What Is The Best Time To Post On Instagram?
When it comes to digital marketing, one of the most important rules of success is recognizing the right times and strategies for reaching your specific audience. As more and more of us are turning to the internet for our day-to-day socializing, it’s no surprise that the world’s leading users of social media are potentially your best target audience. But how can you make sure you reach them?
Among the most prominent users on social media are the 830 million active Instagram users. It’s no wonder, with all the creative ways to find and engage with potential customers via its vast community. As it stands, there are over 96 million images shared daily on Instagram, and it’s likely that your competition is already trying to catch the attention of your potential customers.
But to get them to essentially pay attention your message, you have to understand the optimal best time to post on Instagram. Fortunately, the secret to getting your post seen is simpler than you’d think. Here we’ve laid out everything you need to know to kickstart your campaign on
Instagram.
What Is The Best Time To Post On Instagram?
First of all, it’s important to remember that the best time to post on Instagram doesn’t have one definitive answer. It’s important to understand the factors that affect when someone might be more likely to see and interact with your posts, so that you can adjust your strategy to the details and nuances of your individual brand.
However, it doesn’t need to be a challenging task. We’ll go over what general times and timings will fetch the best response, and how you should research the specifics for your business, product, customer base and influencers.
The Best Global Times To Post For Businesses
It’s exciting to get started on your creative Instagram account, especially now that you know the common trend. Although, as with all marketing activity, it’s essential to work out the best other times to post and reap the maximum rewards.
The data collected by SproutSocial is that the best overall time to post on Instagram is between 9am and 11am on Wednesdays and Thursdays. This, and more, is provided by SproutSocial below.
Weekdays
Wednesdays and Thursdays, running from noon until 3pm, have the highest number of interactions despite the week’s lowest engagement rates. The following are breakdowns of the top five best times to post on Instagram:
• 9am – 11am: Wednesday and Thursday
• Noon – 3pm: Wednesday and Thursday with peak hour at 3pm
• 11pm – 3am: Tuesday at 11am and 4am
• 6am – 7am: Tuesday and Friday
Weekends
On the weekends, most people take a break from all the business and “get it done” mentality and engage for fun with their peers, influencers, and accounts related to hobbies and interests. The peak hour on Saturday at 11am receives the
highest engagements, with Sunday coming second at 8pm.
• 10am – 11am: Saturday
• 8pm – 11pm: Sunday
• 12pm – 1pm: Friday and Sunday
• 5pm – 9pm: Monday and Thursday
Time Zones
The next step is to take into consideration the time zone of your target audience. Having followers across borders and states means your peak hour might be different. It’s often tempting to choose times based on other users, which isn't ideal. It’s better to research local times when it comes to interacting with your larger base of followers. This may mean allowing time zone differences to influence when you post and reply.
User Engagement
Engagement is about the interactions and the content shared amongst users and the business accounts that are part of that conversation. When looking at input from customers, markets, and influencers, it’s important to measure the success of your posts by analytic methods such as CTAs, ranging from likes to shares, comments, and more.
Remember though, most customers don’t make purchases as soon as they see your CTA. It's best to use the insights from your conversations on engagement to inform when to post for reliable positive results.
Creating A Strategy That Works
Besides choosing the best times for posting, it’s a great idea to divide content into three types according to their key objective: promote, announce, and engage. Consider the best possible platforms, hashtags to use, messaging, stories that fit this type, call-to-action, and sizes. Next, implement filters that help find audience interest.
For instance, when promoting products with offers and sales, you want to make sure your messaging gets to the right people at the right time. You can use things like location, relationship status, tags that make the post visible for other use, age, and interests to start building the most effective messaging and post targeting.
Analytics
To measure the success of your inputs, time-based analytics means taking things a step further. Establishing goals to watch out for and understand the factors that seem to
increase your followers’ engagement. Some tools available to you include Heatmaps, geo-mapping functions, and grid post combinations.
Keep a close eye on analytics to feel confident in when and how to post better. It’s no surprise that brands with quality photos and videos dominate their usage of Instagram. Capturing your target audience with visuals associated with your brand remains at the top of the priority list when using this social media content platform.
User Habits & Insights
When you take into consideration how people use Instagram, as mentioned earlier, you’ll realize that most users (54%) look for news related to their interests and topics that are trending. Audiences are likely to digest and comment when posts are content-heavy and focuses on hot topics.
An influencer approach is another way to earn more followers. When partnering with influencers, making sure their content matches what you stand for is key. You can also explore hosting swag contests, creating great visual content, and identify target customers by activity level or paid influencers.
Target Specific Audiences
Your overall approach should be designed and tailored to draw attention from a diverse range of audiences who have different day-to-day habits. If you don’t have any existing user bases, branding and reaching out on Instagram is a great place to start. Building a plan that studies user habits and preferences will lead you to higher engagement rates within your brand page.
It’s important to find the most efficient formula that produces great results between the products offered, lifestyle, interests environment, and age. Establish conversations within a specific range of users – even people from other countries. Put in effort to understand cultures and users can be helpful when selecting content that resonates seamlessly with a global audience
Reaching Your Audience
It is important to know that as your brand’s stature and recognition rises, competitors also playing in the same space will also rise too. The aim is to compete with the most interesting visuals and storytelling while upholding an element of appeal specifically created for you and your company. Reaching the most alluring audiences should also be one of your goals.
The Analytics page on Instagram will give you insights into the time range in which people are more active and the type of content that brings most reactions and reactions to comments that can provide fresh perspective so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Conclusion
It can be tricky to stay updated on all the changes related to timing on Instagram, especially when it comes to peak seasons like the holidays or special occasions. Finding the best times to post is essential for ensuring your reach is as wide as possible. As a general rule, it’s best to post between 9am and 11am on Wednesdays and Thursdays for global users, and test other possibilities for local and weekend audiences too.
Finally, it’s always useful to post content types that engage viewers and stories tailored to a range of audiences, together with using the right tools and influencers in order to make the process easier. With these pieces of advice, you and your brand will be taking strides toward achieving the best Instagram performance and reach desired.
