When is the Best Time to Post on Instagram®?

The best time to post on Instagram® depends on several unique factors to your business.

As a business, you will have acquired a unique set of followers from different parts of the world, meaning it’s difficult to predict precisely when the best time is to schedule your daily posts, without looking at your Instagram® insights.

That being said, Later recently conducted some research into 12 million posts that discovered that the best time to post is between 9 am and 11 am EST.

But this is not necessarily relevant to your business. You need to find the best time to post that works for you, and here are four things for you to consider.

Day of the Week

When you’re scheduling your posts on Instagram® bear in mind that people use social media differently at the weekend than they do during the week.

For example, using that same study by Later that has already been mentioned, they found that the best times to post on a Monday are 6 am, 10 am, and 10 pm EST, whereas the best times to post on a Saturday are 11 am, 7 pm, and 8 pm EST.

This shows us that people have different social media habits on the weekend, so you should adjust your content posting times to reflect this. 

Work Breaks

If you think about your own social media use, when do you most commonly check your feeds?

For many of us, we do so during our work breaks, when our boss won’t shout at us for using our phones!

Knowing this, as a content creator, you should schedule posts to appear in your follower’s feeds during popular work break times.

It might not necessarily improve engagement, but it’s worth testing it out to see if it has any impact. 

Time Zone 

It’s important that you factor in time zones when you’re scheduling your social media content.

If your target audience is in a particular part of the world, you should tailor your posts to go out when people are likely to be online and looking at their phones.

It’s important to realize that this may not be the time zone in your current location.

If you struggle to keep up with the appropriate time zones, you can use a tool like Hootsuite to help you schedule posts in advance. 

Insights

Instagram® insights really are your secret weapon when it comes to scheduling posts that your followers are likely to see.

Insights help you see where your followers are located, their age, gender, and when they’re most active on the Gram. To access the Insights feature on Instagram®, you will need to ensure you have a business account or a creator profile.

You can also utilize the Instagram® Creator Studio Dashboard, which offers more information on audience insights, including advanced data showing when your followers are online.