When is the best and worst time to post on Instagram ?

The Best And Worst Times To Post On Instagram And Tiktok

Whether you are a brand trying to make a presence on Instagram or a high school student trying to gain maximum likes and comments, finding out the worst time to post is the ultimate deal. Instagram’s algorithm keeps playing with the content that it shows to its users. When you know the correct time to upload your posts, you can make sense of the content overload that occurs many times when you scroll your Instagram feed.

Why worst time to post In Instagram is important?

With 1 billion active users on a monthly basis, Instagram is easily one of the biggest social networks out there. In fact, it’s second only to Facebook, and interest for this platform keeps growing at a rapid pace.

Bloggers, influencers, brands, companies, celebrities, and regular people actively use Instagram on a daily basis. Year after year, the platform shows impressive growth – even more impressive than that of Facebook, its parent company.

Instagram users can be roughly divided into three categories: those who do it for themselves, those who do it for friends, and those who want to profit off of these two. After all, it’s more than just a social network for sharing photos. It’s also one of the most business-friendly platforms out there. Today, Instagram is one of the social platforms important for both connecting with your audience and promotion.

General Advice for Posting on Instagram

It’s easy to look at your most popular posts and try to emulate them every time, but if you don’t understand why they work, you’ll never get the results you’re looking for.

The good thing is that there are tools to make posting on Instagram so much easier.

Let Instagram Insights Do the Work

Sign up for the business account if you’re a business looking to increase your following on Instagram. It seems obvious, but tons of people don’t do this and aren’t taking advantage of the tools Instagram already provides.

This eliminates most of the guesswork regarding what time-zones to target, what your most popular days are, and what your most popular posts are.

You can break down interactions by location, time, day of the week, age, and gender.

You can’t always rely solely on the numbers; some people make fake accounts or separate ones for specific reasons.

But, if you have a ton of followers and there are clear trends present, take advantage of the data you have.

Do Your Own Experiments for posting on IG

If you’re a numbers person and you feel like Instagram Insights aren’t enough, make a spreadsheet and start running your own experiments on the best time to post on Instagram.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or guaranteed formula for the best results every single time.

The only way to get as strong a feel for your audience as possible is by doing the dirty work yourself. It’s more time consuming, but it will help.

Post every single day, and post every hour you wish to target to see what time gives you the best results.

Log these in your spreadsheet and record the data for at least one week. You can even do follow-ups every month to make sure results are consistent.

Download a Post Scheduling App

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There are a handful of apps on the App Store or Google Play Store that let users rearrange posts and schedule them to go live.

The goal is to gain more traction, so having an app that can post a photo exactly at the time you select is more important than how you order them.

What does the worst time mean?

Before taking up the issue outlined above, it’s important to explain what it actually means. In simple terms, the worst time is when your audience is the least active. When is it the least active? It depends on a number of factors and on your audience demographics. So as you can see, it’s just another argument in favor of thoroughly studying your Instagram analytics.

Here are a few factors to consider in general:

While there is a desktop version, Instagram was designed and still remains a predominantly mobile application. So if you really want to choose the worst time for posting, do it when the majority of your followers don’t have access to their smartphones.
Instagram posts that appear in a user’s newsfeed aren’t ranked chronologically. You can see the content that, in the Instagram algorithm’s opinion, is the most relevant and interesting to you personally. This relevancy is based on a user’s activity on the platform, their preferences, and their relationship with content creators. Subsequently, the worst idea would be to not cater to any of these factors.
The majority of Instagram users are people from eighteen to thirty-five. Choose timeframes when people within this age range are the busiest and you’ve got your worst posting time.

What are the worst times to post on Instagram?

There is a number of studies with regard to the best and/or worst times to post on Instagram. For example, according to a comprehensive study, Sunday is what IG users are the least active. In general, weekends are not the best days to post. It’s when Instagram audiences show the lowest engagement rates.

When it comes to more specific timeframes, you’d probably want to avoid posting on weekdays between 3 and 4 pm. It’s when people are busy at work and don’t have time to procrastinate browsing Instagram photos.

All in all, I’ll have to admit that different studies on the matter show somewhat different results. However, there are some general trends worth noting:

weekends are slow days on Instagram. You’d do better relaxing and spending time with friends instead of wasting your time on the platform;

if you do have to post on a weekend, early morning is the worst timeframe to choose;

weekday afternoons are the worst.

Keep in mind that these conclusions are just what I said – general trends. They show the bigger picture and while that’s not bad at all, they say nothing about individual user stats. That’s why it’s so important to always monitor your account’s analytics. You can do that by using Instagram’s in-built analytics feature or using social analytics services like trendHERO and Google Analytics.

While collecting your data, note how it correlates with the general trends I’ve listed above, as well as other information provided by studies. Correct your posting schedule accordingly.

How to avoid the worst times to post?

1. Days of the week

If you analyze the level of engagement during a week, you’ll see how user activity is different for each day of the week. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the days of the highest activity. Saturday and Sunday lag well behind.

The reasons for this are simple. The majority of people work five days a week. Mondays are normally the busiest days at work because of some issues that might have piled up during the weekend. So understandably, people have less time for Instagram on Monday. They spend increasingly more time on the platform with each next day of the week, though.

Weekends are the worst time to post on Instagram because it’s when people prefer to be active elsewhere, mostly offline.

2. Breaks from work on weekdays

According to statistics data, lots of users spend their time on Instagram during breaks from work, specifically lunch breaks. Few of us can afford to take many breaks from work during a day but lunch breaks are above all. So try and publish your content around lunchtime – it might just work.

People also tend to check their IG profiles when a working day is closing to an end. They are tired, they need some distraction. And more often than not, they’ve completed all tasks for the day. If you have any understanding of when your followers reach that point, use it to your advantage.

3. Worst times to post and Holidays

Remember that holidays and any other days off significantly affect your subscribers’ level of engagement. Just as is the case with weekends, big holidays make people want to spend less time on social networks and more time offline. They travel, they spend time with family and friends, they relax at home. Needless to say, checking their IG feed won’t be a priority on days like these.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that Instagram users are especially active on the eve of the holidays. So if you have an amazing holiday content, publish it in the morning before the holiday.

4. Frequency of posting

To avoid posting at the worst time, it’s also important to plan how often you are going to post on a daily and weekly basis. As I mentioned earlier, you can publish your content two or three times a day to cover the majority of your following.

On the other hand, if you are trying to opt for quality rather than quantity, think of scheduling your posts for specific timeframes.

5. worst times to post: Type of audience

It’s quite possible that your audience’s behavior is going to be different from that of an average Instagram user. If that’s the case, the recommended time frames won’t work for you all that well. Don’t get me wrong; they can still be of some help. However, for maximum impact, you’ll have to be more flexible.

This kind of flexibility will require studying your profile statistics and metrics. They will show when your audience is at the peak of its activity.

The Best Time to Post on Instagram by Day:

Monday: 6 am, 10 am, and 10 pm EST
Tuesday: 2 am, 4 am, and 9 am EST
Wednesday: 7 am, 8 am and 11 pm EST
Thursday: 9 am, 12 pm, and 7 pm EST
Friday: 5 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm EST
Saturday: 11 am, 7 pm, and 8 pm EST
Sunday: 7 am, 8 am, and 4 pm EST

Instagram is the second biggest social media platform after Facebook, and the daily logins are only expected to increase in the coming years. Looking at the platform as a whole, the best time to post on Instagram from Monday to Friday is from 9 AM to 4 PM.

Conclusion

This is important information, especially if you are a business. You know exactly when your audience is the most active and when they love to interact with you. So if you are running campaigns and promotions, you know exactly when to schedule your posts.