3 Tips to Learning the Best Times to Post on Instagram
Timing, as they say, is everything, and nowhere more than on Instagram. Beyond following trends and hashtags, you need to think about when your posts actually go out, because the first hour of engagement tells the app whether to show a post to more people.
So is there a magic time to post? Yes and no. Plenty of studies have compared posting times with engagement, and they rarely agree on the exact hours. What they do agree on is that every audience is different. Here are three ways to find the right times for yours.
1. Picture your audience's day
Think about who follows you and what a normal day looks like for them. If you are talking to office workers, lunch breaks and the commute home are better bets than mid-morning. If your followers are in more than one time zone, choose a slot that works across both, or post twice.
Instagram's own insights, available on professional accounts, show where your followers live, their age range and, most usefully, the hours and days when they are most active. Start there.
2. Watch your own results, not the averages
Published studies survey thousands of accounts. That makes them useful as a starting point and almost useless as a final answer. Run your own test: post similar content at different times for four to six weeks and record reach, saves and shares in a simple spreadsheet. Patterns usually appear quickly.
| Week | Weekday slot | Weekend slot |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7:30-8:30 | 10:00-11:00 |
| 2 | 12:00-13:00 | 13:00-14:00 |
| 3 | 17:30-18:30 | 17:00-18:00 |
| 4 | 20:00-21:00 | 20:00-21:00 |
3. Let the calendar lead
Some audiences follow a schedule that has nothing to do with office hours. A restaurant's followers look for ideas in the late afternoon. A sportsbook's audience checks in before kick-off and again at half-time, so a betting brand that posts its match preview at 9 a.m. on a Sunday may be talking to an empty room. Line up your posting times with the moments your audience is already thinking about you.
Once you know your best windows, schedule your most important posts for them and use the quieter slots for experiments.