The Best Time to Post on Instagram:
Believe it or not, posting on social media — more specifically, Instagram — is an art.
There are tons of factors to consider; you can’t just post whatever whenever you want if you’re serious about gathering a significant following.
Some factors are obvious, like posting pictures that are thoughtful, relevant, and spark engagement.
However, just because you’re posting great content doesn’t mean you’re going to be famous anytime soon if you’re not paying attention to what time you’re posting on Instagram.
Time is the most important factor to consider when looking to build a following.
Here, we’re going to break down when the best time to post in Instagram is and some important factors to consider before posting.
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Know Your Audience
Before we get into specifics, we need to discuss the significance of knowing your audience before posting on Instagram.
This means you need to know where they are in the world, when they’re most active, and what they’re most likely to respond to.
It’s cool to post a picture a get a ton of likes from either the large number of followers you have or from the hashtags you use.
But the biggest, most popular pages always feel like they’re totally separated from the real world, posting obviously-sponsored pictures and not responding to their audience.
When you’re paying attention to where your audience is located, posting relevant content, and posting content that encourages engagement, people respond positively by telling others to follow your page.
The Best Time to Post on Instagram
We’ve briefly mentioned how planning posts for your time zone is key to posting successfully on Instagram, but let’s dive a little deeper.
There’s a lot we haven’t mentioned yet!
Post During Off-work Hours
The goal here is to post whenever people are available to look at your page.
Most people work, which means most people are unavailable for at least seven hours out of the day.
What you don’t want to do is post quality content during hours that people are in meetings or in the middle of projects and tasks.
- Post between 11 am and 1 pm to target people on their lunch breaks.
- Posting between 8 pm and 9 pm is also ideal because that’s when people are relaxing on the east coast and everyone on the west coast is just getting out of work.
Save Important Posts for Weekdays
People function most efficiently with routines.
During the week, we’re waking up early, eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, watching our favorite shows, going on our phones before bed, and then finally going to sleep.
When the weekend comes, people are either relaxing and staying away from their phones or they’re catching up on other tasks because they had no time during the week.
Save your most important posts, like the ones where you are social selling during the weekdays.
- The general consensus regarding when to post on Instagram — and social media in general — is that posting in the middle of the week tends to generate more interactions with followers; however, every business is different and depends entirely on your audience or the audience you wish to target.
Be Aware of Time Zone Differences
If you’re on the east coast, and your audience is primarily on the west coast, you need to post with the time zones in mind.
- If the west coast is most active at 7 pm, you should schedule your posts for 10 pm EST.
The reason this matter is because it’s incredibly easy for posts to get lost in a sea of similar content.
You want posts to hit the right people at the right time.
- When you time it just right, you can target your primary audience while targeting your time zone simultaneously.
This is key for targeting the largest amount of people as possible.
General Advice for Posting on Instagram
Now that you know when the best time to post on Instagram is, we should quickly go over some general advice regarding when the best time to post is.
It’s easy to look at your most popular posts and try to emulate them every time, but if you don’t understand why they work, you’ll never get the results you’re looking for.
The good thing is that there are tools to make posting on Instagram so much easier.
Let Instagram Insights Do the Work
Sign up for the business account if you’re a business looking to increase your following on Instagram.
It seems obvious, but tons of people don’t do this and aren’t taking advantage of the tools Instagram already provides.
This eliminates most of the guesswork regarding what time-zones to target, what your most popular days are, and what your most popular posts are.
- You can break down interactions by location, time, day of the week, age, and gender.
- You can’t always rely solely on the numbers; some people make fake accounts or separate ones for specific reasons.
But, if you have a ton of followers and there are clear trends present, take advantage of the data you have.
Do Your Own Experiments
If you’re a numbers person and you feel like Instagram Insights aren’t enough, make a spreadsheet and start running your own experiments on the best time to post on Instagram.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or guaranteed formula for the best results every single time.
The only way to get as strong a feel for your audience as possible is by doing the dirty work yourself.
It’s more time consuming, but it will help.
- Post every single day, and post every hour you wish to target to see what time gives you the best results.
- Log these in your spreadsheet and record the data for at least one week. You can even do follow-ups every month to make sure results are consistent.
Download a Post Scheduling App
There are a handful of apps on the App Store or Google Play Store that let users rearrange posts and schedule them to go live.
Many of these apps also make it possible to buy followers, but Instagram is cracking down on that, and it’s always obvious when people buy followers.
They’ll typically have less than fifty posts but over 5,000 followers.
That immediately tells people your page isn’t genuine and you won’t receive any valuable data — especially if your account gets banned.
- Look for an app that posts content accurately.
Many will have all kinds of features that seem cool, but none of that matters if no one’s looking at your posts.
The goal is to gain more traction, so having an app that can post a photo exactly at the time you select is more important than how you order them.
The Final Word
Ensuring your content is seen on Instagram is easy provided you’re paying attention to when your followers are active, and when people you follow are posting.
More often than not, you can get a good sense of when to post when you pay attention to when other pages are posting too.
However, what works for them might not work for you.
They might be targeting an audience halfway around the world.
If you’re taking advantage of key analytics, and you see your audience is in the United States, it doesn’t make sense to post at 3 am when everyone here is asleep and everyone in Europe is just waking up.
The most important thing to understand is that there’s no tried and true method for posting on Instagram.
One way of at least getting close to an accurate idea is by generating your own long-term tests using spreadsheets.
If you find that your audience is actually interacting with your content the most at 3 am, but you just so happen to be sleeping at that hour, you can sleep easy knowing a scheduling app can automate posting for you.
You can, and should, figure out when the best time to post on Instagram is by testing for as many factors as possible.
At the end of the day, there are tools at your disposal to make social media management easier, but you have to be aware of them.
There’s no need to guess anymore.
By following these guidelines for posting on Instagram, you’re going to be able to post meaningful content that encourages follower engagement while increasing followers.
There’s no need to buy followers if you’re doing it right, and there’s no reason not to when Instagram even offers its own insights feature.
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Read more: When to post on Facebook and Twitter?
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