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Instagram is on a spree to launch better features for its marketing community. But not all marketers are able to tap into its full potential.
While the difference in posting strategy takes the spotlight, most skip over the best time to post on Instagram and end up with a compromised reach.
This is one of the crucial factors behind erratic engagement rates. Despite putting in effort and time to create and publish quality posts, you might fail to even appear in front of your audience if you post at any random hour.
And that’s the reason why the question of the hour strikes all—when is the best time to post on Instagram?
Well, this has a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that the best time to post on Instagram is between 6 am-11 am (PST).
Now that the short answer is so precise, why would anyone bother about the latter?
We have our reasons ready! Now there are umpteen reasons for the above-mentioned best time to not work for you. Every business has its own personalized best time to post, depending on the niche and location of its preferred audience.
It’s hard to say that the average best time to post for a wide range of businesses, based on different companies’ data in various parts of the world, would also apply to your business.
Hence there is a pressing need to delve into the long answer for finding that personalized best time frame. This blog will guide you to find the best time to post on Instagram for your business.
But before doing that, let’s find out why it is vital to know the best time to post.
Why Does Finding the Best Time to Post on Instagram Matter?
Instagram keeps tweaking its algorithm, making timeliness crucial for posts to rank on a user’s feed and accommodating newer features. Yet the basic ranking factors more or less depends on these three factors:
- Interest: Posts having content similar to what you previously showed interest in will appear on top of your feeds.
- Recency: The most recent posts will be prioritized to rank higher on the feeds over days or week-older posts.
- Relationship: Posts and accounts that you had frequently interacted with in the past on Instagram rank better on your feed.
With recency being a major factor in ranking a post on Instagram, choosing the right time to post becomes more prominent.
If more active people see the post, the engagement rate is higher within the first hour of posting. Based on this, the Instagram algorithm will decide how many more feeds you can make an appearance to further amp up the engagement long after posting.
So, what does this mean for you?
It means if you choose your posting time when your audience is most active on Instagram, they might find your post to engage with on their feeds sooner.
But wait, there’s more!
Post more frequently on the platform at peak times to use the recency factor to your advantage. It has a higher chance of your brand being shown in feeds.
Let’s move to the main point and find out the best time to post on Instagram to help you achieve your Instagram marketing goals.
How to Find the Best Time to Post on Instagram For Your Business?
There are two ways to find the best time suitable for posting to get more engagement on your Instagram brand profile:
1. Using Insights on the Instagram Application or Creator Studio
Instagram’s own native analytics is a great way to find the optimal time to post on Instagram. There are two routes to check these.
The first one is by using the Instagram mobile app. It is a convenient tool that lets you find significant insights, like the location of your followers, their gender, their age, and when they’re most active on Instagram.
To access insights on Instagram, having an Instagram business account or an Instagram creator’s profile is a must. Another added benefit of having a creator’s profile is that you can access the “Instagram Creator Studio“.
And this is what the second route is. Instagram Creators Studio, like Instagram insights, gives you access to multiple audience insights to find the best time to post on Instagram.
One shortcoming of the Instagram native insights is that they only provide you with the followers’ online activity data of the past 7 days.
Therefore, we recommend using SocialPilot, which gives you detailed insights into the complete audience analytics section for the past 3 months.
2. Using SocialPilot’s Instagram Analytics
Your best time to post on Instagram depends on three things – audience, day of the week, and timezone.
Fortunately, SocialPilot’s Instagram analytics feature helps you figure all of that under one dashboard.
Let’s see how.
The “Time Range” filter lets you choose the exact period for which you want to see the insights in the analytics section. You can view, download, and email the analytics report of your Instagram business accounts for up to the last 3 months.
There’s also a heat map that automatically calculates the average number of followers active at each hour and each day of the week in the chosen time range to give you the personalized best time to post on Instagram.
This heat map graphics will give you all the information about the best times and days for getting more engagement on Instagram for your business.
Moreover, you can see the location of your followers, their gender, their age, and other significant follower insights.
Here’s a curated list of some Instagram analytics tools if you’d like to compare and opt for the best one to measure your Instagram campaigns and best times to post.
What are the Average Best Times to Post on Instagram?
In our recent studies on:
We have found that it is more suitable to test and find your own data than to stick to a fixed template of best times.
On the other hand, if you are new to Instagram promotion, then the general time-frames can be a good start before you set out to test for your personal best time to post. There are fair chances that these fixed times may work wonders for your brand on Instagram.
Here’s why!
We have curated the following data from popular social media marketing companies suggesting when brands should post on Instagram.
- Later suggests the time frame between 9 am to 11 pm (EST).
- Hubspot favors the time between 2 pm and 3 pm (CDT) and Thursday as the best day to post.
- Sprout Social deduced Wednesday at 11 am and Friday from 10 am–11 am as the preferred time slots.
- Search engine Journal favors Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 11 am and Tuesday at 2 pm.
Best Times to Post on Instagram by the Days of the Week
In a nutshell, based on all the data collected by multiple brands, we can say that It is always safe to post on weekdays during:
How to Effectively Use Multiple Best Times to Post on Instagram?
Eventually, you will come to know that there is no single best day or time to post on Instagram after using the tools mentioned above.
Anyway, you wouldn’t want a world with only one best time to post on Instagram.
But, it can be tiresome for a social media manager or marketing agency to keep posting on multiple time slots while handling various social media accounts.
You can either let go of multiple time slots and opt for one best time from the whole day or manually post on various time slots. Choosing the former will lose your other better engagement times, and going for the latter will waste a colossal amount of your time.
This is where you need a social media content scheduler!
For instance, SocialPilot lets you create and schedule your Instagram post days, weeks, and even months ahead of time.
So this automatic posting tool will help you publish on different time slots without any hassle. All you have to do is select multiple time slots for every day of the month in its content planner, and your created posts will be published on Instagram.
Tip Experiment with posting different types of content at varied times to zero in your sweet spot. Schedule multiple reels and stories for the day for an aggravated reach.
Conclusion
Sending out your posts on your brand’s peak times can bring a change in your overall performance. It will help you engage with your audience better and get you in the eyes of promising prospects quicker. But don’t forget about the interest, relevancy, and relationship factors too.
If your content fails to spark any interest, then sharing even at the best time to post on Instagram can’t fetch you desired likes or comments.
Note that posting at the best time will only enable your post to get a stage to showcase itself. After that, the substantial results depend upon your content.
If you are a social media marketer juggling multiple Instagram accounts for your clients, use a social media tool. It will help you save a considerable amount of time and money, proving to be your best investment ever!
