When Is the Best Time to Post to Instagram to Get Your Post Seen?
How about the best day of the week to get the most likes? Most reactions?
Keep reading to learn about Instagram’s universal best post times that seem to work across the board and how to find a unique best post time for your brand (because every business and audience is unique).
…Or! If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch our video for an answer and advice.
Contents
Is There a Better Time to Post on Instagram?
Generally the best time to post on Instagram
Tips for finding the best time to post on Instagram
Bonus: Download a free checklist that shows the exact steps a fitness blogger used to get from 0 to 600,000+ Instagram followers without a budget or expensive equipment.
Is There a Better Time to Post on Instagram?
Each brand may have a slightly different place to post on Instagram as each brand caters to a unique audience with unique social media behaviors. However, there are some best practices you can follow that will yield great results across the board.
In general, it’s very important to post when your followers are online because Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes what’s new. This means, all other things being equal, the new post will appear higher in the News Feed than the old one.
Recency is honestly one of the quickest and easiest wins when it comes to optimizing a post for success. (Although we have plenty of other tips for getting free Instagram likes if you’re interested).
But it’s also important to know exactly what your goals are for your Instagram marketing strategy. Do you have specific goals related to raising awareness, increasing engagement, or driving traffic? What does success look like to you and when were your posts successful in the past? Your past success is an important guideline for when to post in general.
Generally the Best Time to Post on Instagram
According to our observation and experience, the best universal time to post on Instagram is…
Wednesday 11:00
We found that Instagram users are more likely to interact with content in the middle of the day and mid-week. And it makes sense — now is the perfect time to take a break from work or school and flip the page. (And like. And comment.)
So if you’re new to Instagram and don’t have a lot of old or audience data, try posting around this time and see how it works for you. As your account grows, you can tailor your messaging schedule to the Instagram activity patterns of your specific audience. This is how we find the perfect Hootsuite moments to post on our Instagram account.
Bryden Cohen, social marketing and employee advocacy strategist at Hootsuite, told us:
“Usually we like to post early in the morning and in the middle of the day. For Instagram, that means you can post anytime between 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM PT, or between 4:00 PM and 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM PT during the week.
Cohen said that, at least for Hootsuite’s North American B2B audience, our Instagram posts work best when it’s wake up or lunchtime for our Pacific time zone audience while we’re at work. hours of the eastern time zone.
Using the activity map in Hootsuite Analytics, it’s easy to see when your Hootsuite Instagram audience is online:
Hootsuite Analytics Subscriber Online Activity Map
Source: Hootsuite Analytics.
Cohen and the social media team also use Hootsuite Impact tools to measure the effectiveness of posts and campaigns. “The data tells us whether we should continue to focus on the same strategy or change something in the future.”
In general, according to Cohen, deciding when to post something on Instagram is like this:
“We use past performances as a star and then look at when the audience is online as a second opinion. If our content doesn’t work as expected after this, we’ll test another publishing time to see if publishing performance is affected.
