Posting at the right time, when your chances for high engagement are the highest, will help your posts get that early momentum and perform much better. No doubt. But does anybody know exactly when is the best, most beneficial time to post on Instagram to make sure your fresh content gets seen? And what about the right day of the week to get the highest engagement and visibility? Is it true that it can’t be Monday?
Look: every single follower base is unique, so these answers will vary for each profile. Of course, some days of the week seem to work better than others for most profiles we know. But when it comes to identifying the detailed patterns – we can’t read the tea leaves. We need specific, reliable data.
Keep reading the guide I’ve prepared to learn more about how you can discover the right posting time for your profile (spoiler alert: without advanced, complicated data crunching or anything like that). Let’s go!
Is there the best time to post on Instagram?
Sad to say (and even more painful to read, I suppose!), there is no uniform optimal time or day to post that would guarantee maximum reach and interaction. Since each profile’s audience is unique — situated in various time zones, busy with work at different times of the day, maintaining different lifestyles, having children or not, and so on – there is no one universal rule, or “one fits all” answer.
Sure, certain recommended practices apply to every account. Like almost every other social media algorithm, Instagram’s recommendation engine promotes consistency — publishing while your audience is online and active on the platform is the smartest place to start. Analyzing your analytics data will allow you to narrow down your followers’ activity patterns even more.
While determining the optimum time to post on the ‘Gram, always keep your objectives in mind. For example, are you attempting to raise brand awareness? Increase visitors to your website and boost your conversion rates? Get leads? Defining your critical objectives can also help you ensure that every piece of Instagram content is posted at the right moment.
3 Practical Tips for Finding Your Optimal Time to Post on Instagram
Since no two audiences are identical, you must research to determine the optimal times for you – and your followers. Determining your specific best time to post requires data analysis, but it doesn’t have to be difficult or challenging – as I promised, I’ll help you with it! Here are my Instagram suggestions to help you get the most of your data analysis!
1. Analyze your best-performing posts
Examine your top-performing content, all your posts, and Reels, looking for evident patterns. Is there a common factor? Were the majority of your most popular posts published at a given time or day of the week?
As you most probably know, Instagram has a native, in-app analytics tool that may help you analyze your posts. If you don’t want to search through data manually, try the IQ Hashtags Tool – it will do the heavy lifting for you and show you the data you need the most, and thanks to its user-friendly visualizations it will be much easier for you to track the performance of your posts, all the ups and downs (and what I like the most about this tool – it also has a hashtag performance feature, allowing you to check if the hashtags you picked helped you gain a TOP 9 position for any of the used hashtags.
2. Analyze your audience’s behavior and patterns
Speaking of the tools that can help you identify your best, most valuable posting times – it’s also a brilliant idea to analyze your audience’s tendencies and their behavior. Do you know when exactly they are using the platform the most?
The IQ Hashtags Followers Activity feature, as the name indicates, provides you the optimum knowledge about your Instagram community – it will show you when exactly they are online, and what’s the best time to post based on that data analysis. Of course, the tool’s suggestions are based on your previous performance and are matched to your specific audience’s activity habits – so there’s basically no better source of information, I suppose.
3. Track your Instagram growth in time.
I believe that once we have a good, comparable overview, it’s a matter of figuring out what’s worth doubling down on. Don’t ignore the data you see – make good use of it! Track all your ups and downs, so you’re always aware of how good your current posting choices are. Tracking top metrics on Instagram really IS crucial for your strategy. I’m here to stress it as often as I can!
To Wrap It All Up!
I hope this guide helped you learn about what is the best time to post on Instagram and how to test it for your account. Posting a new Reel, a carousel, or a static post is just one part of a much bigger journey for bringing in your potential followers.
Keep creating, growing, and learning how to do it with the strategic approach! I’m here to help you with the latter!
