
Shutterstock
Quality Matters A Lot
If you are using Instagram as a marketing tool to promote your business or brand then you are probably looking for more likes & views to increase engagement on your posts. More engagement means more followers. Of course, you can temporarily boost your follower count by using services to buy Instagram followers but you need engagement from your followers not just something to make your account look pretty. So, gaining more engagement organically on your post is the goal that you probably have in your mind.
One of the main factors which decide the amount of engagement your posts get is the quality. If your post isn’t entertaining or relevant then you probably won’t be getting a lot of engagement even after following all promotion tactics. So, your primary focus should be on creating good quality posts for your Instagram account.
But sometimes even after making a quality post, it can be hard to get likes and comments on your pics and videos. This is where promotional strategies come into play. This article is going to touch on one of the main things that you need to focus on while uploading a post on Instagram to get more engagement.
Best Time to Post on Instagram
This is something that all social media marketers want an answer to. If you can figure out at what time your post will receive more engagement then it can be quite advantageous to you. So, that’s what we will be taking a look at in this article.
Now, you can use the knowledge you get from the time analysis in a couple of ways. You can either start posting at times when most users are active and are engaging with different posts or you can upload at a time when everything is quieter. Once you have an idea about the engagement stats at different times of the day then you can easily schedule your posts to be uploaded at a particular time.
The best option is to use an automatic scheduler where you can schedule all the posts for the week or the month ahead in advance. The tool will then automatically upload your posts to Instagram at the specified time.
What Studies Have Shown?
In this section, we will take a brief look at the times at which posting on Instagram can give your posts more engagement. If you want a more detailed idea about the best times to post for different entries across major social media platforms using the social media scheduler tools. Recently, a lot has changed since COVID. This has affected how people interact on social media platforms. We have included the update on this later but this section shows you the general overview before the pandemic and lockdown.
When it comes to Instagram the best day to post is Wednesday and Friday. The best time to do so is in the morning between 10 am and 11 am. Weekends receive the worst engagement rate so if you are posting content on Sundays and Saturdays you will be getting far less engagement. So, only post content for which you do not necessarily need a good engagement. In general, mid-day during the weekdays see the most engagement on Instagram. The activity starts dropping after 9 p.m. But you can generally expect better engagement between 9 a.m to 4 p.m on weekdays.
The above data shows a general look at the best engagement times. But if you look at specific industries the timing may differ. For example, while in the consumer goods industry more engagement is on Wednesday at 3 p.m for the education industry it is Friday at 10 a.m.
COVID Update
Now, the previous data is from the time when there was no lockdown. The pandemic has changed people’s daily routines and it has affected how they interact on social media platforms. One of the major updates is that now even weekends receive good engagement especially from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
So, posting content on weekends can be good as well. Also, Wednesday is no more the best day to post your content. It is Monday, Tuesday and Friday. You will get good engagement at 11 a.m on Mondays and Tuesdays and at 2 p.m on Fridays.
How You Can Do It Yourself
Now that we have taken a look at the data that studies have shown you can do this analysis yourself for your Instagram account. First, you need to have a business profile on Instagram. It is free and very easy to do so. You can even convert your personal account to a business one if you wish to do so. The main advantage of this is the availability of Instagram Insights which is the analytics tool provided by Instagram.
It can help analyze the performance of your posts so that you can tailor your content to get more engagement and also understand your target audience. Also, the engagement time depends on the location as well. So, if you do the analysis yourself or get a third-party to do it for you then you will get much better results that will be more specific to your brand.
Using this tool you can get insights into how your posts are performing at different times of the day. When did you get the most number of likes, views or comments in a short period as a whole in general? Try posting at different times of the day and not the data down. After doing it for a couple of weeks you can find out what’s the best time to post on your Instagram profile to get more engagement.
This method will probably give you better results as it will be related to your followers and brand. Try to use the stats provided above as a sort of guide to come up with your own insights that can help you get more engagement. Also, focus on the quality of the content as well as no strategy will matter if the content is not good. We wish you all the best.