What is the best time to post on Instagram?
Almost every business can be found online, including on Instagram. But how do you get views? And what is the best time to post on Instagram?
Nowadays social media is widely used as a marketing tool for companies. Almost every target group can be found on one of the platforms. Instagram is one of the fastest growing platforms and is therefore often used by companies. But now the golden question in these dynamic social media times is, what is the best time to post your killer content on Instagram? As much as we would like to give you the exact answer, this is different for every company. In this blog we will give you tips to find the right time for your business.
The influence of the algorithm on your posts
Instagram’s algorithm is a tough nut to crack. But one of the most important things to know is that Instagram shows your post to a small percentage of your followers. When your post has more engagement (likes, comments, shares and saves) than your average posts, you can expect that post to have higher priority in your followers’ feed. And vice versa, if your post gets less engagement, the post will get a lower priority. This, of course, is not the intention!
While timing is only one component that your post is judged on, you can’t just post whenever you want. If you post when only a few of your followers are online, you are already one notch behind when it comes to engagement. The chance that your post will end up at the top of your followers’ feed will be a lot smaller. And it’s a shame that you put a lot of effort into your killer content if in the end nobody sees it, right? So use these tips below to find out what is the best time for you to post on Instagram!
Use general good times as a starting point
There are several companies that offer tools to help with analyzing your business account, among other things. One is Coosto, a social media management software. With the data they collect from the companies they help, they do research every year on what the general best time is to post on social media. So naturally they do this for Instagram as well.
The study determines what day and time on average there is the most interaction. With the 2020 data, it was concluded that Thursday is the day with most interaction. And although interaction on Instagram shows a near perfect normal distribution in terms of times, the best time is at 5:00 pm. For Instagram Business Accounts, it is notable that interaction is a lot lower on weekends, which by the way can be explained by the working days from Monday to Friday. Coosto’s research is based on Instagram Business Accounts, so for personal accounts this may be different!
Are you curious what else Coosto can do for your social media? Then take a look at their website!
Analyze your own Instagram Analytics
If you have a business account, which is definitely recommended, you can analyze your own post through Instagram Analytics. As mentioned earlier, it is important that you post when your followers are actually online. You can see this in your statistics, in your overview you see “total number of followers”. If you click on this you will get an overview of your followers/target group, at the bottom of this page it says “most active times”. Here you can see which times and days your followers are most active. Use these times to try out which time is the right time for you to post.
In addition, you can also analyze each post separately. Keep track of which post you posted when and at what time. Look at which posts you have achieved the most interaction and compare which days and times these were. In this way you can decide for yourself what the best time for your account is to post on Instagram.
Use a little common sense
People work. This is of course very different for each person, but in general most people work during the day. However, there are fixed moments when the phone can be picked up. Think of in the morning when waking up, coffee breaks, lunch breaks and at the end of the day. And use your own social media behavior, all insights are great to come up with the right time!
Figuring out the best time to post on Instagram is a bit of a puzzle, but an important one to consider! We at HUSTL have used the above tips ourselves and continue to constantly monitor statistics to determine for ourselves what our best time to post on Instagram is. It’s definitely worth the effort! Remember: your killer content should not go unseen and interacting with your target audience can only bring benefits to developing your business. Good luck!
