When Is the Best Time to Post on Instagram?
Posting your content on Instagram in the early morning or in the middle of the night won’t give it much reach. If you want to increase your content’s visibility, and therefore your engagement and your number of followers, you’ll have to post at times when your audience is most likely to be on social media! Influence4You will show you how to find out when.
Internet users’ habits
Several international studies analyzed the social media usage behavior of users, and in particular on Instagram. It showed some pretty logical browsing patterns.
People tended to go on social media between their working hours, i.e. on their lunch break (between 12pm and 2pm) and after their work day (from 6pm/7pm) on weekdays. Posting during the weekend may also be a good idea as people take advantage of their days off to unwind on social media.
However, lockdowns and Covid had an impact on people’s habits and it seems that now users log into Instagram in a much more sporadic out way.
Experts have attributed this to Stories and their fleeting nature as users don’t want to miss out and check in throughout the day to watch them. Remote working is also thought to have an influence on these changes.
On the graph below you can see there is a peak corresponding to Wednesday at 11am and Friday from 10am to 11am. You’ll find here a detailed article with numerous statistics that can help you visualize the perfect time to post depending on your industry.
Instagram global engagement over a week. SprountSocial
Find out when your audience is most active online
You can also choose to analyze the best time to post your content yourself. You can conduct a test, for example.
On 4 consecutive Mondays post content first at 5pm, then at 6pm, then at 7pm and finally at 8pm. Posts should be similar in terms of content, description and hashtags to be sure the target audience remains the same. You can then find out which post got the most views using Instagram Insights. This experiment takes a little time to carry out but can pay off depending on your audience.
Use data analysis tools
Many tools can make the lives of influencers and content creators a lot easier. You can find a list of the best ones in our article 10 Tools for Influencers.
To identify the best time to post in a completely automated way and adapted to your audience you can use the paid versions of Later or Sprout Social‘s tool. Both of these companies allow for very advanced analysis of all your posts and will tell you exactly when you had the most interaction with your audience. They even cross-reference data with many other profiles. This will give you the exact time to post depending on the day of the week. Now you can maximize your reach!
Don’t forget to use our platform Influence4You to get in touch with brands and influencers!
