"How long should I scroll each day?" is probably the most common warm-up question we get. The honest answer starts with a disclaimer: TikTok and Instagram do not publish a number, and nobody outside those companies knows the right one. Anyone offering you an exact figure is sharing a habit, not a rule.
What we can offer is a sensible way to think about it, and the defaults we use.
Start with what a normal user would do
A new user who has just installed an app and finds it interesting might open it a couple of times a day, for somewhere between a few minutes and half an hour each time. Some days more, some days less. That is the range to aim for.
In practice, for a warm-up, that means:
- Sessions of roughly 10 to 30 minutes. Long enough to watch, skip, read a few comment threads and like a few things. Short enough to be believable as a break, not a shift.
- One to three sessions a day. Spread out, not back to back.
- A few days of this before posting. The manual guide in how to warm up a TikTok account suggests 5 to 7 days for a new account.
Treat these as reasonable starting points, not thresholds. If your personal use of the app looks different, that is fine; the goal is ordinary, not a formula.
Why sessions should vary
The number matters less than the pattern. An account that opens at exactly 19:00 every day for exactly 20 minutes has a very regular habit, and regularity is the thing automation tends to produce.
Real habits wobble:
- Some sessions are five minutes, some are forty.
- Some days have one session, some have three.
- The start times drift. Lunch is not always at the same minute.
- Occasionally a day is skipped entirely.
So when you plan warm-up, plan in ranges. "Two sessions around lunch and evening, 10 to 30 minutes each" is a better plan than "20 minutes at 12:30 and 20 minutes at 19:30".
Pick hours that fit the account
Choose session times that make sense for the person the account is supposed to be. An account aimed at students in one country should not be most active at 4am local time. If your audience is in a different time zone from you, think about their day, not yours.
It is also worth avoiding hours that a real person would rarely use, such as the middle of the night every night. One late session is normal. A nightly one at the same time is a pattern.
How the numbers ramp
On top of daily time, activity should grow gradually over the warm-up period. The first day is light. Later days are a bit busier, up to a ceiling, and once the account is posting it keeps a lighter maintenance level of ordinary use. That ramp is covered in detail in what an automated warm-up ramp looks like.
If you want a quick reference for posting frequency once warm-up is done, the free posting cadence planner suggests how often to post for your account's age.
How this works in Autopilot
Autopilot gives you two controls for this:
- Session length. You choose how many minutes a warm-up session runs. The default is 20, and you can set it anywhere from 5 minutes up to two hours. We would keep it in the modest range above for new accounts.
- Daily plan. You pick the hours at which connected phones should start a warm-up, and whether the plan runs every day, on weekdays, or on weekends. The Mac app only needs to be open.
Inside each session, the individual actions are not on a fixed timer. How long each post is watched, when a comment thread is opened, when a like happens: all of that varies, so two sessions of the same length do not look the same. The how a person watches TikTok post goes through those details.
You can also start a session by hand at any time, or stop one in the middle.
A simple plan for week one
Here is a modest plan you can adapt, whether you warm up by hand or with a tool:
- Days 1 and 2. One short session a day. Mostly watching, very few likes, no follows.
- Days 3 to 5. One or two sessions a day at different times. A few likes on niche content, a couple of comment threads read per session.
- Days 6 and 7. Two sessions a day with some variety in length. A small number of follows on creators in your niche.
- First post. Only if nothing odd happened: no verification prompts, no captchas. Then keep the ordinary sessions going around your posts.
If something did go wrong, such as a verification prompt or posts landing at zero, do not push more activity. Read how to recover a throttled account first.
Keep it proportionate
It is tempting to believe more warm-up is always better. It is not clear that it is, and very long daily sessions on a brand new account are their own kind of unusual. Moderate, varied, consistent use over several days is the safer bet.
And the usual caveat: automating warm-up breaks TikTok's and Instagram's terms of service. A careful schedule reduces obvious signals, but no schedule makes it permitted, and accounts can still be banned.