The best time to live stream on YouTube
Going live on your YouTube channel at the right time can help boost engagement and build your community. Generally, you need to take a look at your analytics in YouTube Studio to see when your audience tends to be online the most. Aim to go live at those times.
If you’re just starting out and don’t have much audience data yet, Hubspot recommends going live on YouTube between 6-9 pm, Monday-Friday. On Saturdays and Sundays, aim for broadcasting in the early afternoon according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
Use Restream to find the best time to go live on YouTube
Your YouTube Studio is a great place to start for gathering information about your audience, but if you really want to find the best time to go live, you need a professional streaming tool like Restream analytics. When you go live on YouTube, you get access to a full suite of live streaming metrics.
Restream is a browser-based live streaming solution that lets you go live on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter and other multiple platforms simultaneously.
For each YouTube live stream you do with Restream, you can see the following stream metrics:
- Stream title, date, time, duration and platform for each live broadcast
- The days of the week and times of day your streams take place
- Average duration of your streams
- Total time streamed over a given period of time
- Top chat messages and chatters
- Number of average viewers
- Number of maximum viewers
- Watched minutes
- Peak time
- Followers gained or lost during streaming
To access your analytics, log in to Restream and select the More icon (the three dots) on the left side. Then select Analytics.
Schedule your streams in advance
Once you know the best time to go live on YouTube, you should stream consistently on this schedule. But going live on the same day at the same time doesn’t always work — you might get sick or go on vacation and can’t make it for the live stream. Or maybe you want to rebroadcast your stream at a later time for people in a different time zone.
The solution to these problems is recording your video in advance and then scheduling it to go live at your usual time. With Restream’s Upload and Stream, you can upload a pre-recorded video and set it to stream live on YouTube at a later time. Simply choose your video, create a new live event in Restream, choose your streaming destinations and select a time. Then, watch your video go live.
You can find more details about using Upload and Stream in our help center.