When is the Best Time to Post on Instagram in 2020?

Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users and has grown into a social media mammoth.

According to Facebook research, 83% of people discover services and products on Instagram. 81% of them use it to research brands, while 80% use it to make purchase decisions.

Image via Facebook

It’s, therefore, a great time to grow your presence on Instagram, if you haven’t started yet. However, your posts may get lost in the ocean of posts that are uploaded onto the platform every minute. That’s why you need a strategy to ensure that your target audience sees and engages with your content.

Knowing the best time to post on Instagram gives you an edge over your competition. At the same time, it helps you make the most out of your fan-following on Instagram.

To succeed at increasing your engagement, you need to understand Instagram’s new algorithm and what it means for brands.

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Understanding the New Instagram Algorithm

To better understand the new Instagram algorithm, let’s start from the 2016 update. This update announced that feeds would prioritize user moments.

In 2018, the app introduced improvements to ensure that users had more control over their feeds and received timely posts.

Fast forward to 2019, and now users see posts based on their activities on the app.

Image via Instagram

The changes to Instagram’s algorithm mean that your feed is no longer chronological. Instagram now shows content based on timeliness, Instagram usage, and the accounts you engage with the most.

So for brands, that means that your audience sees your posts if the algorithm has determined their interest in your brand. They also see your posts if they have interacted with your brand before. And lastly, the time of posting also affects if your audience will see your posts.

When you take these factors into consideration while posting, there’s a good chance that the right people will see and interact with your updates.

Now that you’ve understood the latest Instagram algorithm update, let’s take a look at the best time to post on Instagram.

Best Time to Post on Instagram Depending on Studies

Several organizations have conducted studies to determine the ideal times to post on Instagram. While they ended up with different results, some similarities stood out.

CoSchedule compared statistics and data from 25 studies. They found that the best times to post are before work; before, during, or after lunch; and after work.

Image via CoSchedule

According to their study, catching people over their lunch hour break is a great idea. You can increase your chances by posting when they are almost finished with their daily activities. The study also found that Friday is the best day to post on Instagram.

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HubSpot found that the best time to post is on Thursday at 5 AM, 3 PM, 11 AM, and 4 PM. The best times for the other days of the week are as follows:

Tuesdays, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 5 AM

Monday from 11 AM to 5 PM. During this time, people are probably having lunch or starting to get exhausted with the day.

Other notable times include:

• Tuesday from 9 AM to 6 PM
• Friday from 9 AM to 4 PM
• Thursday at 11 AM, and 3 to 4 PM
• Wednesday at 11 AM and 3 PM
• Saturday at 11 AM

The best time to post on Sunday is between 10 AM and 2 PM. Your audience is likely to hang out with friends or eat brunch during this time.

High engagement happens on Wednesday and Thursday at 3 PM, and Friday at 5 AM. In summary, post from Tuesday through Friday from around 9.AM to 6 PM.

While these studies are essential, it’s great to establish the best posting time for your brand. This way, you can have an Instagram posting strategy that caters to the specific needs of your audience.

Let’s try to understand how you can achieve that.

How Do You Figure Out The Best Time to Post on Instagram?

Every Instagram account has a distinct set of followers with unique needs. Thus, it’s crucial to find the best time to post based on your audience.

The best time to post on Instagram for a clothing store will differ from that of a club. Understanding who your audience is becomes a priority.

For this, you need to ask the following questions about your audience:

• What are their priorities?
• How do they interact with your posts?
• When and how do they engage with your brand?
• How do they access social media?
• At what time are they likely to be online?

You must also consider the numerous posts and hashtags used by users and your competitors. If you fail to look at these things, there’s a good chance that people may not notice your posts.

Posting at the right time on Instagram may sound complicated. However, there are tools out there that can make your work easier.

Instagram scheduling tools can help you post consistently. This can help you remain relevant for your audience and it can engage them as well.

With these tools, you can automate posting on your Instagram account with ease. All you need to do is schedule the posts and the tools will take care of the rest.

Scheduling tools help reduce the time taken to post your content. That will allow you to focus more on the quality of your content, and that, in turn, can help improve your engagement.

In addition to third-party tools, Instagram has built-in tools that you can use to analyze your demographics, activity trends, and engagement. You can get personalized Instagram insights on your profile. These insights include data about individual Instagram Stories and posts as well.

Instagram Insights gives you data on the past week’s performance of your profile. You can get information such as the number of posts created, followers lost, and followers gained.

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Additionally, the insights show you the time of day when your followers were most active. At the same time, it shows you the activity of your followers for each day. The app also provides insights on follower activity such as the reach and engagement for each post.

Image via Instagram

Use these insights to understand the content your audience likes. You can also use them to gauge the contribution of your social media influencers to your campaigns.

Read the full post on Shane Barker's Influencer Marketing blog.