Best TikTok Publishing times, Al Jazeera, Google Discover, Sun Video & William Gibson
As Paul McCartney would say, navigating the many audience growth hacks might feel like a 'long and winding road' - but fear not, I've got your back, Jack.
What is the best time to post on TikTok?
Here’s one story that caught my attention this week. Buffer recently analysed 7.1 million TikTok posts published through Buffer to identify posting times that tend to produce higher median views/engagement. Although they stress there’s no single “magic” time that works for everyone (because results depend on audience location and habits) their top recommended slots to try are Sunday 9 a.m. (best overall), Monday 1 p.m., and Sunday 1 p.m.; and at a day level, Saturday performs best overall, with Monday and Sunday close behind.
Across the week, the data shows a broad pattern: evenings (roughly 6 p.m.–11 p.m.) tend to peak, while afternoons (12 p.m.–5 p.m.) are often the weakest, and TikTok is unusual in that weekends can outperform weekdays. So try using these benchmarks as a starting point, then validate and tailor your schedule using TikTok Studio Analytics to find when your followers are most active and iterate from there. Easy. Sorta.
Al Jazeera leads top 50 English-language news sites in the world.
Considering it’s been such a tough year for publishers, it’s always worth taking a closer look at leaderboards like this to try and work out reasons for publisher success.
In Al Jazeera’s case you might put this down to their non-western framing of news events and the proliferation of political stories spilling out right now from the Middle East, but equally, it also about how Al Jazeera has responded with a formidable array of analysis, explainers, documentaries, and live blogs. As well as investing in social video (with the introduction of AI-generated visuals) they’ve also seen some strong Google Discover performance in the last two months with stories like this:
This particular article is interesting itself in its own way. Not only is it short, it’s another reminder that, sometimes, it’s not so much about the headline or the image (both aren’t particularly eye-catching in this example) but the importance of being timely and building up an authority on a topic. Al Jazeera may have also benefitted recently from Google opening up its Discover results to a wider range of publishers.
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A quick reminder that I am hosting an SEO & AI Visibility course for journalists on March 31st. You can read all the deets about the session here.
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More on February’s Google Discover core update
Google Discover is currently the biggest driver of search traffic to news brands so it’s no surprise then that there’s been lots of discussion since the update was announced. Barry Adams, Nicola Agius and I discussed this on the most recent episode of SEO and Beers with Barry and Steve but John Shehata has offered some early insights here.
I think the biggest takeaway for me from all the discussions out there is this: We are expecting this core update to stamp down on clickbait because that’s what Google is telling us it’s doing - but let’s just wait and see if that’s that actual case once the update has rolled out. 👀
Also, on the topic of optimising for different surfaces, Joy Johnston has written an excellent primer on exactly that here.
The Sun shines a light on video (sorry) with 1bn+ monthly views and 25 new shows
Take a look at the job boards of most UK news brands at the moment and you’re bound to see them peppered with video-related roles. This is a reflection of the huge investments being made in this area and the Sun is no exception. Their video team have grown from around 25 people to about 80 and are still hiring for roles including showbiz producer, Fabulous producer, senior sports video producer, senior producer on Royal Exclusive, and channel manager for Sun News Video.
Interesting to note that The Sun has the biggest Youtube following of any UK newspaper brand, with 6.37 million subscribers on its main channel (The Telegraph is a close second with around 6.08 million) and 7.5 million across all its accounts. You can read more here.
Whilst we’re talking about video:
Publishers chase video podcast growth, but audio still leads
From Archive to Asset: How to Optimise Existing Videos for Search & AI in 2026
User Needs for Sport
Dmity Shishkin and the team at Smartoct are running a free User Needs for Sport session here March 5th. As someone who has attended previous workshops, I highly recommend.
Some Pods of Note
Ryan Broderick is just insanely funny and always has some great observations about our algorithmic overlords. I found his recent interviews with US politicians particularly insightful, hilarious and anxiety-inducing all at the same time. On this episode he explores the generational gap between Gen Z and Millennials and already I feel a thousand years old.
Elsewhere Ezra Klein hosted a great interview with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark exploring the impact of AI Agents in our lives. If I were an AI (and how could you prove I’m not?) I would summarise thusly: ‘The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed’ i.e. we are accelerating at a thousand miles an hour towards an info-class war.
(Incidentally, I once had a riveting convention with a good friend about the Gibson line: ‘The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.’ I thought it was brilliant, they though it was pony. That was the end of that).
And Finally…
This news story on the Dark Sky weather app caught my attention and made me think - why don’t we have a ‘World Weather according to Donald Trump’ app? We already have partisan news, why not partisan weather?
This is why I probably need to drink less coffee.
Until next time.