Wanna make the most out of your posts? Already optimized your content? Then you must be missing the final piece of the puzzle- timing. Timing is crucial when it comes to social media, it directly affects your reach and engagement, if you want to get more engagement on your posts then you need to learn how to time your posts on Instagram. Before we fully dive into the importance of timing we need to talk about engagement.
Engagement is one of the most important things that you need to focus on if you wish to succeed on Instagram, Instagram is a highly competitive platform and you need to be able to grab and retain your audience’s attention and compel them to a point where they would want to engage with your posts, social media is very intuitive for people and they don’t tend to think too hard about most things that they like and comment on, so it is fairly simple to grab attention but retaining that attention may not be that simple.
If you want to go viral on social media you just need a publicity stunt that will get you 5 minutes of fame but in order to be successful on social media you need to get that 5 minutes of fame every day, the only thing that fetches you that 5 minutes of fame is engagement.
You need to play the long game especially if you wish to monetize your influence which is the case for most people, there are multiple ways to farm engagement on social media, tricks and gimmicks can only get you so far, you always need to strategize and analyze.
Some people aim for simple things like opting to post more videos that will get them more views or aim to get more likes on Instagram and promotions, some people also buy Instagram followers to fill the void between their engagement and actual followers; it balances both their reach and audience.
We mentioned timing before but why is timing even important? The timing of your posts dictates the rate at which people are going to see your post, if a lot of people are online at the time of your post then there are greater odds that more people will engage with your post which directly gain the popularity of your post.
Posts that gain momentum through engagement are eventually seen on other people’s timelines that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to reach but most importantly your post will be prioritized on people’s timelines if it is deemed popular which in turn would fetch you more engagement, not every post goes viral or massively popular through timing alone but it is still favorable to time your posts for the maximum output.
The pandemic has taken a massive toll on the entire world and social media became more prevalent than ever before, with peak usage a recent survey was conducted which analyzed the data collected the past 2 years, and to say the least, there have been some really interesting studies that came out of it.
Sproutsocial published a study that revealed some really interesting facts about our online behavior and one of them summarised the best possible time to post on a certain social media platform.
Bear in mind that this data was collected when the internet had hit peak usage and now as things have settled down the audience might be slightly less dense but what’s truly important is that this data suggests a linear pattern of usage that is still relevant, the only difference is that the volume has slightly decreased.
The year 2020 was a big year of Instagram, they introduced so many things to the platform, most notably, Reels. There were some big changes made by the parent company Facebook and a lot of things were shifted around. Despite all the changes made by Instagram, the best times to post for engagement aren’t that surprising, the study done by Socialsprout concluded that on weekdays the peak traffic on the website was during 11 p.m - 2 p.m and during the weekends the optimal time to post would be- evening.
These results aren’t that shocking as it would make sense as to why the usage would be much denser during said hours. The study does reveal some interesting things about social media usage, for example, the relation between the time of the day and our preference of social media during that time, but for our purposes, we can now statistically deduce that afternoon on weekdays and evening on weekends are the best times for engagement.