Best time to post on Facebook on Tuesday

The Tuesday results fall into two clusters. One is early morning: Hootsuite’s 5 a.m. and Buffer’s 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. The other runs from midday into the evening: Sprout Social’s 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. window, which takes in Buffer’s second-best Tuesday hour, 7 p.m.

That makes 7 p.m. the only Tuesday hour backed by two studies. It is neither study’s top pick, but if you want one slot to start with, it has the widest support. The early cluster has the boldest single claim behind it, since Hootsuite rates 5 a.m. on Tuesday the best time of its entire week.

Hootsuite’s Tuesday pick is early, and nothing in the other two studies matches it: Buffer’s earliest Tuesday hour is 7 a.m., and Sprout Social’s window opens at 12 p.m. Hootsuite doesn’t give the date range of its sample, localised its times across 118 countries, and published its Facebook report in November 2025, which makes it the oldest of the three.

Sprout Social measured engagement on its customers’ profiles over a single winter, late November 2025 to late February 2026. Buffer analysed more than 14 million posts and says its times work in any time zone without conversion. With different samples, metrics and months, peaks landing hours apart is not surprising. None of them is wrong as such; they describe different crowds of Pages.

Tip: If you test 5 a.m., schedule the post the night before rather than setting an alarm, and check the scheduler says a.m., not p.m.

The industry figures pull Tuesday in two directions. Most of Sprout Social’s sector windows open in the morning, hours before its overall 12 p.m. start. Three of Hootsuite’s four Tuesday sector picks land in the late afternoon, about 12 hours after its 5 a.m. headline.

• Retail: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. plus 5 p.m. in Sprout Social’s data; 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. for consumer goods and retail in Hootsuite’s.
• Financial services: 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. (Sprout Social); 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. (Hootsuite).
• Education: 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. for schools (Sprout Social); 5 p.m. (Hootsuite).
• Software and tech: 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., the earliest Tuesday start in Sprout Social’s list.
• Food and beverage, and travel and hospitality: both 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Sprout Social).
• Hospitals and healthcare: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Sprout Social).
• Nonprofits: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Sprout Social); 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday to Wednesday (Hootsuite).
• Government: 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., the only sector in Sprout Social’s list whose Tuesday window opens as late as the overall one.

Retail is where the two studies line up best: Sprout Social adds a 5 p.m. slot to retail’s morning window, and Hootsuite’s consumer goods and retail window runs from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Financial services comes close too, with 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. in one study and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the other.

Your followers decide in the end. Sprout Social’s guide gives the route in Meta Business Suite: pick your Page, go to Planner, start a post, choose Schedule and open Active times, which shows when your followers were most active. Compare Tuesday with Wednesday while you are there. If they look alike, as they do in Sprout Social’s data, a slot that wins on one day is worth trying on the other.

Read both the chart and the studies on your followers’ clock. A Page run from Manila for followers in New York would publish Hootsuite’s 5 a.m. Tuesday slot at 5 p.m. Manila time while New York is on daylight saving time, and at 6 p.m. once US clocks go back in November.

• Early: 5 a.m., Hootsuite’s best time of the week, or 8 a.m., Buffer’s first Tuesday choice.
• Evening: 7 p.m., inside Sprout Social’s window and in Buffer’s top three.
• Your sector’s slot from the list above, if it differs from both.

Rotate the slots over six Tuesdays with similar posts, then compare reactions, comments and shares per person reached. Tuesday and Wednesday look alike in all three studies’ headline picks: Sprout Social gives both 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., Buffer’s top slot is 8 a.m. on both, and Hootsuite’s are an hour apart, 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. If you post on Wednesdays too, test the same slots there to gather evidence twice as fast.