Does anyone else get better social media engagement during working hours?

Working hours is the peak day where people are out and about doing things whether working or just being actively awake. So it makes sense.

The algo mostly judges a post by how it does in the first hour, if your audience checks their phones in short bursts at work you get a quick early spike and that spike is what gets the post pushed further.

Makes sense if a lot of your followers work office jobs. They scroll in short breaks between tasks, and the evening slot is crowded because everyone posts at the times those generic charts recommend. Fewer posts competing in the feed can matter more than how many people are online.

Those charts are averages across millions of accounts, so they say little about yours. Instagram and Facebook insights show when your own followers are active by hour. Try two time slots with similar content for 2 or 3 weeks and compare reach, not likes. One week is too noisy to tell.

makes sense if your audience scrolls at their desk, and office crowds do. the generic best times are averages across everyone. i'd trust your own numbers over the charts and test the same post type at two times for two weeks

Yes! Best time for me is usually 8-10am and 2pm-4pm

Depends who’s following you tbh.

If it’s office people they’re scrolling between meetings, so daytime makes sense. I wouldn’t trust the best time to post charts much, they’re averaged over every account going.

Just swap your slots round for a few weeks and see what gets saved and shared, not just liked.

Two things are probably happening, and only one of them is about people being bored.

The first is that "best time to post" lists are an average across every account on the platform, which mostly means they describe where the biggest audience pool is, not where your followers are. Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn all show you when your own followers are active, and for a lot of accounts that peak sits in the middle of the working day. If your audience is other professionals they are on their phones at ten in the morning in a meeting and off them at eight at night with their kids. Your data beats the list.

The second is the one already in this thread: the first hour decides whether the post travels. A burst of comments at 10am beats a slow trickle of likes at 9pm even when the total reach ends up similar. Working hours produce fast, typed engagement from people at a desk. Evenings produce passive scrolling. Same number of eyeballs, a very different velocity signal.

The trap is judging this on two or three posts, because a good week can be a topic effect rather than a time effect. Alternate the slot on purpose for four weeks with the same format and the same hook style, then compare medians instead of bests. If working hours still wins, it is the slot. If the gap disappears, it was the post.

Split the metric too. If the working-hours posts win on comments and lose on saves, that is not the same result, and it changes what you do with the format.

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You can do some sort of A/B testing and compare your stats across different platforms (tiktok and reels). Definitely the best way for you to get a TRUE answer for that. kre8content is pretty good for comparing the stats in one place

Yeah, people are checking their phones in little gaps throughout the workday, so it makes sense that posts can get a quick burst of engagement then.