You’re not alone. These days we are all fighting for attention on the ‘gram, and with over 1 billion users it can be really hard to stand out from the crowd. One of the biggest factors in how much (or little) engagement you get on an Instagram post is what time in the day you share your content. There’s a lot to cover here, but before we jump into our thinking and research, here are what we’ve found to be the best times to post on Instagram. Of course, you can also use the Plann app to find your perfect times.
6:00am – 7:00am 11:30am – 12:30pm 2:00pm – 3:00pm 4:00pm – 5:30pm 7:00pm – 9:00pm
TIMEZONE TROUBLES
If you run a global business or brand, and have customers and clients all over the globe, finding an absolutely perfect time to post to Instagram can be a nightmare. How do you make sure the majority of your followers see your content when all of them are in different timezones? When is the optimal time to post on Instagram in that scenario? For example; at Plann, the majority of our Instagram followers are either in the United States OR Australia. Northern and Southern Hemisphere…. Oh joy. With our tricky situation, we’ve found that posting at 3 pm AEST (10 pm California) actually skyrockets our engagement! From our Instagram posting experiments we’ve found that this time is perfect for us as the piece of content gets attention all afternoon and into the evening, and when we wake up the next day? BOOM! Even more followers, likes, and comments. Here are a few Instagram experiments that we recommend you try to find out what posting time works best for you.
MORNING OR EVENING?
There’s plenty of people on the side of posting early in the morning, and others that vouch for the evening and night time like nothing else.
But which one is best?
What we’ve found is helpful is thinking about what your target market do for work, and figuring out what their daily life might be like!
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For example: if you sell kidswear and your target market is Mums with young kids, it is pretty likely that they’ll be up early in the morning and will be available in the early afternoon for a quick Instagram scroll as the baby naps.
On the other hand, if your target market is business owners it’s pretty likely that they don’t get a chance to relax until the evening. That’s when you should post to catch their attention!
Now, this is a funny story of mine that I knew I had to share when writing this blog post. At one point in my life, I was managing multiple client Instagram accounts at once, and quite a few of my clients had global audiences. This one in particular? Their best posting time was 10 pm AEST. Which for me meant that I was posting for them right before I went to sleep. But, one night… I was out. It was 12:30 am on the dancefloor, and me being me, I thought I’d push ‘publish’ on a piece of content I had pre-scheduled. AND GUESS WHAT?! That post went nuts. And, I could never replicate it…. Oh the joy of time zones! The moral of the story is this – sometimes the weirdest times of day will get you crazy results on Instagram. So try them out. But of course, if you’re going to test out a crazy time to post be sure to pre-plan your piece of content, caption and hashtags to avoid any awkward posts. Instagram responsibly peeps!
