Let’s not beat around the bush here - Today, practically every content creator strives to gain attention on Reddit.
The platform is growing at an incredible speed, after all. Plus, its partnership with Google means an even greater exposure to your content there.
But that also means that you must be even more strategic when it comes to Reddit, and one of the best ways to do that is by finding the best time to post to your target subreddits.
And that’s exactly what you’re going to learn from this guide.
Why finding the best time to post on Reddit is so critical?
It’s true - There are plenty of people on Reddit. More than you and I could imagine, actually.
According to this data, for example, Reddit is home to 91.2 million daily active users.
The network is also growing really rapidly and is now home to tens of thousands of distinct communities - subreddits.
But here is the catch - Those communities are not all online at the same time.
So, for example, posting the same content to two subreddits at the same time might result in completely different performance. One subreddit might have engaged with your content like crazy, but the other post had flopped.
The main reason for that might be that the other community just wasn’t as active online when you posted. In other words, there weren’t enough people online at that time to generate the same level of engagement.
By finding out the best time to post, you can ensure that your content always reaches the audience at the peak of their engagement.
Here’s how to do it.
What information do you need to maximize your reach and engagement on Reddit
The answer seems obvious (at first!) You need to know the best hour to post to a specific Reddit.
And true as it is, there is a little bit more to it.
For one, there are several factors at play here. Sure, knowing the best hour is important. But with Reddit, the best day matters as much.
So, the first thing to maximize your reach and engagement in a specific subreddit is to understand on what days your target audience is the most engaged there.
It’s only once you have that, you can move on to evaluating the best times to post on those days.
Luckily, there is an incredibly simple way to do so…
How to find the best time to post on Reddit
Disclaimer - For this demonstration, I am going to use my tool, Postpone.
Postpone is a social media scheduler for content creators, brands, and agencies that has a tight integration with Reddit.
As a result, the tool offers quite a number of capabilities for Reddit specifically. And one of those is the ability to determine the best time to post to any specific subreddit.
Let me show you how it works.
Once you’ve signed up to Postpone (here’s the direct link to sign up for a free trial), navigate to the sidebar under Toolbox and Subreddits.
This will take you to the subreddit analysis page. This is where Postpone will analyze any subreddit you search for to find the best times to post.
Let’s use r/digitalmarketing as an example.
Using Postpone, I can quickly uncover a wealth of information about this subreddit.
For example, I can see right away that digital marketing has 136,000 members.
I can also see that it was created 14 years ago, and if your posts perform well, it'll get about 19 upvotes on average.
Also, and this is the most important element of this screen - Using the heat map, I can find the best time to post to digital marketing.
Analyzing the data to find the best time to post on Reddit
The heatmap is designed to very quickly give you an overview of when the highest and lowest engagement happens on a particular day.
Darker squares show the better times to post, and the lighter squares show the worst times to post.
Also, every row here is a different weekday, and every column is a different hour.
So right away I can see that Tuesdays are pretty good days to post to r/digital marketing.
I also see a lot more dark squares starting around noon, and a lot more light squares during the night, at least in my time zone.
But that’s not all. With Postpone, I can go deeper and evaluate this data from several different points of view.
1/ Daily recommendations
Postpone can show me what is the best time to post to this subreddit for every day of the week.
For example, if I wanted to post to r/digitalmarketing on Monday, I probably should do it between 6 and 7 pm (in my time zone, of course.)
However, if I plan to post on Wednesday, the best time to post to this subreddit would be between 5-6pm.
I can also find the number one best time for the entire week. And it looks like for this subreddit, the best time to post would be Tuesday from 1-2pm.
2/ Engagement per day and per hour
Postpone lets me zoom out even further and see what the engagement per day looks like and the engagement per hour.
For example, I can see that Tuesdays and Thursdays have the most engagement in the digital marketing subreddit. Saturdays, on the other hand, are days with the least engagement in the entire week.
Hourly, it looks like between about 2pm and 8 p. m. (again, these are times in my time zone, naturally) have the best engagement for this subreddit.
As you can see, there's a lot of information here that I can use to really zero in on which hours and which days do I want to submit.
And that’s it…
That’s how easy it is to find the best time to post on Reddit, and discover when to schedule your content to maximize its reach and engagement.