There is a substantial amount of conflicting information out there on the best times to post for your
social channels
. Knowing the specific details for your target audiences - like time zones, locations and countries - will help you get further engagement. A recent article published by Later, analysed over 12 million posts across Instagram, finding that 9-11am EST was the best time to publish content globally.
With every account, the
strategy is going to be different,
so the best way to overcome this is to schedule your posts. Remember, timeliness is an essential part of Instagram as the algorithm is in favour of posting times, so how do you actually figure out how to take advantage of this?
Top Followers and Time Zone Metrics for Instagram
Find when your top followers are online and what time zones they are in by researching on
Instagrams marketing Insights
tool. This literally gives everything to you on a platter - location, age, gender and one of the most important metrics -
when they are active on the platform
.
Experiment, track and refine
.
Record everything in an excel spreadsheet including day, time, comments and likes. Do this for a week, then the following week switch up the time on each day to see if that changes the engagement rate. This process will take a few weeks, but it is a great way to see exactly how your audience is interacting with your platform.
Source:
Later
Save your most important and informative posts for weekdays.
Short and sharp posts
will get higher engagement mid-week as the majority of people cannot spend the time to sit down and read a long-winded blog. Instagram’s global engagement has grown to over
one billion active monthly users
and the continuation of extended features gives users new ways to interact with the platform. The social giant also has a high focus on retail. In fact, Sprout Social analysed multiple industries and discovered some interesting insights on what the best times and worst times to post on Instagram are.
|
Best
|
Worst
|
|
Time: Wednesday 11 am & Friday 10-11am
|
Time: Daily between 11pm-3am
|
|
Day: Wednesday
|
Day: Sunday
|
Overall, the most consistent days for engagement are seemingly Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday between 10 am & 3 pm. With these times reflected globally, there are multiple opportunities to dive into your target audience when they are most active on the platform. For example, your audience may be most active when they wake up in the morning or before they go to sleep at night, so make sure you are scheduling a few posts a day to test this behaviour out.: Sprout Social - Consumer goods engagement
Assessing your industry on Instagram
It's important to remember that each industry has its own distinct consumer behaviours, though. Luckily, Hubspot recently explored both B2B and B2C fields to find out exactly how times are influenced by engagement. Most notably, they found the following slots to be the most beneficial:
-
B2B - Early morning (8 am) and after lunch (3 pm).
-
B2C - Daily 10 am until 3 pm and Saturday 11 am until 1 pm.
If your strategy is constantly taking into consideration the algorithm changes and data based on your users' engagement, you will likely see success in social growth. Metrics will move in a positive direction such as inbound traffic, search engine rankings and brand awareness. But never forget the need to
be agile
with your scheduling strategy; just because the highest engagement is Wednesday this week, it may change in two weeks' time. Keep on your toes at all times.
Happy scheduling!
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