- Best Posting Times surfaces a recommended date and time directly in Post Editor's Schedule step, as soon as a profile is selected.
- Specific day mode recommends the best time on a single, fixed publishing date.
- Custom period mode ranks the best date/time combination across a 2 to 7 day window, for teams planning flexibly.
- Recommendations lean on your profile's own recent engagement when there's enough data, and fall back to industry benchmarks for new or lower-activity profiles.
The post is ready. When should it go live?
The post is written, approved and ready to go. Then comes the pause: when should it actually publish? The answer usually lives in a different tab, a different report, or a rough memory of what worked last month.
That gap between finishing a post and knowing when to publish it is a small one, but it repeats dozens of times a week across every profile a team manages. Research covering 1.6 million social posts and nearly 1.5 billion engagements found that teams taking a data-driven approach to publishing reclaim the time they’d otherwise spend guessing when to post. Most teams don’t have that kind of analysis on hand mid-schedule. They have a date picker and a hunch.
That’s the gap Best Posting Times closes.
What’s new
Best Posting Times adds a recommendation engine to the Post Editor, surfacing the strongest date and time to publish without asking anyone to leave the scheduling screen. Select a profile, and the recommendation is already waiting where the decision gets made.
If the name sounds familiar, it should. Advocates have had Best Posting Times in Employee Advocacy since August, with ranked, benchmark-based recommendations for when to share. Now the same guidance comes to publishing, personalized to each profile’s own engagement where the data allows.
It’s still your call, Best Posting Times suggests, you confirm. But the guesswork that used to sit between “post’s ready” and “post’s scheduled” is largely gone.
How it works
Specific day
When you’re locked into a publishing date, a launch day, an event, a deadline – select Specific day. It defaults to whatever date is already selected in the scheduler, and returns the strongest recommended time within that day. A marketer with a fixed publishing day picks from the recommendation and moves on.
Custom period
When the date itself is flexible, select Custom period and set a range of 2 to 7 days. Best Posting Times ranks the best date/time combination across that window, so a marketer planning a campaign can pick the single strongest slot rather than defaulting to whatever day is next on the calendar.
What this means for advocacy and social teams
Scheduling by gut feeling
Most scheduling decisions come down to intuition: post around lunchtime, avoid Fridays, stick to a rough pattern that’s never been tested. It’s not a bad instinct, but it’s not built on this profile’s actual audience either.
Best Posting Times replaces that instinct with a recommendation grounded in real engagement data where it’s available, similar in spirit to how Oktopost’s free best-time-to-post tool blends platform-specific patterns with industry and audience modifiers. The difference is that this version shows up exactly where the scheduling decision happens, not in a separate tab.
Data that lives somewhere else
Even teams that do have performance data often keep it somewhere the Post Editor can’t see: a dashboard, a BI tool, a monthly report. Acting on it means leaving the post half-scheduled, checking the numbers, and coming back to finish the job.
Personalized, AI-driven post timing only helps if it reaches the person scheduling the post at the moment they need it. Best Posting Times pulls a profile’s own recent engagement into the recommendation directly, when there’s enough history to personalize against, so that detour disappears.
Posts stepping on each other
Coordinating multiple profiles, or multiple team members, also opens the door to accidental collisions: two posts landing on the same profile within minutes of each other, splitting whatever attention either one would have earned on its own. Spacing matters as much as posting frequency itself, three posts spread across a week reach an audience three separate times, while three posts bunched together often reach it once.
A clear, ranked recommendation at scheduling time makes those collisions easier to spot and avoid before they happen, which brings timing decisions in line with the standard B2B teams now expect from their publishing workflow.
Ready to try it?
The right post, at the right time, is no longer a separate step. Best Posting Times is available now for eligible profiles, at no extra cost.
Already using Oktopost?
Open Post Editor, head to Schedule → Set date & time, and select at least one profile. The Assist button appears beside the date/time picker, from there, choose Specific day or Custom period to get a recommendation.
New to Oktopost?
Book a demo to see how Best Posting Times fits into a faster, better-timed publishing workflow, alongside the rest of Oktopost’s social media publishing platform.
