Best times to post on Instagram on 2021

When to post on Instagram? In other words, what are the best times in 2021 to post photos on Instagram?

Yes, to grow organically and be able to actively engage your followers, it is essential to be clear when to publish on Instagram. If you too are wondering what time or on what days it is best to post content, you are in the right place!

In this guide updated to 2021, I will reveal how to find the best times to publish, using official statistics, insights and apps to know when to post on Instagram.

When to post on Instagram: introduction

Why is knowing when to post on Instagram so important today?

To answer this question, I want to show you two facts that will serve as a basis for applying the knowledge you will have acquired at the end of this article.

The first is this: 53 minutes. This is the average time spent on the platform each day by users around the world.

The second is the following: 6.35 minutes, which represents the average duration of each visit (or session) on the platform.

These are only averages, but they are enough to make you understand why you need to know how to take advantage of certain time windows in addition to publishing quality content in which users enter on Instagram.

Finding these windows can increase the number of interactions (likes, comments, shares, and saves) with your content. So how do you find the best times to post on Instagram? Let’s see it together below.

Analysis to understand when to post on Instagram

Let’s start with a premise. The best and smartest analysis to find out when to post on Instagram must be done on your followers, or at most, on your target followers.

Many searches aim to provide general data to know when to post, but none of them will work at their maximum potential because each account has different followers, with unique characteristics.

To get to know your fanbase better you should be clear:

• Geographic Localization and Language
• Age
• Sex
• Periods of greatest activity

All this information is already present in the Instagram app, in fact, you just need to click on the insight button, located on your profile page (where there is the biography to understand), to study your followers in detail.

If you don’t see this button, you probably need to switch from a personal account to a business or creator account for free. This way you will have a lot of additional information about the performance of your posts.

Rest assured, this step will change absolutely nothing for you. You will simply have more tools at your disposal, which is good if you want to really get to know your audience and get the most out of your posts.

The best times to post on Instagram

Thanks to Instagram insights, you can analyze your followers’ activity in the last 7 days or the last 30 days. This allows you to find out the best times to post on Instagram based on the specific day of the week.

This is certainly one of the main tools to use the information provided directly by Instagram to your advantage. But it is not the only one. In fact, there are apps to know when to post on Instagram.

One of these is SproutSocial which has also published research that indicates the best times to publish, divided by theme. In fact, according to them the best times are as follows:

• Consumer Products – Wednesday at 3pm
• Medium – Friday at 9
• Education – Friday at 10am
• Non Profit – Tuesday from 1pm to 3pm, Wednesday at 2pm
• Tech – Wednesday at 6 and from 9 to 10, Friday from 7 to 10
• Finance – Friday at 11am

In the following image you can instead see the best times to post on Instagram, but without going into detail on the topic, always with the source of SproutSocial:

Now, it must be said that this was a list of generic guiding rules. They don’t apply to everyone and probably not to you either. Published research is all based on particular samples that potentially include users from each country.

So, for this reason, I advise you to rely mainly on your fanbase and start taking advantage of the social management and analytics apps that we now see in detail.

App to know when to post on Instagram

As anticipated, there are apps to know when to post on Instagram. One of the most effective and used is the aforementioned SproutSocial.

SproutSocial was born in 2010 and has grown exponentially over the years thanks to its continuous updating. To date, the app has reached a degree of maturity that allows you to manage your social networks at 360 °.

By social, I mean the most popular: Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. On them, you can analyze the fundamental metrics, such as the number of impressions resulting from paid and organic campaigns or the level of engagement for a certain theme.

In this image, as you can see, I have shown the integrated tool of the app which, through its analyzes, suggests the best time slot available at the time of publication.

These suggestions are based on previously acquired data regarding the behavior of your followers. In addition, it allows you to schedule the publication, automating the entire posting process.

As for the other tools, the social media listening tool is certainly the most interesting. Thanks to the information provided and the predictions based on it, you can use it to your advantage to grow on Instagram.

Some of the information provided is:

• Audience Analysis: examines the preferences of the audience to improve the marketing strategy and organize the planning of your business;
• Competitor Analysis: monitors the share of voice (SOV, the number of times a brand is mentioned) of the sector and includes the attitude of consumers towards competitors to discover any business opportunities;
• Trend Detection: Study consumer interests for specific topics to stay up to date with trends in your industry.

Another tool that helps you manage the publication effectively is called Later.

This tool is capable of revolutionizing the way you plan to post on Instagram. In fact, it is used by top brands such as Wall Street Journal, Showtime and Patagonia.

Its strong point is called “Visual planner” through which to program the publication with the drag and drop mode, dragging your images on the calendar. Obviously, the application recommends the right time based on the expected level of engagement for the chosen time.

All the contents you need to publish can be easily taken from your Drive, in fact, you just need to connect it to the platform, and Later will create a special library for you, which contains posts ready to be published whenever you want.

The Later app lets you know when to post on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Furthermore, through the analytics tool, you can track your growth over time and the level of interaction with your content.

In fact, you can compare your posts to discover the most engaging ones, automatically calculating the engagement rate and ranking the posts based on their performance.

Additionally, you can analyze your Instagram Stories and rank them based on the number of impressions, reach, response count, and completion. Thus, you get a detailed analysis for each story and you can optimize publication based on time and topic.

Compared to SproutSocial, Later has a slightly better interface because it is optimized for Instagram and using it is a real breeze. I recommend you try them both and find out which one you feel best with.

Instagram post scheduling software

As we have seen, therefore, there are apps to find out the best times to post on Instagram. But that’s not all. Often, to professionally manage the scheduling of publications, you need specially designed software.

These programs are useful if you want to publish on multiple social networks at the same time, perhaps going to share content on both Facebook and LinkedIn.

There are three main reasons for using these services:

• Time-saving: the ability to schedule posts and stories is an advantage because it does not force you to use your smartphone to take care of every single publication;
• Uniformity: by curating your next posts and stories with the same platform, it allows you to keep the same style, giving continuity to your content and making the images perfectly coherent thanks to previews;
• Increase in followers and engagement: publishing in an automated way means always using the best times to post on IG, so this translates into an increase in interactions on your account.

As you’ve seen, you don’t need a social media manager to grow on Instagram. With these tools for scheduling publication and knowing what time to post, you can achieve your goals without too much effort.

The consistency and quality of your publications will help you climb the ranking of the best posts for a certain topic and will allow you to end up on the explore page of Instagram. If you start from scratch it will take time, but rest assured, because the results will not be long in coming.