When it comes to posting on IG, what is more important – time of the day or day of the week? Ensuring you post when your audience is most active can help increase engagement AND conversions, so getting this right does matter.
If you want a quick overview of this, you can check out this Instagram post
Or, keep reading below!
The way the algorithm works, Instagram will show your post to your followers based on your account’s ranking in their feed regardless of WHEN you posted. If you posted at 5:00 am and your follower logged in at 9:00 pm, but your follower is a die-hard who loves your content, your post would still appear at the top of their feed at 9:00 pm. If your follower is a moderately active follower and they logged in at 5:30 am (30 minutes after you posted), your post still wouldn’t appear at the top of their feed, but likely a few further down, behind those accounts they are more devoted to who have posted since the last time that follower logged in.
The most important factor, therefore, isn’t the time of the day, but knowing what days of the week is best for your audience.
If your audience is most active on weekends, posting on Tuesday isn’t ideal, no matter what time you post. Instead, you should be posting Thursday through Sunday (at any time of the day) to ensure you’ve got fresh content when they are most likely to log in.
Consider your audience behaviors to know when they are more likely to be online – college students versus working parents will have very different online schedules.
You can also check your Instagram insights to see what days of the week are most active for your followers. When you go to your IG insights and go to the Followers details, scroll down towards the bottom of the page and it’ll show you if certain days are more active than others for your followers. If the graph doesn’t seem to show any preference on day, do your own analysis to see how your engagement is on different days of the week. Don’t look just for like counts on your posts, but also consider comments, shares, saves, and link/profile clicks to know if your audience is more likely to take certain actions on certain days.
If you’ve been stressing out about what time of day to post, stop worrying about it! Instead, focus on which days perform better. If necessary, use a scheduling tool in order to get content out on the days that perform best with your audience. I highly recommend using Agorapulse or other tools that allow you to reliably schedule content in advance – and manage your comments, DMs, and other social media activities in one place!
