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Accomplish May 4, 2020
Timing is everything.
If you’ve been doing social media research on Instagram timing, you might notice something strange. Multiple different marketing platforms claim that vastly different hours are the best times to post on Instagram. What’s up with that? How can the best times to post on Instagram be so different from platform to platform?
As it turns out, there are a few reasons for why it’s so difficult to pin down a universal Instagram schedule. ENTITY explains this phenomenon and how to determine the best times to post on Instagram for you.
There are tons of social media agencies publishing research on Instagram timing. In 2014, TrackMaven analyzed social media timing from “the Fortune 500,” or “America’s largest corporations.” In 2018, Sprout Social, Later, Hootsuite, Coschedule and Hubspot all released reports on the best times to post on Instagram.
The results vary wildly. From 5 AM on Thursday to 12-1 PM on weekdays to 9 PM any day, we get a plethora of different results from all these sources. How do we parse through all this data to get to the real answer?
Before we get into the data, let’s explain why so many companies are potentially getting these wildly different results.
Firstly, most of these companies are gathering this research from “internal data,” or their customers. Depending on the social media platform, some customers represent the population better than others.
For example, Hootsuite mainly focuses on social media scheduling and management. CoSchedule has similar goals, but the platform’s focus is a little more narrowly centered around businesses.
Depending on the different brands or influencers that are drawn to these various websites, this internal data could reflect slightly varied audiences. It’s possible that the people who use CoSchedule over Hootsuite share a distinct trait that may affect results.
Furthermore, most of the people that use these platforms are social media workers. We’re not sure if these social media reports analyzed their customers’ audiences or their customers. But if they did exclude data from the customers’ followers, their reports are largely based on when social media workers are online— not when the average person is online.
Time zones also greatly affect these reports. Sprout Social’s 2018 report used data from various locations and industries. They released this data in Central Time, which could explain why they recommend posting at 5 AM on Thursday. Depending on how far their customers stretch across the globe, this could be an ideal middle time for customers between different continents.
There are a few times that have been consistently successful in my experience and throughout these sources. 9 AM in your target audience’s location —especially on Mondays— is considered as a great moment for Instagram posts. Over the summer, Elijah Schneider from Modifly, previously Mercury Media, confirmed that this is one of the best times to post on Instagram.
Generally, social media agencies also advise against posting at night. This is pretty common sense. Most people won’t be up at 2 AM to see and engage with your post.
But this is very generic advice. Outside of these tips, how can you truly determine the best times to post on Instagram?
You can’t completely rely on the complex and varied data in all this research. If you had to choose a company to trust, CoSchedule does a great job of combining many, many reports from various companies to analyze the best times overall.
But even then, these times might not work out for your account. Your audience is specific to you. Only you have this group of followers from certain locations, of certain ages and with certain likes and dislikes. This audience might also have specific times when they are active online. It’s up to you to determine this schedule for yourself.
You can definitely use the data from CoSchedule or any of these other social media agencies as starting points, but eventually, you should test and adjust these times to make your own schedule. The best way to do this is through an Instagram analytics application. The analytics feature Instagram Insights is available directly through the app, but there are a lot of outside programs that you can download as well.
After downloading Insights or another analytics program, start posting similar content at different times to test the reach. The times that reach the most followers are your best times to post on Instagram.
Instagram Insights also has a fun feature that analyzes follower activity. If you have over 100 followers, under “Audience,” there are graphics that document your followers’ age range, gender and locations. After all this, at the bottom of the tab, there is a bar chart of your followers’ most active times.
For the most part, the times given by this bar chart have successfully reached more followers. But occasionally, I have found that a recommended time slot fails to give my posts more reach. So even after retrieving this information, continue testing these times to make sure they actually provide results.
The answer is that there isn’t really an answer. Besides mornings, there aren’t any universal best times to post on Instagram. While many of these reports can give great suggestions that could end up working out for your account, it’s up to you to test these times and determine how many accounts they reach. Then adjust your schedule and continue to keep an eye out for these measurements.
It’s hard work. But in a few months, you’ll have your own personalized schedule that maximizes reach in a way that only works for your account. And to me, that sounds a lot more enjoyable than wracking your brain over a million different reports.
So good luck, and get scheduling!
