Posting times

Best time to post, for food creators.

Appetite has a clock and it is not the same clock as attention. The reliable windows are late morning, when people plan what to eat, and the hour before an evening meal. What that means in practice is that a recipe posted at 3pm is competing for people who are not hungry and not planning, which is the worst of both.

Get started See pricing

The shape of the week

Late morning
The hour before an evening meal
Mid afternoon

Late morning

People are deciding what to eat rather than eating. This is the window where a recipe gets saved for tonight instead of admired and scrolled past.

How this audience spends its day, not hours read from anybody's account.

The shape of the week

When food creators are actually reachable.

Late morning

People are deciding what to eat rather than eating. This is the window where a recipe gets saved for tonight instead of admired and scrolled past.

The hour before an evening meal

Appetite is doing the work for you. It is the strongest window in this niche and the one a general average buries.

Mid afternoon

The emptiest hour here. Your audience is neither hungry nor planning, so a recipe posted now is competing for attention nobody has spare.

The hours every guide repeats describe everybody, not food creators, and we have not checked them against any account. They are on the posting times guide.

Find your own hours

Three tests for a food account.

Run each one for two weeks and change one thing at a time. The number to compare is named beside each test, because likes alone will tell you the wrong story.

1Post a quick weeknight recipe in the late afternoon instead of at night.Compare: Saves in the first two hours, when people are deciding what to cook.
2Publish the weekend recipe on Friday evening rather than Saturday.Compare: Saves and shares, because the shopping happens before the cooking.
3Post the same dish once as a reel and once as a carousel.Compare: Saves per account reached, the number that says the recipe will be used.

The number worth watching here: saves, and how far they sit above your reach. Food is the topic where a save is the whole point: somebody intends to cook this. A recipe that reached widely and was saved rarely found browsers rather than cooks, and the two audiences are worth different amounts to anybody selling anything.

In Synclify

Your own hours beat any average.

Connect an account and the guessing stops. Synclify reads 90 days of your own audience's hours, day by hour, in your account's timezone, and a week's plan schedules into them.

Read from your posts and your followers' activity, per account, never from an industry average.