YouTube is one of the most important social media networks for businesses and influencers in part because it gives creators time to present their thoughts, ideas, and products. With several million videos posted every week, you can easily find content you are interested in. There are, of course, many different niches or topics that YouTube creators focus on based on their expertise. For popular content areas such as technology, travel, sports, gaming, cooking, fitness, and so much more, there can be hundreds or even thousands of different creators developing content for people interested in those topics.

YouTube can be a very lucrative endeavor for creators with various ways to monetize their channels. For this reason, creators look for various approaches to boost their engagement rates, increase their video views, and gain more followers. Clearly, competition for views and followers can be stiff, since performing well for these metrics will go a long way in determining how much money you can make from your channel. That is why so many YouTube creators research best practices and look for all possible methods to rise above the competition in a crowded field. 

Along these lines, it is important to keep in mind that YouTube is a search engine. For that reason, it is important to optimize your videos with relevant keywords as well as follow other best practices such as using the right hashtags and finding what video lengths are optimal can go a long way. The overall topic of YouTube optimization is massive. For this reason, we want to focus on a single issue: posting times.

For those who want to look for ways to improve your performance, you are probably wondering what are the best times to post on YouTube. In reality, there is no universal answer that is valid for every channel. Therefore, we will on focus on how you can use data-based research methods to research when to post on YouTube that are based on your specific industry, location, and/or niche. With all this content that is posted every day on YouTube, finding the best times to post can be one of the factors that contributes to your overall performance. 

Are Posting Times on YouTube Important?

As we have covered with articles about the ideal times to post on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, posting time matters on social media. What’s more is that the best posting times are not universal for every profile, but rather depends on your target audience and when they are online, as well as when they are most likely to interact with your content. It may be tempting to read blogs that highlight when are the best times to post on YouTube in general. However, you should keep in mind that these are generally based on data from thousands or more profiles across different industries, content niches, and timezones. This means that many of these may not be overly helpful for determining when to post for your own channel. 

YouTube is no different than other social media channels as it relates to the importance of getting early engagement for your content. This is because gaining early engagement can represent an important signal to the algorithm, which would in turn help increase your reach. However, we should note that posting times is not the ultimate defining factor when it comes to getting noticed and boosting your performance. As we already pointed out, YouTube is a complex search engine that has many different ranking factors and best practices. First and foremost, it is important that content is related to the search intent of a user and follow SEO best practices, so your video is easily discovered. 

However, if you are taking a comprehensive approach to bettering the performance of your YouTube channel, then it may make sense to research at what times you should be posting for your OWN channel. After all, discovering when is a good time to post on YouTube is dependent on your target audience and not general YouTube trends. For this reason, we will show you how to use a social media tool to discover when you should be posting on YouTube. This involves analyzing data from both your YouTube channel as well as other similar channels. We will also discuss how to research when is the best time to post a short on YouTube if you want to focus on this specific content format.

Finding the Best Times to Post on YouTube

If you want to find the best times to post on YouTube, we highly recommend that you take a data-based approach that allows you to analyze large data sets. Ultimately, the best posting times will be correlated when your audience is online as well as when there is a high probability that they will interact with your content. 

Below, we will go through the steps you can take in order to determine for yourself when is the best time to post on YouTube for your own channel. Importantly, we will be using a social media tool that helps us to collect and analyze data. In this case, the various charts presented below are generated by the all-in-one social media tool Fanpage Karma.

Lastly, in going through how to find when to post on YouTube, we will provide a concrete example related to the steps you need to take by looking at a specific content niche. In this case, we will analyze YouTube channels related to travel that have at least 500,000 followers: Fearless & Far, Flying the Nest, Gone with the Wynns, Hey Nadine, Kara and Nate, Lost LeBlanc, The Bucket List Family, The Endless Adventure, vagabrothers, and Wolters World. In doing so, we will highlight what is important to keep in mind when conducting your analysis. 

Step 1: Determine what YouTube Channels will be Part of your Analysis

Researching when is the best time to post on YouTube is highly dependent on the channels that make up your data set. This is why it is important to think carefully about what profiles you are adding to your study, and make sure they are similar profiles that have more or less the same target audience. When using data-based methods to find when to post on YouTube is that you want to add channels that have similar audiences since you can then get a better understanding of their online behavior, i.e. when they are online and most likely to engage with the content. This is because, when using the right social media tool, you are essentially analyzing the data profiles, in addition to yours, in that you can add more data points to your analysis, which makes it more accurate.

As we already explained, our example would be focusing on travel channels that would all have similar audiences. However, the overall topic(s) of interest is only one aspect, albeit a critical one, that you should consider when looking for similar profiles. When it comes to posting times, the timezones in which profiles are based are also significant. Therefore, the profiles you add to your study should also be active in similar timezones, so your data is not skewed by timezones that your target audience does not live in. We should point out, though, that for channels with global audiences this might not be quite as important of an issue than those who may target audiences in specific countries or regions.     

We also noted we selected channels that have significant followings, in this case at least 500,000 followers to date (as of September 2024). While not always the most important factor, the size of profiles in your study is important to keep in mind. There may be reasons that you add channels with significantly smaller or larger follower counts to your analysis. However, it also most likely that channels with comparable number of followers would be more similar to yours than those with wildly different follower counts.

Lastly, keeping your analyses as precise as possible is important. Let’s say that you have a YouTube channel that posts about more than one topic or focuses on several niches. In this case, it may make sense to run a different analysis for each content niche. In other words, you should run one study adding similar profiles for that specific content area and then another one for another content area. If you find the right social media tool that allows for unlimited profile tracking, you can essentially run multiple analyses for different niche or content topics. This would then allow you to gain more precise and tailored insights for ideal posting times in specific industries. 

Step 2: Identify your Timeframe

Longer timeframes, for instance looking at an entire year such as 2023, give you a larger collection of data points which would presumably give you a more accurate understanding of when the best posting times are. You may want to take this approach if you are relatively certain that posting times throughout the year remain static. The downside of such an approach is that you may miss seasonal or monthly changes in posting times that are obscured when you conduct a study with so many data points. 

You may also consider focusing on only a month or two, for instance January-February 2024. This allows you to closely study posting times for only specific timeframes, so you can get a better understanding of when to post on a monthly or seasonable basis. The downside is that, even if you add a number of profiles to your study, you may not have very many data points to analyze.

One suggestion is to run analyses for both a longer timeframe and shorter timeframes based on specific months or seasons. You can then better understand whether there are seasonal differences as well as general posting times would be throughout the year. Along these lines, it is important to find the right social media tool that allows you to adjust the timeframes of analysis in addition to tracking as many profiles as you want. 

Step 3: Analyze your Data and Determine When to Post on YouTube

Now that we know what to consider when beginning our analysis, it is time to discuss data output. Keep in mind that even if you don’t upload new videos very often, it makes sense to understand the best times and days to post on YouTube beforehand so you can plan your posting schedule according. So what are the best times to post on YouTube as it relates to examining the travel channels we mentioned? Let’s take a look below.

We will begin running an analysis that includes all the channels we mentioned above for January-February 2024. When studying the charts below, keep in mind that the size of the circle indicates the number of posts during a specific timeframe, with larger circles meaning that more that was posted at that time. You can see the relative post interaction rates for each timeframe by looking at the color of the circle, with greener colors indicating higher post interaction rates.

(Selected YouTube Travel Channels: January-February 2024)

As you see above, there are a number of potential posting times, mostly in the morning or early afternoon during different parts of the week. However, we may wonder if the there are changes to ideal posting times if we look at another two month window during a different part of the year. In this case, we will adjust our timeframe and look at October-November 2023.  

(Selected YouTube Travel Channels: October-November 2023)

When studying our chart in this case, we see a change in the ideal posting times from that in January-February 2024. In this instance, we may consider adjusting our analysis several times to see specific best posting times based on one or two month timeframes. Now that we have looked at relatively short periods of time, we will adjust our timeframe to look at 2023 for the entire year as we see below.

(Selected YouTube Travel Channels: Entire 2023)

Once we have run this analysis, we see that there are more data points in our study. There is some overlap with best posting times from the previous analyses, as well as some new possibilities. This shows how adding more data points can alter your data output.

However, what if we decided that only the first five channels we mentioned (Fearless & Far, Flying the Nest, Gone with the Wynns, Hey Nadine, Kara and Nate) were very similar channels to our own and then removed the last five (Lost LeBlanc, The Bucket List Family, The Endless Adventure, vagabrothers, and Wolters World) from our analysis since they were not very similar? What would happen to our data output? 

(Fearless & Far, Flying the Nest, Gone with the Wynns, Hey Nadine, Kara and Nate: Entire 2023)

We see that this not only reduces the number of data points we are analyzing but also the data output. There may be scenarios where you first analyze only profiles that are very similar to your own, while then adding other somewhat similar profiles to another analysis. 

What we have shown here is that, as you continue to adjust your analysis, the output can change. The point of this exercise is to show the different ways in which you can adjust your analysis that correspond to your needs. Again, it may be important for you to find a tool that allows you to make these adjustments and track a large number of profiles.     

Finding the Best Times to Post on YouTube Shorts

So far, we have talked about finding the best times and days to post on YouTube in general. However, what if you want to concentrate on a specific content format, such as YouTube shorts? For instance, let’s say that we want to find out when is the best time to post shorts on YouTube for these travel channels. Are the best times to post on YouTube shorts different than other videos? And what steps do you need to take to find out?

Step 4: Schedule your Posts

We have so far discussed what are the best times to post on YouTube for these travel channels, as well as how to adjust your analysis to fit your needs. However, keep in mind that discovering when is the best day to post on YouTube is only helpful if you actually act upon your research. In other words, when you are planning your content, make sure that you note what times you should upload your YouTube videos and follow through with it. 

It may be helpful to use a social media planning tool to help you schedule and plan your posts, especially if you are posting content on multiple social media networks. A good social media publishing tool can help you schedule in advance while helping you manage and delegate tasks to various team members who are helping produce the content. 

Step 5: Continue Researching When to Post on YouTube

As with any approach that is aimed at helping boost your performance, it is also important to constantly monitor your progress to see if what you are doing is working. You can monitor your progress yourself by looking at the native YouTube analytics, or you can use a social media tool with benchmarking features that allows you not only to track your own progress, but also that of other similar profiles you want to compare yourself to. 

We should also point out that researching the best times to post on YouTube should be seen as a continuous process. Every day that passes marks another new data point for analysis. Moreover, you can use tools that can help you discover new, similar profiles that you can add to your data set to enhance your study. This is why it can generally make sense to find a social media tool that gives you all of these types of functions if you are serious about researching the best posting times. 

Using Research to Find the Best Times to Post on YouTube

The main point that we want to emphasize in concluding this articles is that finding the best times to post on YouTube is possible for any creator. However, you should keep in mind that there are a number of steps to take if you want to do it right. This includes finding similar profiles to add to your analysis, as well as understanding what timeframe you want to analyze. Moreover, if you are researching when to post shorts on YouTube, you should make adjustments to look at that specific content format. 

If you are looking for a social media tool that allows you to conduct these types of best times to post analyses, you can try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial and see for yourself when you should consider uploading your videos. Additionally, there are several different content optimization and benchmarking functions that give you power insights as well as community management, publishing, and research features.

You can also sign up for and participate in our free weekly webinar that focuses on how to use Fanpage Karma to improve your social media performance.