Posting times

Best time to post, for restaurants and cafes.

Two windows and they are not subtle: late morning, when people decide where to have lunch, and the couple of hours before an evening meal. Posting a dish at 4pm reaches an audience that is neither hungry nor deciding, which is the emptiest hour in this niche.

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The shape of the week

Late morning
Early evening
Mid afternoon

Late morning

The lunch decision is being made right now by people who have not made it yet. The shortest and sharpest window in this niche.

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

The shape of the week

When restaurants and cafes are actually reachable.

Late morning

The lunch decision is being made right now by people who have not made it yet. The shortest and sharpest window in this niche.

Early evening

The couple of hours before a meal, when a table gets chosen and booked rather than admired.

Mid afternoon

The emptiest hour here. Nobody is hungry and nobody is deciding, so a dish posted now is a dish posted to nobody.

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

Find your own hours

Three tests for a hospitality 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 the specials at lunchtime instead of the evening before.Compare: Taps on directions and calls.
2Publish the weekend post on Thursday afternoon.Compare: Booking enquiries for Friday and Saturday.
3Swap a plated photo for a short kitchen reel in the same slot.Compare: Shares, the sign someone is planning to bring a friend.

The number worth watching here: saves, and profile visits from your own area. A save on a dish is somebody planning to come and eat it. Reach is close to meaningless for a restaurant if it happens in another city, so the figure that matters is how much of it is local and how much of that turned into a visit to your profile.

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.