The Best Times and Days to Post
One thing that is often overlooked when you are posting is the TIMING of the post! What hour you post each day majorly impacts engagement and subsequent “success” of the post! The timing of an Instagram post is a key part of social media strategy, and I for one want to do everything I can to maximize Instagram’s impact!
While I believe wholeheartedly it’s better to post when you’re ready than wait around for the clock to strike a certain hour, the push for needed engagement to beat the algorithm is REAL so posting when your audience is most likely to engage with your content is a smart move when it comes to strategy.
So what time is best?
It is different for every person! I like to use Instagram’s insights to track my best times. I’ll show you how to look at your own times below. You must have a ‘Business’ profile on Instagram to access these stats.
First, go to your Instagram profile and click the 3 lines in the top right corner:
Then, head to Insights:
Once you’re there, go to the Audience tab and scroll down to the bottom:
You’ll have to tab the blue bars for these numbers to show up. Then the gray arrow to scroll through the days.
Take a look at our numbers below.
Best Times
As you can see, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings at 9 pm are the highest. So I usually post around 7 pm-7: 30 pm so we can begin to get some engagement then get the maximum number of eyes on our post.
If it’s a high performing post then that engagement will continue to carry over into the next day for those who check their Instagram in the morning when they wake up.
I reserve our most important content for these days- giveaways, event announcements, poll questions, etc.
Occasionally I’ll post at 12 pm (lunchtime for most people) or 3 pm (afternoon slump) if I know I’ll be busy that evening and won’t be able to get on to interact with the post. But I batch and schedule most of our content so it’s posted automatically via our Later app anyway so I don’t have to sit there and write out the caption, edit the photo, etc. It saves SO MUCH time.
You can learn how to batch and schedule your content here.
It’s still important to get on and interact with the post and respond to comments right away as that will help your engagement even more.
Take a look at your own numbers and see what works for you.
With your photos scheduled and ready to go, you can look ahead to the week and simply just see what time you should post each day of that week! Having this in your schedule makes it even less stressful because you know exactly what the week has in store content-wise!
When To Post App
If you don’t have an Instagram business account I highly recommend this app. I used it before we switched to a business account.
This app is FREE but you can also upgrade to get even better tracking for $1.99, so to me, it’s totally worth it… I mean, a one time fee to get some rocking analytics and post with confidence? Yup. Now, what I LOVE about this app, is it tells you the best times for YOU to post based on when your audience is on and engaging the most.
What I love about this app is it will give you multiple times to post each day so you aren’t confined to one window of time, it will give you the analytics broken down each day of the week and give you a little countdown on when the next best time is to post. Since we are all serving different audiences, I love this so much more than generic times that might not reach the specific people you’re serving!