There is no single best time to post a TikTok slideshow in the UK, Canada or Australia, but there is a sensible place to start: the local morning commute, lunch and early evening, in the time zone where most of your audience lives. ViralSlides' presets use 08:00, 12:00 and 19:00 London time for the UK, 09:00, 12:00 and 19:00 Toronto time for Canada, and 08:00, 12:00 and 19:00 Sydney time for Australia. Treat those as a first guess, then let two weeks of your own posts pick the winner.
The harder part is the clock. Each of these markets changes its clocks on different dates, two of them span several time zones, and Australia's seasons run opposite to the other two. A schedule set in the wrong time zone quietly drifts by an hour, or by eleven.
Why these three windows
The three slots follow the shape of an ordinary weekday: phones come out on the way to work or school, again at lunch, and again in the evening once the day is done. They are starting points, not measured peaks. Every audience bends them: students scroll later, parents earlier, shift workers on their own schedule. Your account's analytics will tell you more than any default once you have a few weeks of posts.
Timing also matters less for slideshows than people fear. A useful slideshow gets saved and revisited, so it keeps collecting views for days. The first hour mostly decides who sees the post first. If your app is for UK commuters and you post while only North America is awake, your first viewers are people who can't install it yet.
United Kingdom
The UK is one time zone, which makes it the simplest of the three. The catch is the clock change: British Summer Time starts on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October. Schedule in the Europe/London time zone rather than a fixed offset from UTC, so 19:00 stays 19:00 after the change.
Watch the overlap with the US if you serve both. For most of the year, 19:00 in London is 14:00 in New York and 11:00 in Los Angeles, so a UK evening post reaches US viewers in the middle of their working day, and an account that posts at 19:00 Eastern for the US is publishing at midnight in London. The US changes its clocks on different dates from the UK, so for a few weeks each spring and autumn the gap is an hour shorter.
A good first test for UK audiences:
- 08:00 for commuters and anything about the day ahead: planning, money, fitness.
- 12:00 for lunch-break scrolling and quick tips.
- 19:00 for the evening scroll.
Canada
Canada spans six time zones, from Newfoundland (three and a half hours behind UTC in winter) to the Pacific coast. Most Canadians live in Ontario and Quebec, almost all of which is on Eastern time, which is why the preset uses Toronto. A 19:00 Toronto post lands at 16:00 in Vancouver, so a second evening slot on Pacific time is worth testing if your audience is in the west.
Two things are specific to Canada:
- Language. A large share of Quebec speaks French first. English slideshows will reach some of that audience, but a French-language account written for Quebec is a separate market with its own hooks. The localization guide covers what changes.
- The US next door. Canadian viewers share a lot of feed with US creators, and Eastern time is the same on both sides of the border. If your app serves both countries, one Eastern-time schedule can serve both, but check that your prices, store links and examples work for Canadians.
Most of Canada changes its clocks on the same dates as the US, the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. Most of Saskatchewan does not, so it lines up with Alberta in summer and with Manitoba in winter. Scheduling in a named time zone such as America/Toronto handles this for you.
Australia
Australia is where fixed schedules go wrong most often, for three reasons.
Three main time zones. Eastern (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane), Central (Adelaide, Darwin, half an hour behind Eastern) and Western (Perth, two hours behind Sydney in the southern winter and three in the southern summer).
Daylight saving is not national. New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, Tasmania and South Australia move their clocks forward on the first Sunday of October and back on the first Sunday of April. Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia don't. From October to April, Brisbane is an hour behind Sydney even though both are "Eastern".
The gap to Europe and North America moves twice. Because Australia's daylight saving runs in the southern summer, Sydney is 9 hours ahead of London in the northern summer and 11 hours ahead in the northern winter, with a few weeks at 10 hours in between when only one side has changed. A post scheduled for "19:00 Sydney" from a London calendar entry will slide by two hours across the year unless the scheduler uses the Australia/Sydney time zone.
Seasons flip too. The Australian school year starts in late January or early February, summer holidays fall over Christmas, and "new year, new routine" content lands in the middle of summer. Plan seasonal hooks on the Australian calendar, not the northern one.
If most of your Australian audience is in Perth, test a slot on Western time; otherwise start with Sydney:
- 08:00 for the commute.
- 12:00 for lunch.
- 19:00 for the evening.
Posting for more than one of these markets
One account can serve markets that share a language, but it can only post at one moment at a time. Pick the market that matters most and schedule for it. Posts still travel: a slideshow posted for a UK evening will reach Australian viewers the next morning as it keeps circulating.
If two markets matter equally and their hours never overlap, as with the UK and Australia, consider a separate account for each, with content written for that market and its own schedule. Separate accounts also give you separate analytics, which makes the next decision easier.
Find your own best time in two weeks
Defaults get you started; your audience decides. Run the same test the US posting guide describes:
- Pick three windows in the market's time zone, such as 08:00, 12:00 and 19:00.
- Post one slideshow a day for two weeks, rotating through the windows so each gets four or five posts.
- Keep the format, deck length and closing slide the same, so timing is the only thing that changes.
- Compare saves per view and how many viewers reached the last slide, judged 48 hours after posting, not raw views after two hours.
- Keep the winner for a month, then test again. Audiences shift as the account grows.
Not sure how often to post while you test? The posting cadence planner suggests a pace for your account's age.
How ViralSlides schedules by market
Each app in ViralSlides has a target market: Global, United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. Picking one sets the posting schedule's time zone to that market's (America/New_York, Europe/London, America/Toronto or Australia/Sydney), so clock changes are handled by the time zone rather than by you, and the schedule's Best times preset fills the weekdays with the starting times above. You can change the time zone and the slots afterwards, for example to Australia/Perth or a Pacific-time evening, and the schedule posts at those local times.