The best time to post on Instagram: How to optimize your performance in 2025

Why the timing of your Instagram posts matters

The timing of your Instagram posts is crucial because it significantly affects the visibility and engagement your content receives, whether it involves images, reels, etc.

Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes fresh, timely content, so posting when your audience’s activity is greatest ensures maximum exposure.

Well-timed posts are more likely to appear at the top of followers’ Instagram feeds, increasing likes, comments, and shares. This heightened engagement not only boosts your post’s performance but also enhances your overall visibility and growth potential on the network.

By aligning your posting schedule with your audience’s peak activity times, you can optimize engagement rates and build a more active, engaged follower base.

Factors that have an impact on the best time to post on Instagram

As previously mentioned, the best time to post on Instagram isn’t the same for every brand. It depends on several key factors that influence when your audience is most active and likely to engage. 

Audience demographics

Before deciding when to post, it’s crucial to understand who your audience is and how they spend their time online. Demographics shape when people are most likely to engage with your content.

• Time zone: Post when the majority of the users following you (and those you wish to reach) are awake and active. For example, if your audience is mostly in the U.S. Eastern Time Zone, schedule posts to match that region’s peak hours.
• Age: Younger audiences (e.g., Gen Z) may be more active in the evenings or late at night, while older professionals might check Instagram in the morning or during lunch breaks.
• Occupation or lifestyle: Students, professionals, and parents all have different browsing patterns based on their daily routines.

Type of content

Different types of content attract attention at different times. 

Although the data concerning the best time to post on Instagram from Buffer’s study is meant to encompass all kinds of posts, businesses are likely to find that their audiences engage with various types of content more often at certain moments than others.

Understanding how your audience interacts with Instagram Reels, Stories, and static posts can help you time your uploads strategically to make them as effective as possible.

• Reels vs. Stories vs. posts: Reels often perform well late in the day and on weekends, while Stories may do better during the workday (people check them quickly).
• Promotional vs. informational: Fun, light content may perform best during leisure hours, such as the early evening hours, while educational or business-related content might do better in the morning or early afternoon.

Industry and niche

Different industries have their own “sweet spots.” For instance, the ideal posting time for a fashion brand may differ from that of a tech company. 

Considering your niche helps ensure your content appears when your audience is most receptive.

These are some examples of different niches and possible best times to post throughout the week in general:

• Fashion and beauty: Midweek afternoons
• Food and beverage: Lunchtime and weekends
• Tech or B2B brands: Weekday mornings
• Entertainment and travel: Evenings and weekends

Global or multi-region audiences

For businesses with international reach, timing becomes even more complex. When your audience spans several time zones, it’s important to experiment and find a schedule that works globally.

• Multiple posting times per day: Share content at different times throughout the day to reach followers across various time zones.
• Geo-targeted posts (via ads or scheduling tools): Use location-based targeting or scheduling tools to publish posts when specific regional audiences are most active.
• Experimentation to see when engagement peaks globally: Test and analyze engagement metrics from posts at different times to identify when your worldwide audience has the most activity and when these followers are most responsive.

Tips for finding the best time to post on Instagram for your business

While using the aforementioned recommended times to post on Instagram is a great way to approach your posting strategy in the beginning, there’s a good chance that the best time to post for your unique brand is going to differ.

You might find, for example, that Sunday morning is in fact when the people in your target audience are most active on Instagram during the week and therefore most likely to engage with the content you post on the social media network.

Or perhaps instead, late evenings, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays are when activity is at its peak for your Instagram followers and when your posts are going to be the most effective… 

To help you better determine the best time to post on Instagram for your business, consider the following tips.

Take advantage of Instagram Insights

If you don’t already have a Business account on Instagram for your brand, you’re missing out on several important benefits that could help take your social media marketing to the next level!

Not only does a business account tend to look more professional, with this account type, you can avail of Instagram advertising, schedule your posts ahead of time, tag products in your posts, and use Insights, the network’s native analytics tool.

With the analytics available in Instagram Insights, you can discover very helpful data pertaining to your audience demographics, such as top locations, age range, gender, and, most relevant for the purposes of this article, when your audience is the most active.

Source: Sprout Social

Figuring out when your followers’ activity is at its peak via the analytics available in Instagram Insights makes it possible for you to adapt your posting schedule accordingly to encourage more views and engagement on the social media platform.

Consider your buyer personas

Buyer personas are detailed descriptions of fictional characters who embody members of your target market. When creating your buyer personas, you’ll perform extensive research to determine a variety of demographics for your ideal customer, including age, lifestyle, education level, career, interests, family, etc.

Example of a buyer persona

Identifying your buyer persona(s) is a critical step in launching a new business, as it helps you to decide everything from what products you’re going to sell to what kinds of content to include on your blog. It also allows you to better determine when is the best time to post on social media networks like Instagram!

For example, if the majority of the people in your target audience are third-shift workers, the “best times” to post on Instagram probably won’t be late in the morning, as this is when these users are likely to be asleep. You’ll need to adjust your posting schedule based on different sleeping hours and break times.

It’s also a good idea to take your buyer personas’ time zone(s) into consideration regarding when you post. If your target audience is mainly in France, for instance, the best posting times for Europe would be more relevant than those for a global audience.

In addition, you can research Instagram-specific data for your buyer personas to help you determine the following:

• their reasons for using Instagram,
• amount of time they spend on the platform,
• what other accounts they follow (competing companies, Instagram influencers, etc.)
• times/days they’re more apt to engage rather than simply scroll, and
• how often they open the app per day.

Track your peak times manually with a spreadsheet

If your ecommerce brand is new to Instagram and doesn’t yet have a ton of followers, you might decide that tracking your engagement manually may work best for you.

Using an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets, for example, you can add the times that you post during the week. Then, note how many likes, comments, and shares your content gets for each posting time.

Note that this practice could become difficult to keep up with as time goes by and you begin to build up a significant following, especially if you’re the only one handling your social media marketing. Nevertheless, it can be a good way to start out to see in detail what’s happening with your Instagram account in terms of engagement and when.

Understand the Instagram algorithm

Whether it’s for Google or a social media network like Instagram, comprehending how an algorithm works can be tricky. However, once you have a better understanding of how an algorithm functions, you’ll be able to more easily improve your performance on the app or platform.

Fortunately for Instagram users, the social network released an update in May 2023, which offered an explanation of how its algorithm operates. Based on this report, we now know that Instagram doesn’t operate on a single algorithm to control what users see or don’t see on the platform. 

It instead employs a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each designed for a specific purpose when it comes to determining what to show in different parts of the app, including posts in your Feed, Stories, Explore, Reels, Search, etc.

Instagram Explore page (Source: Instagram)

For instance, when determining what to display in your Feed, Instagram combines the recent posts of the accounts that you follow and ranks them based on different signals. The ranking factors for Feed, starting with the most important, include the following:

• Your activity: Instagram looks at various signals including the number of posts you’ve liked, shared, saved, or commented on to comprehend your interests.
• Post data: This includes information that signals a post’s popularity, such as number of likes, and more ordinary details, such as where the content was posted, what time it was posted, the length of the post (for videos), etc.
• Poster data: The network uses information such as the number of interactions the account that created the post received from other users to learn how relevant the account may be to you.
• Your interaction history: To determine your level of interest in viewing posts from a specific account, Instagram checks certain data such as if you comment on the other account’s posts and vice versa.

In contrast, when Instagram is determining what to display to you in Explore, the ranking factors will be different in terms of the level of importance. In this case, the app starts by looking at information about the post and then reviews your activity in Explore, your interaction history with the poster, and finally information about the poster. 

Regardless of the type of content, it seems that a user’s activity is something that Instagram reviews quite closely. 

This strongly indicates that engagement is a crucial factor that influences a post’s likelihood of being shown to other users, which is something that you’ll want to consider when deciding when to share content on Instagram!

Find out when your competitors post

While Buffer’s data supplies guidance as to when to post for a global audience, the best times to post on Instagram can actually vary widely depending on the industry and even within a particular industry. If you’re feeling overwhelmed as to how to determine your business’s best posting times, it can be helpful to check out your competitors’ content on Instagram.

Take a look at a handful of competing brands and find out when they post, also noting which posts earn the most engagement for those businesses. Although you might not opt to use their exact strategies for your own Instagram efforts, this step can help lead you to the right direction.

Say that you find that many of your competitors begin sharing Instagram content around 9 a.m. If you’d like to have a little less competition, you might consider posting earlier in the day, say 7:30 or 8 a.m.

In addition, because brands often share content on the hour, posting just several minutes before or after (e.g., 10:58 a.m. or 11:03 a.m. rather than 11 a.m.) is another easy way to reduce competition for views!

Test different posting times

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll find the perfect posting times for your brand on Instagram right away.

Trial and error is very common when it comes to any social media strategy. If you’re struggling to find what works best for you, don’t give up!

Continue to experiment with different posting schedules until you’re able to determine which times consistently bring you positive results. Once you believe that you’ve found the best time for your audience, test it multiple times to ensure that it wasn’t just a fortuitous one-off!

Prioritize high engagement

As determined from the article detailing the Instagram algorithm update mentioned earlier, creating high-quality, engaging content is more important than stressing over the best posting time when it comes to optimizing your performance on the social network.

If you recall, the top interactions evaluated by Instagram for feed placement are how likely a user is to spend a few seconds on a post, comment on it, like it, save it, and tap on the profile photo. Consider reviewing your current practices to see how you might be able to increase these interactions and improve your overall engagement rate.

For instance, to encourage people to spend more time on a post, add an eye-catching visual, a compelling caption that users will want to read, and an interesting carousel or video. If your aim is to get more comments on a post, asking questions in the post can generate excellent results.

Source: Chewy

Want more likes? Ensure that your posts are helpful to your followers and/or offer another type of benefit, such as visual appeal, uniqueness, or humor. For a higher number of saves, it’s essential that your posts contain useful information that people will want to reference later, e.g., tips, how-tos, and tutorials.

Source: Chewy

Finally, to encourage people to tap on your profile photo, mention the phrase “link in bio” in your post (making sure that you do in fact have a relevant link in your bio) and use a visually appealing photo.

Take your content into account

As you’ve probably come to understand through your business’s marketing efforts, high-quality content is a must for any brand. Whether it’s the content you post for audiences to read in your newsletter, on your blog, or on various social networks, quality trumps quantity every time. Instagram is no different!

However, besides prioritizing Instagram post ideas with high-quality content, you’ll also want to consider the type of content you’re sharing when deciding when to post it.

Different content-related factors to think about when you’re figuring out the best posting time to make the most of your social media management efforts with Instagram include the following:

• Product, service, idea, or action that you’re promoting: Are users more inclined to use or do this during certain hours or days?
• Objective of your post: What do you hope to accomplish? Boost brand awareness? Increase traffic to your online store? Educate your followers?
• At what times or days will your audience see the post as most helpful: People may be less likely to appreciate, for example, content involving cocktail recipes at 7 a.m. than 4 or 5 p.m. when they’re getting ready for Happy Hour.

Start boosting your Instagram performance with the best posting times today

A top-notch social media marketing strategy will no doubt include a presence on Instagram. In order to increase your chances of achieving success and reaching your individual goals, it’s important to consider the timing of your posts carefully. 

Spontaneity has its place in marketing but is generally best avoided when it comes to businesses posting on social media networks!

The fact remains, though, that despite all the different studies done and articles available to read, it’s impossible to say for certain what the best hours and days to post on Instagram will be across the board for all brands.

However, by taking a look at your target audience, your competitors’ posting habits, the types of content you want to share, what you wish to accomplish with your Instagram account, etc., you’ll soon be able to better determine the most effective posting schedule for you, whether late in the morning on weekends, late evenings on Monday, or a variety of moments throughout the week.

Once you’ve done your research, taken advantage of analytics, and obtained some helpful insights as to when your brand should be sharing content on the social media platform, be sure to show up consistently for your audience. Scheduling your Instagram content ahead of time is an excellent way to stay on track with the timing of your posts.

By being consistent with the timing of your Instagram posts, your followers will get in the habit of seeing you appear in their feed. This in turn can help to build not just brand awareness but trust. Then, because you’re sharing useful, compelling content, they’ll be more apt to engage with your Instagram account in the form of likes, comments, and shares.

And remember, more engagement = a stronger relationship with your audience plus more authenticity in the eyes of Instagram!

Finally, continue to monitor your results and adapt your strategy as needed. The best time for you to post on Instagram today may very well change in the future.