your content in the For You Page (FYP). But they might often navigate to your TikTok profile to learn more about who you are and what you post about.

If your TikTok bio is empty, you’re leaving valuable space that could work to get you more followers.

Your bio should tell what content you create — establish your niche and your unique selling point. Instead of making it about you though, focus on your audience and make it about them.

For example, Parker York Smith’s bio says, “Helping you look good and feel confident,” which is an instant value prop for why you should follow him.

While you’re at it, also ensure that your TikTok profile is up to date — have a clear profile picture and an easy-to-read username. All of the factors in your profile will work together to help build trust and make it tempting to follow you.

4. Build a content calendar to post consistently

TikTok, like all other social media platforms, loves consistency. The ideal posting frequency for TikTok is two short-form videos a day. 

But take that number with a grain of salt. You can adjust this based on your capacity — more important to maintain the quality of your TikTok videos. 

Kirsti, for example, has seen solid audience growth with two or three videos a month.

A smart way to increase your posting cadence without burning out is to repurpose your content. If you already have a YouTube channel, for instance, you can chop up some videos from there to post on your TikTok account. You can also shoot b-roll in bulk (hello, content batching) and reuse it for future videos.

Alice Kim, founder of PerfectDD, used TikTok to generate $25,000 in sales for her business in a month. She found that many of her old videos would resurface to new TikTok users, thanks to the algorithm. Having a consistent branding (alongside regular posting) helped her immensely in this scenario.

“I’ve found consistency in messaging is more important than consistency of posting,” she says. “This means that any of my videos could be seen by a new potential customer at any time."

"That’s why I’m unafraid to reiterate my brand promise and message over and over again, so people who are new to my videos always know what PerfectDD is all about.”

The easiest way to maintain a consistent posting schedule is by creating a content calendar and using a tool like Buffer to automate posting (Buffer also doubles as a content calendar — so you don’t need both!). This way, you can visually spot your content gaps and fill them.

Remember to leave some room in that content calendar for trending content.

5. Create trending content

Let’s be clear: Trending content isn’t a magic bullet to increase your TikTok followers. But it can help you become more visible on the For You Page — which can, by extension, help you get more followers on TikTok.

While creating your content calendar, leave some gaps for trending videos. Or you could treat them as bonus posts! There can be three kinds of trends:

• TikTok trends: A trend that’s unique to the TikTok app, like challenge videos.
• Trending songs: You can often find trending songs used behind TikTok videos.
• Industry-specific trends: Trends related to a specific news or event in your niche.

If you scroll on TikTok regularly, you’ll automatically start finding these trends on your FYP. Some trends are also tied to a specific period, like the holidays or the fall season. Most trending content will be time-sensitive, so you need to jump on trends before they fade.

Keep two things in mind before hopping on trends:

• Your trending videos still need to fit your niche. Don’t participate in a trend if it’s not true to your brand values or can’t be molded for your industry.
• Balance trending content with evergreen content. Trending posts can provide you with viral moments and boost visibility, but the real gold is the evergreen content that makes people follow you and stick around.

Alice experienced this herself:

“Sometimes, trendy TikToks didn’t work because the trend wasn’t authentic enough to me and my brand. The trends that have most benefited my business are the ones I personally had an emotional reaction to,” she said. 

“I still try the trends when they’re easy and fun for me, but what people really pick up on are the videos in which I’m authentically sharing my experience and talking about my brand.”

Your TikTok strategy should include a healthy mix of trending and evergreen content. Trending videos might bring in a large TikTok audience to your profile, but evergreen content is what will make them stick around.

And while you’re creating that content calendar (hopefully using a smart tool like Buffer!), you also want to select the right time to post.

6. Post at the right time

There’s no such thing as the right time to start working on your goals. Or meet your soulmate. Or having a sweet treat. But posting on TikTok? Yep, there’s a right time for that one.

You don’t want to post when your engagement will be low. Or when there’ll be too much competition and your video will drown in the noise. Or when your audience is fast asleep.

The goal is to post when video discoverability is at an all-time high so you get more engagement. Based on our analysis of one million TikTok posts, that time is between 4-5 p.m. mid-week.

Posting at the right time might sound like a small, insignificant thing. And it is a relatively small piece of the puzzle of how to get more followers on TikTok. But it can help your TikTok content get that initial boost it needs to get in front of the right audience at the perfect time.

7. Focus on scroll-stopping hooks

Short-form video content (whether it’s TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts) thrives when the first few seconds of your video can quickly grab attention.

Take this video by Erin McGoff: The “I got the job!” phrase quickly piques interest and curiosity. The following line, “Ugh, that salary is way too low,” holds it. You want to know what the character would do next.

Your hook can be the audio, the visual, the text on the screen, or all three combined. The goal is to stop the scroll. Think: What would my audience see or hear and immediately stop in their tracks?

Use copywriting formulas and closely observe the hooks that make you want to watch more. Slowly but surely, you’ll learn to craft impeccable hooks.

Hooks might not seem like a TikTok strategy for follower growth, but a strong hook is what gets your foot in the door. Once someone is hooked (pun intended) to your TikTok content, they’ll stick around till the end to see it through. And if they like what they see, they’ll tap the follow button to see more of it.

8. End your videos with a strong call-to-action

Here’s something I learned in therapy that applies to TikTok marketing, too (the parallels of life remain unparalleled, amirite?): You gotta ask for what you need.

Maybe your TikTok videos are epic, but are you asking viewers to follow you? It could be something as simple as “Follow me for more [your niche] tips!”

Another thing you could do is tease what you’re going to post about in the future that might also interest your potential TikTok followers. For example, Kallie Baker ends with a call-to-action of “Tomorrow, I’ll teach you [this new thing],” in one of her videos.

If you’ve watched her video till the end, she’s already succeeded in making you see the value in her content. The call to action gives you a great reason to follow (‘I can learn this too if I follow Kallie!’), too.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. If you can’t say the ‘follow me’ using a voiceover because you’re using music, use overlay text somewhere at the bottom or top of your video to nudge the same behavior and get more followers on TikTok.

9. Start a content series

A content series is when you create episodic content on a specific topic. It has the binge-able value that keeps your audience returning for more. Plus, a series makes it easier for you to come up with new video ideas.

Tiffany Yu — who landed $160k in brand partnerships and a book deal using her TikTok account — says her anti-ableism series put her on the map.

“Since launching it, I was named to the inaugural API TikTok Trailblazers list alongside creators like Bella Poarch, and a literary agent who saw it reached out about writing a book,” she said. “The series has nearly 300 posts and over 5 million views.”

She also explains why she thinks the series helped her with follower growth: “For one, it helps new followers engage more deeply in my content,” she said. “When someone discovers a video and sees it’s ‘part 273,’ they’ll likely be curious to explore other content from the series.”

Annie-Mai also believes in the power of content series: “Audiences are craving something to latch onto, something that feels familiar, consistent and worth returning to,” she says. “That’s why series content works so well.”

A series can also help you stay consistent because you can create content on a broad topic without starting from scratch each time. Choose a topic that’s broad enough to require multiple videos and one that your audience is interested in.

10. Use relevant hashtags and SEO terms

The TikTok algorithm uses hashtags and keywords within your post to understand what your post is about and put it in front of people who like watching similar videos. SEO also comes into the picture because more and more people are using the TikTok app as a search engine.

This is why it’s important to use the right hashtags and SEO terms. Use three to five relevant hashtags with each post alongside naturally-woven keywords your audience might be searching for.

Follow this evergreen TikTok checklist each time before posting:

• Did your caption contain relevant keywords?
• Have you included 3-5 hashtags?
• Did you film within TikTok or use their affiliated app, CapCut?
• Have you included a TikTok audio?

According to TikTok’s Creator Academy: “Avoid including irrelevant or misleading keywords based solely on popularity — irrelevant text stacking will actually negatively affect your video traffic,” they say.

“If you want your video to do well in search, describe your video content accurately and objectively.”

11. Engage with your community

Someone who commented on your video might not follow you. Engaging with them by responding to their comment is an easy way to make them return to your video and become more memorable — leading to an eventual follow.

The TikTok algorithm — like many other platforms — pushes posts with more engagement at the frontline. If you regularly create engaging content that makes people comment and you reply back, you play in favor of the TikTok game.

But it’s not just about playing the game; it’s also the foundation of building a strong community: Social media is a two-way street. Instead of posting and ghosting, engage with your followers and learn from their feedback.

Tiffany focused on going the extra mile and giving video replies to her audience:

“Early on in growing my channel, I not only made sure to try to respond to most of the comments, but I would also respond to questions with video replies,” she says.

“Not only does that person get notified that you replied, but it also signals to your audience that you are reading the comments and willing to engage with them, making them more excited to stick around.”

Gaining followers is not in a silo, after all. You don’t want an inflated follower count alone, you want a loyal and engaged community. And responding to every comment you can is the first step to make your followers feel valued and heard.

12. Collaborate with fellow creators or influencers

If you’re a creator, collaborating with other creators in the same industry can be a win-win for both parties: Both of you can cross-promote your content in front of new, vetted audiences who will like your content (and potentially follow you).

There are also TikTok features like a duet or stitch — where you can add your own spin to a popular video. This can be helpful when you want to add to a conversation that’s already a hot topic on TikTok.

Alice says many of her popular videos were created using stitches.

“Some of our most popular videos lately have been duets or stitches with other women complaining about the exact problems that we’re trying to solve,” she says.

If you’re a business owner, you can also collaborate with TikTok influencers using influencer marketing and sharing user-generated content.

• Via influencer marketing, you want to choose relevant creators with a tight-knit, loyal audience to talk about your brand authentically. You can gift them your products with no strings attached or do a paid partnership if you have the budget.
• Via user-generated content, you can reshare your customers' organic posts and testimonials on your TikTok account. These serve to build trust and help you gain more followers.

Whether you use duets, stitches, or user-generated content, remember to credit the original creator before reposting (along with asking for permission to repost).

13. Experiment with video length

We analyzed over one million posts and found TikTok videos over one minute in length get:

• 43.2% more reach than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 70.3% more reach than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 95.7% more reach than videos in the 5-10 second range

The numbers were similar for average watch time (a crucial ingredient of the TikTok algorithm). TikToks longer than a minute got:

• 63.8% more watch time than videos in the 30-60 second range
• 175.6% more watch time than videos in the 10-30 second range
• 264.5% more watch time than videos in the 5-10 second range

While TikTok became famous for short-form video content, videos under 10 seconds are no longer the only way to keep your audience engaged. Instead, create content that focuses on providing value and experiment with various video lengths to find the one that works best for you.

Engaging content has no ideal length — it all depends on the topic at hand, your video editing chops, and your audience’s preferences.

14. Don’t buy TikTok followers

You’ll see loads of companies trying to sell bots as TikTok followers. But taking this shortcut isn’t just against TikTok’s Community Guidelines, it also doesn’t fulfill your larger purpose: building a loyal following.

In fact, gaining followers this way could hurt your TikTok presence because it harms your personal brand and overall reputation.

Your actual TikTok followers might put two and two together when they don’t see your engagement and follower count number adding up (or when bots comment generic compliments on all your videos). This will hurt your brand presence immensely in the long run.

There’s no denying that getting more followers on TikTok is hard work — it requires a lot of patience.

But buying followers isn’t going to make that any easier. Focusing on creating high-quality content for your target audience — without fussing too much over that follower count — might make it a bit more enjoyable.

Growing on TikTok isn’t a one-time affair

TikTok marketing is a whole host of things — increasing your follower count is a small, ongoing part of it.

What you don’t need in addition to creating content regularly, engaging with your followers, and keeping up with new features (along with algorithmic changes and potential ban fears), is also taking up the admin work of posting everything manually and tracking the results of your efforts.

Outsource those tasks to Buffer so you can focus on the important things that’ll give you a better ROI on your time. Take it for a free spin today.

More TikTok resources:

My TikTok Experiment: How I Grew My Following by More Than 1,000% in 30 Days

TikTok Has Landed Me $160K in Brand Partnerships and a 6-Figure Book Deal — Here’s How I Did ItHow to Use TikTok Studio: A Handy Tool for Growing on the Platform15 Trending Songs on TikTok in 2025 (+ How to Use Them)

Growing on Instagram takes time and effort — but with these must-do tactics, the path to an engaged following is a lot more straightforward than you might think.

At Buffer, we recently embarked on an ambitious project: uncovering the best time to post on social media in 2025 — across all major platforms.

We pored over millions of posts, reels, TikToks, shorts, videos, and more to pinpoint when the best-performing content was published.

We analyzed the data here in one of two ways: To predict the best time to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, we looked at the timeslots with the highest median social media engagement on each platform. To predict the best times to post on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, we looked at median reach and video views.

In both cases, we found some clear patterns — and can make some clear recommendations on the best time to post on social media. Specific timeslots see more engagement or views than others, which is an important consideration in your social media marketing strategy.

Use these times as a starting point to give your content the best possible chance of success.

Before we get into this, an important caveat: sharing your social media posts at the ‘right’ time is not the secret sauce for content success.

(If there were a secret sauce, it would be consistency. But more on that in a sec.)

There are thousands of signals that determine content performance all each of the social media platform’s multiple algorithms — engagement, watch time, user preferences, location… Post recency is likely just one small part of a pretty complex puzzle.

Still, if you feel like you're hitting all the right notes with your content and want to give your social media strategy a helpful little boost, it’s worth testing the best time to post on social media for your platform of choice.

Is there an overall best time to post on social media?

There is no single best time to post on social media that applies to all social media platforms. Why? They’re all used for different reasons, by very different users.

For example, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is used for professional networking and thrives during working hours. TikTok is more focused on entertainment — so videos and carousels there are more likely to get views after hours. Posts on X tend to get more engagement on Tuesdays, while Fridays are the best days for Instagram.

As you’ll see from all our graphs, there’s not much overlap, especially across all major social media platforms.

So, while we can't be as specific as we can on a per-platform basis, we can make broad recommendations that are largely common sense. For example, social media posts shared on weekends tend to get less reach and engagement, as does content posted in the middle of the night.

With all that in mind, you’re far better off with a digital marketing plan and social media calendar with a unique posting schedule for each platform. Let’s get into our recommendations for all of them.

Best time to post on social media: a quick guide

Here’s a cheat sheet for the best time to post on social media (it’s worth scrolling down for more options, too!)

• Best time to post on Facebook: 5 a.m. – 7 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Instagram: 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on LinkedIn: 7 a.m. – 4 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on TikTok: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on YouTube: 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on X/Twitter: 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Threads: 7 a.m. — 9 a.m. on weekdays

The best time to post on Facebook

The best time to post on Facebook is 5 a.m. on Monday.Facebook users are the earliest birds of the bunch. Early morning posts — especially at the start of the week — tend to perform best.

That pre-sunrise slot on Monday tends to get the most engagement, but Tuesday at 5 a.m. and Thursday at 7 a.m. aren’t far behind.

In general, the morning hours are where the magic happens on Facebook. Engagement levels tend to rise through mid-morning, peak around midday, and gradually taper off later in the day.

When it comes to the best day to post on Facebook, Wednesday leads the pack in terms of overall engagement. Tuesday and Thursday follow closely — and you’ll notice from the graph below that all weekdays tend to boast similar performance on Facebook.

The weekends are another story. Engagement takes a noticeable dip on posts on social media on weekends, with Sunday coming in as the quietest day on the platform. Posts shared on Sundays see around 15% less engagement than those shared midweek, and Saturday about 10%.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Facebook to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is 3 p.m. on Friday. After analyzing over 2 million posts, we found this time slot consistently got the highest reach.

That said, there was not much difference in the reach of posts shared between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on most weekdays.

If you look at the heatmap above, you’ll notice a fairly predictable pattern: reach starts to build from around 6 a.m. on weekdays, picks up steam around 11 a.m. (hello, lunch time scroll), and hits its stride at 3 p.m. on most days.

Weekends, however, tell a different story. Reach tends to dip on Saturdays, dropping even further on Sundays. While there are a few small spikes in the early evening, they don’t quite match the performance of weekday posts.

In general, weekdays are a safe bet for solid reach on Instagram — but Monday and Friday come out on top, with slightly higher engagement than the rest of the week.

At the other end of the scale? Sunday is the worst day to post on Instagram, where we see a notable dip in post performance.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Instagram to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on LinkedIn

The best time to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

In the more than 1 million LinkedIn posts we analyzed, this time slot tended to see the most engagement — however (again!), only by a smidge.

Posts shared between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays tended to get solid engagement — and there are no prizes for guessing why.

Despite LinkedIn becoming a little more casual and creator-friendly in recent years, it’s still a work-first platform. Most people scroll their feeds during working hours.

Evenings, on the other hand, tend to be quieter. Unlike platforms like Instagram or TikTok, engagement on LinkedIn typically trails off as people wrap up their workdays and log off.

When it comes to the best day to post on LinkedIn, Thursday comes out tops, closely followed by Wednesday and Tuesday. But again engagement is fairly strong across all weekdays — so you’ve got a lot of flexibility.

The weekend tells a different story. Posts shared on Saturday and Sunday get noticeably less engagement, with Sunday coming in as the slowest day of the week. Again, that checks out — most people aren’t firing up LinkedIn on their days off.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on LinkedIn to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on TikTok

The best time to post on TikTok is Sunday at 8 p.m., with Tuesday at 4 p.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m. coming in just behind.

Videos, carousels, and even text-based posts shared during those slots tended to pull in the most views across the week.

Generally, we found that TikTok engagement starts to pick up in the early afternoon, with most peak viewing times happening from 1 p.m. onwards.

TikTok is a bit of an outlier compared to other social platforms — making it all the more fascinating to analyze. While platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have relatively consistent engagement patterns tied to the workday, TikTok audience behavior is different — possibly because people scroll in their downtime, not just between meetings.

Wednesday is the best day to post on TikTok, with Thursday and Friday tied for second place, so mid-to-late week is a great window to add to your schedule.

The worst day to post on TikTok is Saturday — the data shows a noticeable dip in views for content shared then, with Sunday not too far behind.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on TikTok to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on YouTube

The best time to post on YouTube is Wednesday at 4 p.m. Videos published at that time saw the highest average views of the week — with Thursday and Monday at 4 p.m. close behind.

More broadly, posting between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays is an excellent window for your posting schedule. Videos shared late afternoon consistently outperformed other time slots, likely because viewers are winding down after work or study and have time to settle in with longer-form content.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the best days to post on YouTube. These three were tied for top performance in our data, especially when paired with that late-afternoon posting window between 3 and 5 p.m.

Sunday was the lowest-performing day, followed closely by Saturday. So if you’re planning your content calendar, weekdays might be your best bet — and worth experimenting with if you’re currently posting on weekends.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on YouTube to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on X (formerly Twitter)

The best time to post on Twitter/X is 9 a.m. on Wednesday. That’s when content sees the highest engagement, according to our analysis of over 1 million posts.

The next-best times are Tuesday at 8 a.m., followed closely by Monday at 8 a.m.

In general, though, weekday mornings are your best bet. Engagement starts picking up early — typically around 6 or 7 a.m. — and hits its peak between 8 and 9 a.m. From there, activity tends to taper off into the afternoon as people shift gears into the rest of their workday.

Most of the top-performing time slots land in this morning window, so if you’re looking to get more eyes on your tweets, try scheduling them before lunchtime.

Tuesday is the best day to post on Twitter/X. Posts shared on Wednesday and Thursday also perform well — making the middle of the week a great time to show up on the platform.

Again Engagement tends to drop off on posts shared on the weekend. Sunday is the quietest day on Twitter, with Saturday not far behind. While a few time slots still hold up, you’re generally better off keeping your strongest content for the workweek.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on X to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

The best time to post on Threads

The best time to post on Threads is 7 a.m. on Wednesday. Posts published then had the highest median engagement — that is likes, replies, and reposts — across all the data we analyzed.

The next-best times were 7 a.m. – 9 a.m. on weekdays, especially Tuesday through Friday. Generally speaking, most weekday mornings are great windows to aim for.

An interesting ‘outlier’ time that popped up in our study was 1 a.m. on Sunday. As you can see from the heatmap graph above, it ranks in the top five posting times for Threads.

It’s proof that, while the hours with the highest median engagement rates tend to be between 7 and 9, it can still be worth experimenting with other posting times to see what works best for your audience.

Wednesday is the best day to post on Threads, based on overall engagement. It’s followed closely by Friday and Thursday — midweek is clearly prime Threads time.

On the flip side, Sunday sees the lowest engagement overall, with Saturday not far behind. If you’re batch-scheduling content for the week, you might want to give those weekend posts a second thought.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Threads to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

How to find your best times to post in Buffer

I can’t promise that posting your content at precisely these times will guarantee social media success — if only it were that easy! It’s important to remember that audience behavior can vary. For example, optimal posting times for Buffer’s social media audience probably won’t work for my personal target audience, and vice versa.

Using your social media metrics to guide you can be really helpful here. Some social media platforms, like Instagram and YouTube, will include high-engagement times in their native analytics. For the ones that don’t, you can do a bit of manual work by analyzing your best-performing posts to make some educated guesses on your personal best time to post on social media.

Click on the platform-specific guides I’ve linked above to find step-by-step instructions to help you access them all.

Of course, there is an easier way. Any social media management tool worth using will do the hard work for you. Buffer’s analytics will crunch the numbers of all your historical data and recommend the following:

• The best time/day of the week for you to post
• The best content format to post (image, video, text, or link)
• How often to post per day or week

To find them:

1. Ensure the social network you want to analyze is connected to Buffer (here’s a guide to connecting all our available channels). Note that if this channel has just been connected to Buffer, it may take about a week for us to gather all the required data.
2. Click on the Head to the Analytics tab at the top left.
3. Here, you’ll find your Analytics Overview. You’ll see how your content has performed over the period you set with the date dropdown on the top right.
4. Click on the Answers tab. You’ll find all of the recommendations I mentioned above in this window.

Choose the platform you want answers for in the column on the left.

Timing matters — but it isn't everything

As touched on above, finding the best time to post on social media might help boost content performance, but it's not the magic bullet that will have your content going viral.

Using optimal posting times on your chosen social media platforms is an easy box to tick, but your time and energy are best spent on making sure your content resonates with your target audience and will nudge you toward your social media marketing goals.

Not sure where to begin? Here's our guide to building a solid social media strategy from scratch — along with a template to get you started!

What have you found most helpful when determining your best time to post on social media? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!

With Bluesky’s livestreaming feature, users will be able to discover when someone is live — and jump directly to YouTube, Twitch, or another platform to watch.

At Buffer, we recently embarked on an ambitious project: uncovering the best time to post on social media in 2025 — across all major platforms.

We pored over millions of posts, reels, TikToks, shorts, videos, and more to pinpoint when the best-performing content was published.

We analyzed the data here in one of two ways: To predict the best time to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, we looked at the timeslots with the highest median social media engagement on each platform. To predict the best times to post on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, we looked at median reach and video views.

In both cases, we found some clear patterns — and can make some clear recommendations on the best time to post on social media. Specific timeslots see more engagement or views than others, which is an important consideration in your social media marketing strategy.

Use these times as a starting point to give your content the best possible chance of success.

Before we get into this, an important caveat: sharing your social media posts at the ‘right’ time is not the secret sauce for content success.

(If there were a secret sauce, it would be consistency. But more on that in a sec.)

There are thousands of signals that determine content performance all each of the social media platform’s multiple algorithms — engagement, watch time, user preferences, location… Post recency is likely just one small part of a pretty complex puzzle.

Still, if you feel like you're hitting all the right notes with your content and want to give your social media strategy a helpful little boost, it’s worth testing the best time to post on social media for your platform of choice.

Is there an overall best time to post on social media?

There is no single best time to post on social media that applies to all social media platforms. Why? They’re all used for different reasons, by very different users.

For example, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is used for professional networking and thrives during working hours. TikTok is more focused on entertainment — so videos and carousels there are more likely to get views after hours. Posts on X tend to get more engagement on Tuesdays, while Fridays are the best days for Instagram.

As you’ll see from all our graphs, there’s not much overlap, especially across all major social media platforms.

So, while we can't be as specific as we can on a per-platform basis, we can make broad recommendations that are largely common sense. For example, social media posts shared on weekends tend to get less reach and engagement, as does content posted in the middle of the night.

With all that in mind, you’re far better off with a digital marketing plan and social media calendar with a unique posting schedule for each platform. Let’s get into our recommendations for all of them.

Best time to post on social media: a quick guide

Here’s a cheat sheet for the best time to post on social media (it’s worth scrolling down for more options, too!)

• Best time to post on Facebook: 5 a.m. – 7 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Instagram: 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on LinkedIn: 7 a.m. – 4 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on TikTok: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on YouTube: 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on X/Twitter: 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Threads: 7 a.m. — 9 a.m. on weekdays

The best time to post on Facebook

The best time to post on Facebook is 5 a.m. on Monday.Facebook users are the earliest birds of the bunch. Early morning posts — especially at the start of the week — tend to perform best.

That pre-sunrise slot on Monday tends to get the most engagement, but Tuesday at 5 a.m. and Thursday at 7 a.m. aren’t far behind.

In general, the morning hours are where the magic happens on Facebook. Engagement levels tend to rise through mid-morning, peak around midday, and gradually taper off later in the day.

When it comes to the best day to post on Facebook, Wednesday leads the pack in terms of overall engagement. Tuesday and Thursday follow closely — and you’ll notice from the graph below that all weekdays tend to boast similar performance on Facebook.

The weekends are another story. Engagement takes a noticeable dip on posts on social media on weekends, with Sunday coming in as the quietest day on the platform. Posts shared on Sundays see around 15% less engagement than those shared midweek, and Saturday about 10%.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Facebook to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is 3 p.m. on Friday. After analyzing over 2 million posts, we found this time slot consistently got the highest reach.

That said, there was not much difference in the reach of posts shared between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on most weekdays.

If you look at the heatmap above, you’ll notice a fairly predictable pattern: reach starts to build from around 6 a.m. on weekdays, picks up steam around 11 a.m. (hello, lunch time scroll), and hits its stride at 3 p.m. on most days.

Weekends, however, tell a different story. Reach tends to dip on Saturdays, dropping even further on Sundays. While there are a few small spikes in the early evening, they don’t quite match the performance of weekday posts.

In general, weekdays are a safe bet for solid reach on Instagram — but Monday and Friday come out on top, with slightly higher engagement than the rest of the week.

At the other end of the scale? Sunday is the worst day to post on Instagram, where we see a notable dip in post performance.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Instagram to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on LinkedIn

The best time to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

In the more than 1 million LinkedIn posts we analyzed, this time slot tended to see the most engagement — however (again!), only by a smidge.

Posts shared between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays tended to get solid engagement — and there are no prizes for guessing why.

Despite LinkedIn becoming a little more casual and creator-friendly in recent years, it’s still a work-first platform. Most people scroll their feeds during working hours.

Evenings, on the other hand, tend to be quieter. Unlike platforms like Instagram or TikTok, engagement on LinkedIn typically trails off as people wrap up their workdays and log off.

When it comes to the best day to post on LinkedIn, Thursday comes out tops, closely followed by Wednesday and Tuesday. But again engagement is fairly strong across all weekdays — so you’ve got a lot of flexibility.

The weekend tells a different story. Posts shared on Saturday and Sunday get noticeably less engagement, with Sunday coming in as the slowest day of the week. Again, that checks out — most people aren’t firing up LinkedIn on their days off.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on LinkedIn to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on TikTok

The best time to post on TikTok is Sunday at 8 p.m., with Tuesday at 4 p.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m. coming in just behind.

Videos, carousels, and even text-based posts shared during those slots tended to pull in the most views across the week.

Generally, we found that TikTok engagement starts to pick up in the early afternoon, with most peak viewing times happening from 1 p.m. onwards.

TikTok is a bit of an outlier compared to other social platforms — making it all the more fascinating to analyze. While platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have relatively consistent engagement patterns tied to the workday, TikTok audience behavior is different — possibly because people scroll in their downtime, not just between meetings.

Wednesday is the best day to post on TikTok, with Thursday and Friday tied for second place, so mid-to-late week is a great window to add to your schedule.

The worst day to post on TikTok is Saturday — the data shows a noticeable dip in views for content shared then, with Sunday not too far behind.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on TikTok to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on YouTube

The best time to post on YouTube is Wednesday at 4 p.m. Videos published at that time saw the highest average views of the week — with Thursday and Monday at 4 p.m. close behind.

More broadly, posting between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays is an excellent window for your posting schedule. Videos shared late afternoon consistently outperformed other time slots, likely because viewers are winding down after work or study and have time to settle in with longer-form content.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the best days to post on YouTube. These three were tied for top performance in our data, especially when paired with that late-afternoon posting window between 3 and 5 p.m.

Sunday was the lowest-performing day, followed closely by Saturday. So if you’re planning your content calendar, weekdays might be your best bet — and worth experimenting with if you’re currently posting on weekends.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on YouTube to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on X (formerly Twitter)

The best time to post on Twitter/X is 9 a.m. on Wednesday. That’s when content sees the highest engagement, according to our analysis of over 1 million posts.

The next-best times are Tuesday at 8 a.m., followed closely by Monday at 8 a.m.

In general, though, weekday mornings are your best bet. Engagement starts picking up early — typically around 6 or 7 a.m. — and hits its peak between 8 and 9 a.m. From there, activity tends to taper off into the afternoon as people shift gears into the rest of their workday.

Most of the top-performing time slots land in this morning window, so if you’re looking to get more eyes on your tweets, try scheduling them before lunchtime.

Tuesday is the best day to post on Twitter/X. Posts shared on Wednesday and Thursday also perform well — making the middle of the week a great time to show up on the platform.

Again Engagement tends to drop off on posts shared on the weekend. Sunday is the quietest day on Twitter, with Saturday not far behind. While a few time slots still hold up, you’re generally better off keeping your strongest content for the workweek.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on X to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

The best time to post on Threads

The best time to post on Threads is 7 a.m. on Wednesday. Posts published then had the highest median engagement — that is likes, replies, and reposts — across all the data we analyzed.

The next-best times were 7 a.m. – 9 a.m. on weekdays, especially Tuesday through Friday. Generally speaking, most weekday mornings are great windows to aim for.

An interesting ‘outlier’ time that popped up in our study was 1 a.m. on Sunday. As you can see from the heatmap graph above, it ranks in the top five posting times for Threads.

It’s proof that, while the hours with the highest median engagement rates tend to be between 7 and 9, it can still be worth experimenting with other posting times to see what works best for your audience.

Wednesday is the best day to post on Threads, based on overall engagement. It’s followed closely by Friday and Thursday — midweek is clearly prime Threads time.

On the flip side, Sunday sees the lowest engagement overall, with Saturday not far behind. If you’re batch-scheduling content for the week, you might want to give those weekend posts a second thought.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Threads to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

How to find your best times to post in Buffer

I can’t promise that posting your content at precisely these times will guarantee social media success — if only it were that easy! It’s important to remember that audience behavior can vary. For example, optimal posting times for Buffer’s social media audience probably won’t work for my personal target audience, and vice versa.

Using your social media metrics to guide you can be really helpful here. Some social media platforms, like Instagram and YouTube, will include high-engagement times in their native analytics. For the ones that don’t, you can do a bit of manual work by analyzing your best-performing posts to make some educated guesses on your personal best time to post on social media.

Click on the platform-specific guides I’ve linked above to find step-by-step instructions to help you access them all.

Of course, there is an easier way. Any social media management tool worth using will do the hard work for you. Buffer’s analytics will crunch the numbers of all your historical data and recommend the following:

• The best time/day of the week for you to post
• The best content format to post (image, video, text, or link)
• How often to post per day or week

To find them:

1. Ensure the social network you want to analyze is connected to Buffer (here’s a guide to connecting all our available channels). Note that if this channel has just been connected to Buffer, it may take about a week for us to gather all the required data.
2. Click on the Head to the Analytics tab at the top left.
3. Here, you’ll find your Analytics Overview. You’ll see how your content has performed over the period you set with the date dropdown on the top right.
4. Click on the Answers tab. You’ll find all of the recommendations I mentioned above in this window.

Choose the platform you want answers for in the column on the left.

Timing matters — but it isn't everything

As touched on above, finding the best time to post on social media might help boost content performance, but it's not the magic bullet that will have your content going viral.

Using optimal posting times on your chosen social media platforms is an easy box to tick, but your time and energy are best spent on making sure your content resonates with your target audience and will nudge you toward your social media marketing goals.

Not sure where to begin? Here's our guide to building a solid social media strategy from scratch — along with a template to get you started!

What have you found most helpful when determining your best time to post on social media? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!

Learn the ideal image sizes for all types of Instagram posts so your content is always pixel-perfect.

At Buffer, we recently embarked on an ambitious project: uncovering the best time to post on social media in 2025 — across all major platforms.

We pored over millions of posts, reels, TikToks, shorts, videos, and more to pinpoint when the best-performing content was published.

We analyzed the data here in one of two ways: To predict the best time to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, we looked at the timeslots with the highest median social media engagement on each platform. To predict the best times to post on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, we looked at median reach and video views.

In both cases, we found some clear patterns — and can make some clear recommendations on the best time to post on social media. Specific timeslots see more engagement or views than others, which is an important consideration in your social media marketing strategy.

Use these times as a starting point to give your content the best possible chance of success.

Before we get into this, an important caveat: sharing your social media posts at the ‘right’ time is not the secret sauce for content success.

(If there were a secret sauce, it would be consistency. But more on that in a sec.)

There are thousands of signals that determine content performance all each of the social media platform’s multiple algorithms — engagement, watch time, user preferences, location… Post recency is likely just one small part of a pretty complex puzzle.

Still, if you feel like you're hitting all the right notes with your content and want to give your social media strategy a helpful little boost, it’s worth testing the best time to post on social media for your platform of choice.

Is there an overall best time to post on social media?

There is no single best time to post on social media that applies to all social media platforms. Why? They’re all used for different reasons, by very different users.

For example, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is used for professional networking and thrives during working hours. TikTok is more focused on entertainment — so videos and carousels there are more likely to get views after hours. Posts on X tend to get more engagement on Tuesdays, while Fridays are the best days for Instagram.

As you’ll see from all our graphs, there’s not much overlap, especially across all major social media platforms.

So, while we can't be as specific as we can on a per-platform basis, we can make broad recommendations that are largely common sense. For example, social media posts shared on weekends tend to get less reach and engagement, as does content posted in the middle of the night.

With all that in mind, you’re far better off with a digital marketing plan and social media calendar with a unique posting schedule for each platform. Let’s get into our recommendations for all of them.

Best time to post on social media: a quick guide

Here’s a cheat sheet for the best time to post on social media (it’s worth scrolling down for more options, too!)

• Best time to post on Facebook: 5 a.m. – 7 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Instagram: 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on LinkedIn: 7 a.m. – 4 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on TikTok: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on YouTube: 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on X/Twitter: 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Threads: 7 a.m. — 9 a.m. on weekdays

The best time to post on Facebook

The best time to post on Facebook is 5 a.m. on Monday.Facebook users are the earliest birds of the bunch. Early morning posts — especially at the start of the week — tend to perform best.

That pre-sunrise slot on Monday tends to get the most engagement, but Tuesday at 5 a.m. and Thursday at 7 a.m. aren’t far behind.

In general, the morning hours are where the magic happens on Facebook. Engagement levels tend to rise through mid-morning, peak around midday, and gradually taper off later in the day.

When it comes to the best day to post on Facebook, Wednesday leads the pack in terms of overall engagement. Tuesday and Thursday follow closely — and you’ll notice from the graph below that all weekdays tend to boast similar performance on Facebook.

The weekends are another story. Engagement takes a noticeable dip on posts on social media on weekends, with Sunday coming in as the quietest day on the platform. Posts shared on Sundays see around 15% less engagement than those shared midweek, and Saturday about 10%.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Facebook to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is 3 p.m. on Friday. After analyzing over 2 million posts, we found this time slot consistently got the highest reach.

That said, there was not much difference in the reach of posts shared between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on most weekdays.

If you look at the heatmap above, you’ll notice a fairly predictable pattern: reach starts to build from around 6 a.m. on weekdays, picks up steam around 11 a.m. (hello, lunch time scroll), and hits its stride at 3 p.m. on most days.

Weekends, however, tell a different story. Reach tends to dip on Saturdays, dropping even further on Sundays. While there are a few small spikes in the early evening, they don’t quite match the performance of weekday posts.

In general, weekdays are a safe bet for solid reach on Instagram — but Monday and Friday come out on top, with slightly higher engagement than the rest of the week.

At the other end of the scale? Sunday is the worst day to post on Instagram, where we see a notable dip in post performance.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Instagram to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on LinkedIn

The best time to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

In the more than 1 million LinkedIn posts we analyzed, this time slot tended to see the most engagement — however (again!), only by a smidge.

Posts shared between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays tended to get solid engagement — and there are no prizes for guessing why.

Despite LinkedIn becoming a little more casual and creator-friendly in recent years, it’s still a work-first platform. Most people scroll their feeds during working hours.

Evenings, on the other hand, tend to be quieter. Unlike platforms like Instagram or TikTok, engagement on LinkedIn typically trails off as people wrap up their workdays and log off.

When it comes to the best day to post on LinkedIn, Thursday comes out tops, closely followed by Wednesday and Tuesday. But again engagement is fairly strong across all weekdays — so you’ve got a lot of flexibility.

The weekend tells a different story. Posts shared on Saturday and Sunday get noticeably less engagement, with Sunday coming in as the slowest day of the week. Again, that checks out — most people aren’t firing up LinkedIn on their days off.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on LinkedIn to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on TikTok

The best time to post on TikTok is Sunday at 8 p.m., with Tuesday at 4 p.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m. coming in just behind.

Videos, carousels, and even text-based posts shared during those slots tended to pull in the most views across the week.

Generally, we found that TikTok engagement starts to pick up in the early afternoon, with most peak viewing times happening from 1 p.m. onwards.

TikTok is a bit of an outlier compared to other social platforms — making it all the more fascinating to analyze. While platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have relatively consistent engagement patterns tied to the workday, TikTok audience behavior is different — possibly because people scroll in their downtime, not just between meetings.

Wednesday is the best day to post on TikTok, with Thursday and Friday tied for second place, so mid-to-late week is a great window to add to your schedule.

The worst day to post on TikTok is Saturday — the data shows a noticeable dip in views for content shared then, with Sunday not too far behind.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on TikTok to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on YouTube

The best time to post on YouTube is Wednesday at 4 p.m. Videos published at that time saw the highest average views of the week — with Thursday and Monday at 4 p.m. close behind.

More broadly, posting between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays is an excellent window for your posting schedule. Videos shared late afternoon consistently outperformed other time slots, likely because viewers are winding down after work or study and have time to settle in with longer-form content.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the best days to post on YouTube. These three were tied for top performance in our data, especially when paired with that late-afternoon posting window between 3 and 5 p.m.

Sunday was the lowest-performing day, followed closely by Saturday. So if you’re planning your content calendar, weekdays might be your best bet — and worth experimenting with if you’re currently posting on weekends.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on YouTube to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on X (formerly Twitter)

The best time to post on Twitter/X is 9 a.m. on Wednesday. That’s when content sees the highest engagement, according to our analysis of over 1 million posts.

The next-best times are Tuesday at 8 a.m., followed closely by Monday at 8 a.m.

In general, though, weekday mornings are your best bet. Engagement starts picking up early — typically around 6 or 7 a.m. — and hits its peak between 8 and 9 a.m. From there, activity tends to taper off into the afternoon as people shift gears into the rest of their workday.

Most of the top-performing time slots land in this morning window, so if you’re looking to get more eyes on your tweets, try scheduling them before lunchtime.

Tuesday is the best day to post on Twitter/X. Posts shared on Wednesday and Thursday also perform well — making the middle of the week a great time to show up on the platform.

Again Engagement tends to drop off on posts shared on the weekend. Sunday is the quietest day on Twitter, with Saturday not far behind. While a few time slots still hold up, you’re generally better off keeping your strongest content for the workweek.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on X to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

The best time to post on Threads

The best time to post on Threads is 7 a.m. on Wednesday. Posts published then had the highest median engagement — that is likes, replies, and reposts — across all the data we analyzed.

The next-best times were 7 a.m. – 9 a.m. on weekdays, especially Tuesday through Friday. Generally speaking, most weekday mornings are great windows to aim for.

An interesting ‘outlier’ time that popped up in our study was 1 a.m. on Sunday. As you can see from the heatmap graph above, it ranks in the top five posting times for Threads.

It’s proof that, while the hours with the highest median engagement rates tend to be between 7 and 9, it can still be worth experimenting with other posting times to see what works best for your audience.

Wednesday is the best day to post on Threads, based on overall engagement. It’s followed closely by Friday and Thursday — midweek is clearly prime Threads time.

On the flip side, Sunday sees the lowest engagement overall, with Saturday not far behind. If you’re batch-scheduling content for the week, you might want to give those weekend posts a second thought.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Threads to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

How to find your best times to post in Buffer

I can’t promise that posting your content at precisely these times will guarantee social media success — if only it were that easy! It’s important to remember that audience behavior can vary. For example, optimal posting times for Buffer’s social media audience probably won’t work for my personal target audience, and vice versa.

Using your social media metrics to guide you can be really helpful here. Some social media platforms, like Instagram and YouTube, will include high-engagement times in their native analytics. For the ones that don’t, you can do a bit of manual work by analyzing your best-performing posts to make some educated guesses on your personal best time to post on social media.

Click on the platform-specific guides I’ve linked above to find step-by-step instructions to help you access them all.

Of course, there is an easier way. Any social media management tool worth using will do the hard work for you. Buffer’s analytics will crunch the numbers of all your historical data and recommend the following:

• The best time/day of the week for you to post
• The best content format to post (image, video, text, or link)
• How often to post per day or week

To find them:

1. Ensure the social network you want to analyze is connected to Buffer (here’s a guide to connecting all our available channels). Note that if this channel has just been connected to Buffer, it may take about a week for us to gather all the required data.
2. Click on the Head to the Analytics tab at the top left.
3. Here, you’ll find your Analytics Overview. You’ll see how your content has performed over the period you set with the date dropdown on the top right.
4. Click on the Answers tab. You’ll find all of the recommendations I mentioned above in this window.

Choose the platform you want answers for in the column on the left.

Timing matters — but it isn't everything

As touched on above, finding the best time to post on social media might help boost content performance, but it's not the magic bullet that will have your content going viral.

Using optimal posting times on your chosen social media platforms is an easy box to tick, but your time and energy are best spent on making sure your content resonates with your target audience and will nudge you toward your social media marketing goals.

Not sure where to begin? Here's our guide to building a solid social media strategy from scratch — along with a template to get you started!

What have you found most helpful when determining your best time to post on social media? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!

Learn how to leverage AI social media content creation tools and save valuable time in your social media marketing efforts.

At Buffer, we recently embarked on an ambitious project: uncovering the best time to post on social media in 2025 — across all major platforms.

We pored over millions of posts, reels, TikToks, shorts, videos, and more to pinpoint when the best-performing content was published.

We analyzed the data here in one of two ways: To predict the best time to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, we looked at the timeslots with the highest median social media engagement on each platform. To predict the best times to post on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, we looked at median reach and video views.

In both cases, we found some clear patterns — and can make some clear recommendations on the best time to post on social media. Specific timeslots see more engagement or views than others, which is an important consideration in your social media marketing strategy.

Use these times as a starting point to give your content the best possible chance of success.

Before we get into this, an important caveat: sharing your social media posts at the ‘right’ time is not the secret sauce for content success.

(If there were a secret sauce, it would be consistency. But more on that in a sec.)

There are thousands of signals that determine content performance all each of the social media platform’s multiple algorithms — engagement, watch time, user preferences, location… Post recency is likely just one small part of a pretty complex puzzle.

Still, if you feel like you're hitting all the right notes with your content and want to give your social media strategy a helpful little boost, it’s worth testing the best time to post on social media for your platform of choice.

Is there an overall best time to post on social media?

There is no single best time to post on social media that applies to all social media platforms. Why? They’re all used for different reasons, by very different users.

For example, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is used for professional networking and thrives during working hours. TikTok is more focused on entertainment — so videos and carousels there are more likely to get views after hours. Posts on X tend to get more engagement on Tuesdays, while Fridays are the best days for Instagram.

As you’ll see from all our graphs, there’s not much overlap, especially across all major social media platforms.

So, while we can't be as specific as we can on a per-platform basis, we can make broad recommendations that are largely common sense. For example, social media posts shared on weekends tend to get less reach and engagement, as does content posted in the middle of the night.

With all that in mind, you’re far better off with a digital marketing plan and social media calendar with a unique posting schedule for each platform. Let’s get into our recommendations for all of them.

Best time to post on social media: a quick guide

Here’s a cheat sheet for the best time to post on social media (it’s worth scrolling down for more options, too!)

• Best time to post on Facebook: 5 a.m. – 7 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Instagram: 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on LinkedIn: 7 a.m. – 4 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on TikTok: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on YouTube: 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on X/Twitter: 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Threads: 7 a.m. — 9 a.m. on weekdays

The best time to post on Facebook

The best time to post on Facebook is 5 a.m. on Monday.Facebook users are the earliest birds of the bunch. Early morning posts — especially at the start of the week — tend to perform best.

That pre-sunrise slot on Monday tends to get the most engagement, but Tuesday at 5 a.m. and Thursday at 7 a.m. aren’t far behind.

In general, the morning hours are where the magic happens on Facebook. Engagement levels tend to rise through mid-morning, peak around midday, and gradually taper off later in the day.

When it comes to the best day to post on Facebook, Wednesday leads the pack in terms of overall engagement. Tuesday and Thursday follow closely — and you’ll notice from the graph below that all weekdays tend to boast similar performance on Facebook.

The weekends are another story. Engagement takes a noticeable dip on posts on social media on weekends, with Sunday coming in as the quietest day on the platform. Posts shared on Sundays see around 15% less engagement than those shared midweek, and Saturday about 10%.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Facebook to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is 3 p.m. on Friday. After analyzing over 2 million posts, we found this time slot consistently got the highest reach.

That said, there was not much difference in the reach of posts shared between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on most weekdays.

If you look at the heatmap above, you’ll notice a fairly predictable pattern: reach starts to build from around 6 a.m. on weekdays, picks up steam around 11 a.m. (hello, lunch time scroll), and hits its stride at 3 p.m. on most days.

Weekends, however, tell a different story. Reach tends to dip on Saturdays, dropping even further on Sundays. While there are a few small spikes in the early evening, they don’t quite match the performance of weekday posts.

In general, weekdays are a safe bet for solid reach on Instagram — but Monday and Friday come out on top, with slightly higher engagement than the rest of the week.

At the other end of the scale? Sunday is the worst day to post on Instagram, where we see a notable dip in post performance.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Instagram to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on LinkedIn

The best time to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

In the more than 1 million LinkedIn posts we analyzed, this time slot tended to see the most engagement — however (again!), only by a smidge.

Posts shared between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays tended to get solid engagement — and there are no prizes for guessing why.

Despite LinkedIn becoming a little more casual and creator-friendly in recent years, it’s still a work-first platform. Most people scroll their feeds during working hours.

Evenings, on the other hand, tend to be quieter. Unlike platforms like Instagram or TikTok, engagement on LinkedIn typically trails off as people wrap up their workdays and log off.

When it comes to the best day to post on LinkedIn, Thursday comes out tops, closely followed by Wednesday and Tuesday. But again engagement is fairly strong across all weekdays — so you’ve got a lot of flexibility.

The weekend tells a different story. Posts shared on Saturday and Sunday get noticeably less engagement, with Sunday coming in as the slowest day of the week. Again, that checks out — most people aren’t firing up LinkedIn on their days off.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on LinkedIn to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on TikTok

The best time to post on TikTok is Sunday at 8 p.m., with Tuesday at 4 p.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m. coming in just behind.

Videos, carousels, and even text-based posts shared during those slots tended to pull in the most views across the week.

Generally, we found that TikTok engagement starts to pick up in the early afternoon, with most peak viewing times happening from 1 p.m. onwards.

TikTok is a bit of an outlier compared to other social platforms — making it all the more fascinating to analyze. While platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have relatively consistent engagement patterns tied to the workday, TikTok audience behavior is different — possibly because people scroll in their downtime, not just between meetings.

Wednesday is the best day to post on TikTok, with Thursday and Friday tied for second place, so mid-to-late week is a great window to add to your schedule.

The worst day to post on TikTok is Saturday — the data shows a noticeable dip in views for content shared then, with Sunday not too far behind.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on TikTok to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on YouTube

The best time to post on YouTube is Wednesday at 4 p.m. Videos published at that time saw the highest average views of the week — with Thursday and Monday at 4 p.m. close behind.

More broadly, posting between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays is an excellent window for your posting schedule. Videos shared late afternoon consistently outperformed other time slots, likely because viewers are winding down after work or study and have time to settle in with longer-form content.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the best days to post on YouTube. These three were tied for top performance in our data, especially when paired with that late-afternoon posting window between 3 and 5 p.m.

Sunday was the lowest-performing day, followed closely by Saturday. So if you’re planning your content calendar, weekdays might be your best bet — and worth experimenting with if you’re currently posting on weekends.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on YouTube to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on X (formerly Twitter)

The best time to post on Twitter/X is 9 a.m. on Wednesday. That’s when content sees the highest engagement, according to our analysis of over 1 million posts.

The next-best times are Tuesday at 8 a.m., followed closely by Monday at 8 a.m.

In general, though, weekday mornings are your best bet. Engagement starts picking up early — typically around 6 or 7 a.m. — and hits its peak between 8 and 9 a.m. From there, activity tends to taper off into the afternoon as people shift gears into the rest of their workday.

Most of the top-performing time slots land in this morning window, so if you’re looking to get more eyes on your tweets, try scheduling them before lunchtime.

Tuesday is the best day to post on Twitter/X. Posts shared on Wednesday and Thursday also perform well — making the middle of the week a great time to show up on the platform.

Again Engagement tends to drop off on posts shared on the weekend. Sunday is the quietest day on Twitter, with Saturday not far behind. While a few time slots still hold up, you’re generally better off keeping your strongest content for the workweek.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on X to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

The best time to post on Threads

The best time to post on Threads is 7 a.m. on Wednesday. Posts published then had the highest median engagement — that is likes, replies, and reposts — across all the data we analyzed.

The next-best times were 7 a.m. – 9 a.m. on weekdays, especially Tuesday through Friday. Generally speaking, most weekday mornings are great windows to aim for.

An interesting ‘outlier’ time that popped up in our study was 1 a.m. on Sunday. As you can see from the heatmap graph above, it ranks in the top five posting times for Threads.

It’s proof that, while the hours with the highest median engagement rates tend to be between 7 and 9, it can still be worth experimenting with other posting times to see what works best for your audience.

Wednesday is the best day to post on Threads, based on overall engagement. It’s followed closely by Friday and Thursday — midweek is clearly prime Threads time.

On the flip side, Sunday sees the lowest engagement overall, with Saturday not far behind. If you’re batch-scheduling content for the week, you might want to give those weekend posts a second thought.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Threads to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

How to find your best times to post in Buffer

I can’t promise that posting your content at precisely these times will guarantee social media success — if only it were that easy! It’s important to remember that audience behavior can vary. For example, optimal posting times for Buffer’s social media audience probably won’t work for my personal target audience, and vice versa.

Using your social media metrics to guide you can be really helpful here. Some social media platforms, like Instagram and YouTube, will include high-engagement times in their native analytics. For the ones that don’t, you can do a bit of manual work by analyzing your best-performing posts to make some educated guesses on your personal best time to post on social media.

Click on the platform-specific guides I’ve linked above to find step-by-step instructions to help you access them all.

Of course, there is an easier way. Any social media management tool worth using will do the hard work for you. Buffer’s analytics will crunch the numbers of all your historical data and recommend the following:

• The best time/day of the week for you to post
• The best content format to post (image, video, text, or link)
• How often to post per day or week

To find them:

1. Ensure the social network you want to analyze is connected to Buffer (here’s a guide to connecting all our available channels). Note that if this channel has just been connected to Buffer, it may take about a week for us to gather all the required data.
2. Click on the Head to the Analytics tab at the top left.
3. Here, you’ll find your Analytics Overview. You’ll see how your content has performed over the period you set with the date dropdown on the top right.
4. Click on the Answers tab. You’ll find all of the recommendations I mentioned above in this window.

Choose the platform you want answers for in the column on the left.

Timing matters — but it isn't everything

As touched on above, finding the best time to post on social media might help boost content performance, but it's not the magic bullet that will have your content going viral.

Using optimal posting times on your chosen social media platforms is an easy box to tick, but your time and energy are best spent on making sure your content resonates with your target audience and will nudge you toward your social media marketing goals.

Not sure where to begin? Here's our guide to building a solid social media strategy from scratch — along with a template to get you started!

What have you found most helpful when determining your best time to post on social media? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!

Learn all about user-generated content — what it is, why you should use it, and how to leverage it in your marketing channels.

At Buffer, we recently embarked on an ambitious project: uncovering the best time to post on social media in 2025 — across all major platforms.

We pored over millions of posts, reels, TikToks, shorts, videos, and more to pinpoint when the best-performing content was published.

We analyzed the data here in one of two ways: To predict the best time to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, we looked at the timeslots with the highest median social media engagement on each platform. To predict the best times to post on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, we looked at median reach and video views.

In both cases, we found some clear patterns — and can make some clear recommendations on the best time to post on social media. Specific timeslots see more engagement or views than others, which is an important consideration in your social media marketing strategy.

Use these times as a starting point to give your content the best possible chance of success.

Before we get into this, an important caveat: sharing your social media posts at the ‘right’ time is not the secret sauce for content success.

(If there were a secret sauce, it would be consistency. But more on that in a sec.)

There are thousands of signals that determine content performance all each of the social media platform’s multiple algorithms — engagement, watch time, user preferences, location… Post recency is likely just one small part of a pretty complex puzzle.

Still, if you feel like you're hitting all the right notes with your content and want to give your social media strategy a helpful little boost, it’s worth testing the best time to post on social media for your platform of choice.

Is there an overall best time to post on social media?

There is no single best time to post on social media that applies to all social media platforms. Why? They’re all used for different reasons, by very different users.

For example, unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is used for professional networking and thrives during working hours. TikTok is more focused on entertainment — so videos and carousels there are more likely to get views after hours. Posts on X tend to get more engagement on Tuesdays, while Fridays are the best days for Instagram.

As you’ll see from all our graphs, there’s not much overlap, especially across all major social media platforms.

So, while we can't be as specific as we can on a per-platform basis, we can make broad recommendations that are largely common sense. For example, social media posts shared on weekends tend to get less reach and engagement, as does content posted in the middle of the night.

With all that in mind, you’re far better off with a digital marketing plan and social media calendar with a unique posting schedule for each platform. Let’s get into our recommendations for all of them.

Best time to post on social media: a quick guide

Here’s a cheat sheet for the best time to post on social media (it’s worth scrolling down for more options, too!)

• Best time to post on Facebook: 5 a.m. – 7 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Instagram: 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on LinkedIn: 7 a.m. – 4 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on TikTok: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on YouTube: 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on X/Twitter: 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. on weekdays
• Best time to post on Threads: 7 a.m. — 9 a.m. on weekdays

The best time to post on Facebook

The best time to post on Facebook is 5 a.m. on Monday.Facebook users are the earliest birds of the bunch. Early morning posts — especially at the start of the week — tend to perform best.

That pre-sunrise slot on Monday tends to get the most engagement, but Tuesday at 5 a.m. and Thursday at 7 a.m. aren’t far behind.

In general, the morning hours are where the magic happens on Facebook. Engagement levels tend to rise through mid-morning, peak around midday, and gradually taper off later in the day.

When it comes to the best day to post on Facebook, Wednesday leads the pack in terms of overall engagement. Tuesday and Thursday follow closely — and you’ll notice from the graph below that all weekdays tend to boast similar performance on Facebook.

The weekends are another story. Engagement takes a noticeable dip on posts on social media on weekends, with Sunday coming in as the quietest day on the platform. Posts shared on Sundays see around 15% less engagement than those shared midweek, and Saturday about 10%.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Facebook to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is 3 p.m. on Friday. After analyzing over 2 million posts, we found this time slot consistently got the highest reach.

That said, there was not much difference in the reach of posts shared between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on most weekdays.

If you look at the heatmap above, you’ll notice a fairly predictable pattern: reach starts to build from around 6 a.m. on weekdays, picks up steam around 11 a.m. (hello, lunch time scroll), and hits its stride at 3 p.m. on most days.

Weekends, however, tell a different story. Reach tends to dip on Saturdays, dropping even further on Sundays. While there are a few small spikes in the early evening, they don’t quite match the performance of weekday posts.

In general, weekdays are a safe bet for solid reach on Instagram — but Monday and Friday come out on top, with slightly higher engagement than the rest of the week.

At the other end of the scale? Sunday is the worst day to post on Instagram, where we see a notable dip in post performance.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Instagram to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on LinkedIn

The best time to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

In the more than 1 million LinkedIn posts we analyzed, this time slot tended to see the most engagement — however (again!), only by a smidge.

Posts shared between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays tended to get solid engagement — and there are no prizes for guessing why.

Despite LinkedIn becoming a little more casual and creator-friendly in recent years, it’s still a work-first platform. Most people scroll their feeds during working hours.

Evenings, on the other hand, tend to be quieter. Unlike platforms like Instagram or TikTok, engagement on LinkedIn typically trails off as people wrap up their workdays and log off.

When it comes to the best day to post on LinkedIn, Thursday comes out tops, closely followed by Wednesday and Tuesday. But again engagement is fairly strong across all weekdays — so you’ve got a lot of flexibility.

The weekend tells a different story. Posts shared on Saturday and Sunday get noticeably less engagement, with Sunday coming in as the slowest day of the week. Again, that checks out — most people aren’t firing up LinkedIn on their days off.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on LinkedIn to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on TikTok

The best time to post on TikTok is Sunday at 8 p.m., with Tuesday at 4 p.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m. coming in just behind.

Videos, carousels, and even text-based posts shared during those slots tended to pull in the most views across the week.

Generally, we found that TikTok engagement starts to pick up in the early afternoon, with most peak viewing times happening from 1 p.m. onwards.

TikTok is a bit of an outlier compared to other social platforms — making it all the more fascinating to analyze. While platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn have relatively consistent engagement patterns tied to the workday, TikTok audience behavior is different — possibly because people scroll in their downtime, not just between meetings.

Wednesday is the best day to post on TikTok, with Thursday and Friday tied for second place, so mid-to-late week is a great window to add to your schedule.

The worst day to post on TikTok is Saturday — the data shows a noticeable dip in views for content shared then, with Sunday not too far behind.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on TikTok to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on YouTube

The best time to post on YouTube is Wednesday at 4 p.m. Videos published at that time saw the highest average views of the week — with Thursday and Monday at 4 p.m. close behind.

More broadly, posting between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays is an excellent window for your posting schedule. Videos shared late afternoon consistently outperformed other time slots, likely because viewers are winding down after work or study and have time to settle in with longer-form content.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the best days to post on YouTube. These three were tied for top performance in our data, especially when paired with that late-afternoon posting window between 3 and 5 p.m.

Sunday was the lowest-performing day, followed closely by Saturday. So if you’re planning your content calendar, weekdays might be your best bet — and worth experimenting with if you’re currently posting on weekends.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on YouTube to see the optimal times for every day of the week, plus the best type of content to post.

The best time to post on X (formerly Twitter)

The best time to post on Twitter/X is 9 a.m. on Wednesday. That’s when content sees the highest engagement, according to our analysis of over 1 million posts.

The next-best times are Tuesday at 8 a.m., followed closely by Monday at 8 a.m.

In general, though, weekday mornings are your best bet. Engagement starts picking up early — typically around 6 or 7 a.m. — and hits its peak between 8 and 9 a.m. From there, activity tends to taper off into the afternoon as people shift gears into the rest of their workday.

Most of the top-performing time slots land in this morning window, so if you’re looking to get more eyes on your tweets, try scheduling them before lunchtime.

Tuesday is the best day to post on Twitter/X. Posts shared on Wednesday and Thursday also perform well — making the middle of the week a great time to show up on the platform.

Again Engagement tends to drop off on posts shared on the weekend. Sunday is the quietest day on Twitter, with Saturday not far behind. While a few time slots still hold up, you’re generally better off keeping your strongest content for the workweek.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on X to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

The best time to post on Threads

The best time to post on Threads is 7 a.m. on Wednesday. Posts published then had the highest median engagement — that is likes, replies, and reposts — across all the data we analyzed.

The next-best times were 7 a.m. – 9 a.m. on weekdays, especially Tuesday through Friday. Generally speaking, most weekday mornings are great windows to aim for.

An interesting ‘outlier’ time that popped up in our study was 1 a.m. on Sunday. As you can see from the heatmap graph above, it ranks in the top five posting times for Threads.

It’s proof that, while the hours with the highest median engagement rates tend to be between 7 and 9, it can still be worth experimenting with other posting times to see what works best for your audience.

Wednesday is the best day to post on Threads, based on overall engagement. It’s followed closely by Friday and Thursday — midweek is clearly prime Threads time.

On the flip side, Sunday sees the lowest engagement overall, with Saturday not far behind. If you’re batch-scheduling content for the week, you might want to give those weekend posts a second thought.

📚 Read our full guide to the best time to post on Threads to see the optimal times for every day of the week.

How to find your best times to post in Buffer

I can’t promise that posting your content at precisely these times will guarantee social media success — if only it were that easy! It’s important to remember that audience behavior can vary. For example, optimal posting times for Buffer’s social media audience probably won’t work for my personal target audience, and vice versa.

Using your social media metrics to guide you can be really helpful here. Some social media platforms, like Instagram and YouTube, will include high-engagement times in their native analytics. For the ones that don’t, you can do a bit of manual work by analyzing your best-performing posts to make some educated guesses on your personal best time to post on social media.

Click on the platform-specific guides I’ve linked above to find step-by-step instructions to help you access them all.

Of course, there is an easier way. Any social media management tool worth using will do the hard work for you. Buffer’s analytics will crunch the numbers of all your historical data and recommend the following:

• The best time/day of the week for you to post
• The best content format to post (image, video, text, or link)
• How often to post per day or week

To find them:

1. Ensure the social network you want to analyze is connected to Buffer (here’s a guide to connecting all our available channels). Note that if this channel has just been connected to Buffer, it may take about a week for us to gather all the required data.
2. Click on the Head to the Analytics tab at the top left.
3. Here, you’ll find your Analytics Overview. You’ll see how your content has performed over the period you set with the date dropdown on the top right.
4. Click on the Answers tab. You’ll find all of the recommendations I mentioned above in this window.

Choose the platform you want answers for in the column on the left.

Timing matters — but it isn't everything

As touched on above, finding the best time to post on social media might help boost content performance, but it's not the magic bullet that will have your content going viral.

Using optimal posting times on your chosen social media platforms is an easy box to tick, but your time and energy are best spent on making sure your content resonates with your target audience and will nudge you toward your social media marketing goals.

Not sure where to begin? Here's our guide to building a solid social media strategy from scratch — along with a template to get you started!

What have you found most helpful when determining your best time to post on social media? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!