Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

This post is a companion to my recent post “Social Media for Artists in 2024”, which can be read here! https://tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/articles/9385 In that article we talked about social media platforms and which ones are best for posting your art on to get more exposure and audience engagement. In this article we are going to discuss what the experts say are the best times to schedule your social media posts, how to discover the best times for your audience, and a free post scheduling service that will help you bulk schedule posts to cut your time down!

In this article we will cover the following topics:

What the Experts Say about Best Times

Using a Social Media Scheduling Service

Let’s talk social media!

What the Experts Say about Best Times

Posting your content at the right time means you can get the maximum number of eyeballs on your content because your audience is at its most active. However, not every social media platform has the same user base, usage patterns, or demographics, so the best time and day isn’t the same for all platforms! 

The following data information comes from SocialPilot, and you can find the full article at https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/best-times-to-post-on-social-media

Overall, the best time to post on social media is during mid-week days from 7-9 a.m., 1-3 p.m., and 7-9 p.m.. Midweek and the morning is the best time across most social media platforms (I think this is probably from people checking their social media before work!), but Sunday seems to be the best day for YouTube and Pinterest specifically according to the SocialPilot study. 

Each social media platform has its own peak times so it’s best to plan around that. For instance, you wouldn’t schedule a post at the same time on Facebook and on Pinterest because it would only be the optimal time for one of those platforms! 

Facebook

With over 3 Billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most used social media platforms. Because of Facebook’s demographics, the best days are Wednesday and Thursday in the morning or around lunchtime, while Sunday tends to be the worst day for views and engagement. Weekend nights tend to also be bad times to post. 

It seems that most social media experts recommend posting on Facebook during the weekdays around 9 a.m. or around 1-3 p.m.

Instagram

The participating audience of Instagram is in the 18-30 age bracket and over half of Instagram users log in at least once a day. This means that if you can get your posts out at just the right time (and post high-quality content as well!) you have a chance at getting a lot of eyes on your work. 

Instagram’s best days seem to be Thursday, Monday, and Friday, in that order. The worst day is Sunday. Similar to Facebook, the best times seem to be around 9-10 a.m. Fridays show good engagement in both the morning and late afternoon, around 5-6 p.m. On all days of the week the worst times seem to be between 3-4 p.m.

X (Twitter)

The user base on X (formerly Twitter) seems to like checking in earlier in the morning than other platforms. The best times are usually from 6-10 a.m. with the best days being Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Weekends tend to be the worst times for engagement on this platform. Most X users are usually catching up on news and trending topics, so the more you can participate in relevant trending hashtags, the better!

YouTube

YouTube is the second most used social media platform with 2.7 billion active users. Because it’s video-centric, you can share the story behind your art and share a lot more of your process and personality than other “bite-sized” social media. The best days to post on YouTube are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday between 2-4 p.m. Worst days are Monday and Tuesday. It takes a few hours to index videos on YouTube, so make sure you schedule your videos for about 2 hours before peak viewing times!

TikTok

TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform, and if you can create short-form video content quickly and your work appeals to Gen-Z, you have a chance at growing quite the audience! You need to optimize your posting time to improve your engagement and appear in the “For You” section as well. 

Best days for TikTok are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, usually during 6-7 a.m. and also 10-11 p.m. There are multiple peak times across the day for TikTok because of the diverse browsing habits of the user base. Worst days are Saturday and Sunday. 

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual search-engine whose core user base comes looking for inspiration, ideas, and recommendations. If you can fit in to the types of topics that Pinterest users love, it’s a great way to build an audience! The best days to post on Pinterest are Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday between 8-11 a.m. and 2-4 p.m. Unlike a lot of other social media platforms, Pinterest has most of its engagement on weekends, probably because most users are using it to plan parties and events. Its worst days are Thursday and Friday, but most weekday morning posts don’t perform well, unlike on other social media platforms. 

Using a Social Media Scheduling Service

If you’re like me and don’t want to write posts for social media every day, you may want to look into a social media scheduling service. There are a ton of these, all with various features and pricing plans. For this article I decided to test out a service called Buffer. Their free plan allows you to connect up to three social media accounts at the time of writing this. You don’t get access to all the fancy analytics, but honestly that’s something you could track yourself with a spreadsheet if you want to see the numbers and figure out your personal best times to post for engagement! 

After choosing the free plan during sign up and verifying my email address, I then clicked on the button to connect my channels. 

Connecting my Instagram and Facebook page was really easy and just required a couple of clicks and verifying which account to connect. 

In Buffer, the Create tab gave me some suggestions for how to get started with the “complete your setup” popup. I do like that they give you an Ideas section to mark down when you get ideas for posts, though this is probably more useful for teams, but I can definitely see where it would be useful if you have a lot of ideas for types of posts or want to keep up with upcoming holidays and such!

With the “Complete your setup” intro widget open, you can click on “Publish your first post” to start writing out a post. Choose which social media channels you want to post to from the top of the Create Post window. Then you can add photos and write text while the sidebar shows a preview of your post. Don’t forget to add any relevant hashtags!

When you’re done writing your post, you can either save it as a draft, publish right away, or schedule the post for a later date and time. To schedule the post, click on the down arrow to the right of the “Share now” button and click on “Schedule Posts.”

Select a date and time from the calendar and click “Schedule” to save the post.

Buffer also has an “AI Assistant” that I decided to try just because I was curious. In this AI Assistant you can type in a prompt of what you want your post to be about and the target audience and it will generate some text based on the prompt. This AI can not look at web pages and is pretty simple, but it gave me some text that I thought might be better if it wasn’t so formal. I clicked the “More casual” button below the generated text to try again.

If you do decide to use this AI generator, you can copy the generated text into the post writing area and edit it from there, add photos, etc. I feel like this would be a good starting point if you’re unsure of what to write and need some ideas, or if you’re particularly bad at talking about yourself - which I know I am! 

Conclusion

Using a service like this you can write a lot of social media posts and schedule them in non-peak times, then let them post at peak times so you can benefit from higher views and engagement at times when your audience is active!

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com