When readers live in different time zones: why 9 AM isn't the same everywhere

When it's 9 AM in Seoul, it's 8 PM the evening before in New York and 1 AM in London. The same "9 AM" post reaches readers at a completely different point in their day, depending on whose 9 AM it is.

That's why people with readers in several countries often say picking a time to schedule is hard. A post timed for one audience's lunch break goes up in the middle of the night for another.

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What happens with a single time

• You pick a time in the middle. A compromise between several time zones ends up being a good time for none of them.
• You go by your own time zone. Schedule for what suits the writer, and if readers are elsewhere, it is always the same group that gets the inconvenient hour.
• You use the same time on every channel. It's easy to schedule in one go, but if each channel is read by different people, that difference goes unnoticed.

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Decide whose morning each post is for

The common advice is to decide first who each post is mainly for, then schedule it for their morning. The English version goes out in the American morning and the Korean version in the Korean morning, even when it's the same idea. It's fine for one idea to go out at different times on different channels.

In the tool I'm building, each channel of a post gets its own scheduled time, and you can apply the same time to the other channels in one go.

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What to decide before the time zone

Which time zone to aim for depends on who reads that channel. If you don't know where your readers are, the only way is to post at a few different times and see when responses come in.

When you schedule, do you aim for one time zone or a different one for each channel?