When is the best time to post on Instagram?
Later analyzed 12 million Instagram posts and found that the best time to post on Instagram is between 9am-11am EST.
But is that the best time to post on Instagram for your business?
Every Instagram account has a unique audience, with followers located in different time zones, so it’s important to find your personalized best time to post on Instagram.
Scheduling your Instagram posts for optimized times is proven to help you reach more followers and get more engagement on your posts.
Here’s how to find your best time to post on Instagram, plus we break down the best times for each day of the week:
When is the Best Time to Post on Instagram?
To find the best time to post on Instagram in 2020, we analyzed 12 million Instagram posts, posted in multiple time zones around the world from accounts ranging from 100 to 1 million+ followers.
Here are the top 3 global best times to post on Instagram for each day of the week, represented in Eastern Standard Time:
Here’s a breakdown of our findings for quick reference:
The Best Time to Post on Instagram by Day:
- Monday: 6am, 10am, and 10pm EST
- Tuesday: 2am, 4am, and 9am EST
- Wednesday: 7am, 8am and 11pm EST
- Thursday: 9am, 12pm, and 7pm EST
- Friday: 5am, 1pm, and 3pm EST
- Saturday: 11am, 7pm, and 8pm EST
- Sunday: 7am, 8am, and 4pm EST
While these are the best times to post on average, here at Later, we’ve found that if you want to get more engagement, it’s best to find your personalized best times to post based on your unique audience.
Timeliness has always been an important factor in the Instagram algorithm, but ever since Instagram updated the algorithm in early 2018, when you post to Instagram is more important than ever!
As a result, if you want to beat the Instagram algorithm in 2020, you need to optimize your posting time for when the majority of your followers are online.
Think of it this way: Since Instagram is now prioritizing “new” content on people’s feeds, your best shot at getting your content in front of your followers is by posting when most of them are actively scrolling the app.
That’s why it’s so important to find your own personalized best time to post on Instagram — you can hack the algorithm to increase your reach and get more likes and followers.
Want to learn more about finding your best time to post on Instagram? Check out this quick video guide:
How to Find Your Best Time to Post on Instagram in 2020:
To help you nail down your personal best times to post for your audience, there are a few tools and features you can use:
- Use Later’s Best Time to Post feature to automatically calculate your top 7 posting times
- Review Instagram Insights to find your top time zones and see when your followers are online
- Experiment with different posting times and measure your progress with Instagram analytics
If you want to skip the experiments and get right to the good data, an Instagram marketing platform like Later can do the work for you!
Later’s Best Time to Post feature automatically calculates your 7 top posting times based on your best performing posts from the recent month:
Since every Instagram account is different, we wanted to create a feature that would give you your personalized best posting times — and that’s exactly what Best Time to Post does!
If you’re on one of Later’s business plans, which start at just $19/month, your best times to post will automatically be highlighted in your weekly content calendar, making it super easy to schedule your Instagram posts for when your audience is most active!
Other Ways to Calculate Your Best Time to Post on Instagram
If you’re not on a Later business plan, don’t worry! You can a still calculate your best times to post on Instagram yourself manually, but it may take some more time and effort to get it right.
#1. Find Your Top Time Zones & See When Your Followers Are Online
When it comes to the best time to post on Instagram, it’s essential to think about the time zones of your Instagram followers.
The best thing you can do to find your optimal posting time for Instagram is to research your audience using Instagram’s native analytics tool, Instagram Insights.
Instagram Insights gives you everything you could ask for: you can see where your followers are located, their gender, their age, and, most importantly, when they’re most active on Instagram.
Just keep in mind that in order to access Insights, you’ll need to set up an Instagram business profile or an Instagram creator profile.
One of the added benefits of switching to a creator profile is that you also get access to the Instagram Creator Studio dashboard, which is packed with valuable audience insights, including advanced data for when your followers are online.
Creator profiles also have access to data around growth insights and new discovery data:
If you’re on one of Later’s paid plans, you can also track key insights about your followers directly in your Later dashboard with Later’s Instagram Analytics!
With Later’s Instagram analytics, you can track key insights about your followers, including their age, gender, location, languages, and more.
These kinds of metrics are perfect for fine-tuning your content strategy!
For example, you can use your audience data to pinpoint your top time zones and find out when your followers are most active on Instagram right from your desktop.
You can also use Later’s Instagram audience analytics to track when your audience is most active on Instagram and then use that data to optimize your posting times.
Once you have a clear understanding of your best times and days to post on Instagram, you can easily schedule your posts at those times!
#2. Experiment with Posting Times and Measure Your Progress
If you’d rather crunch the numbers yourself, you can create a spreadsheet to track how much engagement you receive when you post at different times on different days.
Start by picking five different times throughout the week.
For example, if you notice that your followers are most active between 5 and 9pm EST, schedule your posts to appear at 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9pm.
In your spreadsheet, track how many likes and comments each post receives, along with the date and time that you posted them.
The following week, switch the timing of your posts for each day. For example, if you posted at 5pm on Monday in week 1, post at 6pm during week 2.
It might take a few weeks, but you can use this information to help you choose the best days to share to specific networks based on your own audience, along with the times that work best for getting traffic on those specific days.
Other Factors to Consider:
Different audiences will, of course, be active at different times, so there’s no hard-and-fast rule about the best time to post on Instagram. But there are some general rules you should consider:
#1: The Instagram Algorithm Factors in Timeliness
As we mentioned a little earlier, in 2018, Instagram updated its algorithm to give more weight to when something is posted.
So does this mean the chronological feed is back? Not exactly!
What Instagram did was adjust their current algorithm so that, among other things, very old content doesn’t constantly get bumped up in people’s feeds. It gives priority to newer content.
Source: Instagram
There are a number of factors that influence the Instagram algorithm, including how much engagement a post gets and how long people spend viewing a post.
With the recent change, Instagram has essentially shifted the importance (or weight) of these factors so that the time that people post has more influence on what appears on your feed.
#2: Scheduling Your Posts Can Get You More Engagement
We’ve already covered this to an extent — if you post when your audience is most active on Instagram, you’re more likely to drive engagement on that post. But did you know that Instagram engagement has a compounding effect?
When a post gets a lot of likes and comments, that engagement will translate into Instagram bumping your post higher up on users’ feeds and potentially getting a spot on the Instagram Explore page, which, in turn, will result in even more engagement on your post!
It’s a cyclical process: higher engagement leads to more visibility, which leads to higher engagement, which leads to more visibility. But it all starts with when you post on Instagram!
#3: Post for Your Most Active Time Zone(s)
If your primary audience lives in a specific region, like California, you should be posting with the Pacific Standard Time (PST) time zone in mind. Likewise, if the majority of your followers are located in New York City, you should be posting in Eastern Standard Time (EST).
But what if your followers are scattered around the world? This is where experimentation comes in handy!
Also, keep in mind that if you have followers in both North America and the UK, you may find that posting at “odd” times in your time zone (like midnight PST) actually perform well for you, because it’s 8am in London, England.
Looking for a quick guide to best times to post globally? Later teamed up with influencer marketing platform Fohr to analyze infleuncers’ posting habits and trends for the future.
What they discovered, after analyzing thousands of influencers and their posts, were these core posting times around the world:
Of course, it still pays off to use this as a ball-park time slot, and find your personalized (and perfect!) posting time from there!
#4: Post More During Off-Work Hours Instead of During the Day:
Generally, the best times to post on Instagram are lunchtime (11am-1pm) and evenings (7-9pm).
Instead of posting while you’re at your desk, schedule Instagram posts during the workday so you don’t have to worry about it during your free time!
#5: Save Your Important Posts for Weekdays:
The differences are slight, but average Instagram engagement does shift depending on the day.
For example, B2B companies may get more engagement during the week while their audience is at work, whereas bloggers may get more engagement on the weekends when their audience is more likely to have time to read their posts.
How to Schedule for Your Best Time to Post on Instagram
Now that you know when your Instagram audience is most active, and how to drive the most engagement based on your audience’s activity, the last step is to schedule your Instagram posts for your personalized best times to post on Instagram.
There are many reasons why you should be scheduling Instagram posts in 2020, but one of the top reasons is that you’ll be able to consistently have content going out at your best times to post on Instagram.
One of the best ways to ensure that you are consistently posting when your audience is most active is to use Later’s Quick Schedule tool.
With Quick Schedule, you can create your own Instagram queue based on your best times to post.
You just have to select your posting times once, and then you can easily save yourself time by dragging and dropping posts on to your calendar, which will then automatically be scheduled for your best times to post on Instagram.
Instagram is an incredible channel for businesses to achieve their marketing goals, but in 2020, it just isn’t enough to post content whenever you feel like it anymore.
By planning and scheduling your posts in advance for the best time to post on Instagram, you can boost your engagement, drive traffic, and gain new followers and customers!
Want to learn how to plan your Instagram content like the pros? We teamed up with Puno, founder of ilovecreatives and Peoplemap.co to show us how to put a personal spin on your content. Check out our free video course:
