How to see which followers are active on instagram
How to Find Your Best Time to Post on Instagram in 2021
Summary
There are many factors to success on Instagram. One of the most important is timing. In this guide, we'll walk you through a step-by-step process to help you find the best times for your business to post
You will learn
- How to find the best time to post on Instagram for your business
- The factors that determine your best time to post
- A strategy for testing new posting times and analyzing results
You might have heard that the best time to post on Instagram is 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Or maybe 2 to 3 p.m. And that you should avoid Mondays and weekends, and post more on Thursdays...
Well, here's the truth.
There’s no one-size-fits-all best time to post on Instagram. All those studies that looked at millions of users? Not all that helpful. Those aren’t your followers.
So, buckle up—we’re here to show you how to find the best time to post on Instagram for your business.
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What factors determine your best time to post on Instagram?
The best time to post on Instagram is when your audience is most active. But it may also be a time when fewer followers are online—if your content is relevant to their daily routine at that moment.
Both timeliness and relevance are factors that the Instagram algorithm uses to determine where your post falls within your followers’ feeds. And the higher your posts show in your followers’ feeds, the more impressions your brand gains. More impressions can lead to more engagement. And the more engagement your posts get, the more impressions your future posts can get, too, creating a snowball effect.
Timeliness: When most of your followers are online
Posting at the time when most of your followers are active will give your post a better chance of being seen by more people.
This is due to the timeliness or recency factor, which simply means that your post occurs close to the time that a user logs on.
Emma Ward, marketing manager for the New England smoothie bar The Juicery, has Instagram scheduling down to a science. She reserves the time when most of The Juicery’s followers are on Instagram to post about promotions, news, or other exciting content to share.
“If I’m promoting a giveaway, a new location, or something that isn’t menu-specific, I’ll post in the evenings. I want to get the most eyes on the content and, therefore, post at a time where the most amount of people are online,” she tells us.
The Juicery posts non-menu content in the evenings to reach more of its 10k+ followers.While most of her brand’s followers are online in the evenings, she knows that’s hardly the time when people are primed to buy smoothies, though. Thus, the optimal time to post to Instagram depends on the content you have to share, too.
Relevance: when your content fits best into your followers’ days
The Instagram algorithm seeks to first show users the content they want to see most.
How does it know what people want to see? By looking at users’ interests and relationships. The more relevant your content is to your followers, the more they’ll interact with it. This engagement prompts Instagram to display your content higher on people’s feeds.
Emma considers when her brand’s products are most relevant to its followers’ daily schedules. For The Juicery, mornings are a great time to get in front of people who are thinking about what to pick up for breakfast. She posts about smoothies and other menu items first thing in the morning—around 7:30 a.m. every weekday and just past 8 a.m. on the weekends, even if the number of followers online is smaller.
Emma says of her followers, “I want our smoothies to be on top of mind when they head into a workday.”
The Juicery posts content about smoothies and other menu items first thing in the morning, even though fewer followers are online then.If she simply looked to conventional “best time to post on Instagram” advice from aggregate studies, she would miss the opportunity to plant the idea of a morning smoothie for those followers who are most likely to go pick one up on their way to work.
How to find the best time to post on Instagram for your brand
Finding the best times to post on Instagram for your brand doesn’t have to be complicated. You’ll need to consider two things:
- When your greatest number of followers are active on the platform
- When your brand is most relevant for them.
These two data points will give you an idea of your optimal posting times, which you can then test and refine.
Now let’s walk through each step to finding your best times to post together. (Buffer's analytics can also do the legwork and recommend best times for you, too.)
Step 1: See when your audience is most active on Instagram
You can see when your greatest number of followers are on Instagram by looking at the insights that Instagram provides. You’ll find this information for business accounts by clicking the Insights button.
The Insights button is located on the business account profile page.Under Insights, you can then click to view data broken down by content, activity, and audience.
Select the Audience tab to see data on your followers, including when they access Instagram, as well as their location, age range, and gender. You can toggle between hours and days to view their most active times.
Keep in mind that the data only shows for the past seven days in your Instagram account. This gives you limited data, but it’s a start. Watch out for the impact of special occasions and seasonal behavior before you base any decisions on data from such a short timeframe.
Step 2: Hypothesize what type of content is best for those times
The best time to post one type of content on Instagram will differ from that for another. And chances are you have several different types of content you can serve up.
At this step, come up with a hypothesis. You know your target audience better than anyone else. What time of day are they dealing with the problem that you solve? When does it make sense for them to think of your brand?
Emma considers when each type of content will be most relevant for The Juicery’s followers, and then she tries it out.
“For each new type of content, I’ll try it at different times. A post with an enticing acai bowl will be at a different time than a gift card giveaway,” she explains.
Step 3: Create a schedule to test your hypothesis
Now you know when your followers are online, and you have an idea of what content you think may interest them at those times. Try putting it into action with an Instagram posting schedule for a set period like three weeks.
Let’s say you run the Instagram account for a gym. We’ve hypothesized some different types of content that we think might resonate with your followers at different points in their day.
The idea is to consider what time your followers want to hear from you. If you’re a gym, your followers might be looking for healthy inspiration in the afternoon when their energy is waning or in the morning when they face the choice to get out of bed and hit the gym rather than sleeping in. Reminding them of upcoming class schedules can help them plan for the next day.
And perhaps you want to post content that encourages people to visit on Tuesdays and Thursdays since those days are often less busy at your gym.
You don’t have to publish a certain number of times a day. Once you find your optimal times, you may be able to publish less with greater impact. And remember, hashtags based on days of the week can be a powerful way to grow your following, too.
Step 4: Analyze your findings to figure out the best times for your content
By the time you’ve come through a few weeks of testing your Instagram posting schedule, you’ll have an idea of which content is resonating with your followers at which times.
Then, you can tweak your schedule to refine it. Keep posting the content that resonates with followers, and change up the content that didn’t do as well.
Where can you find the data? Instagram shows engagement numbers for each post under the Posts tab in the Insights section of your business account.
Find engagement data under the Posts tab in your Instagram Insights.
If you use Buffer’s analytics, you can find a goldmine of data organized in a way that’s easy to understand. For example, you can see the interactions for each post side by side to get a feel for how each resonated with your followers.
Buffer's analytics shows a wealth of information that you can customize to report on the metrics you want to see.In the Instagram example schedule promoting a gym, perhaps your early morning posts got likes and comments, but your late-afternoon posts didn’t resonate even though it was a time when a lot of your followers were online. You could try posting a different kind of content at that time to determine what your afternoon crowd responds to.
To dig deeper into data, check out Buffer’s Ultimate Guide to Instagram Analytics.
Step 5: Continue testing new times
Your post performance data is based on your posting history. So check your best times every month or so, and try testing out new times occasionally. This lets you continue learning about your audience.
Laura Moss, co-founder of Adventure Cats, usually posts during the daytime, but she sometimes experiments with an evening or late-night post to see how it resonates with her brand’s 162k followers.
Occasionally her “experiments” happen organically because she forgets to schedule a post and ends up posting at a less-than-optimal time. She says, “Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise to see that post take off, but other times it serves as a reminder that doing some strategic planning and scheduling is smart.”
Brands that schedule their posts can aim for specific times each day. However, Laura likes to post manually. She aims to post to Instagram between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays to get visibility.
If you miss posting at a certain time each day, does it mean your posts will be lost in your followers’ feeds? Not necessarily.
It’s true that analytics data pinpoints the best time of day to the hour, and consistently scheduling your posts is key to hitting your best time of day—every time—to maximize engagement.
However, the time on either side of this precise point will often be very favorable, too. While not optimal, you could still see positive effects by publishing within a range, like Laura does.
How the right tools can power your “best time to post” choices
When you’re operating a small business, your resources can be spread pretty thin. Your social media accounts are just one part of your marketing, and you need to approach everything efficiently. Taking advantage of the best time to post to Instagram for your business means you can see a bigger effect with less effort.
“The predictive ‘best time to post’ feature in Buffer's analytics is a game-changer!
Choosing the right tools can help stretch your marketing efforts further. Buffer’s tools can be found behind many successful Instagram marketers like Emma and Laura. Buffer’s analytics help you determine your best times to post, the best types of posts, and how often you should post to maximize reach and engagement.
The tool studies your data over time to make informed recommendations and predict how your followers will respond.
In Emma’s words, “The predictive ‘best time to post’ feature in Buffer's analytics is a game-changer! Especially for my smaller accounts, I really look to this tool to see suggested times based on when our followers are online and when they’re engaged.”
Buffer's Answers feature uses data from your previous posts and followers' activity to calculate your best times to post.Buffer's Answers feature gives you three posting time suggestions for maximizing your reach on Instagram. Our in-house statistical model predicts your reach for every hour of the week based on your followers’ activity and the performance of your previous posts. Three times, spread across the entire week, are then recommended to you so that you can schedule your Instagram posts and maximize your reach.
So, instead of posting 20 times a week, you can optimize, say, five really great posts and see better results.
We invite you to learn more in our Instagram marketing library and look into Buffer's analytics today.
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How to See When Your Followers Are Most Active On Instagram
Back to BlogIf you're going to have a successful Instagram account, then followers are going to be an important part of it. But how do you get them? If only there was a way to see when your followers were most active...
Well, now there is. In this guide, We'll teach you how to find out what time the majority of your Instagram followers are active. The more followers you have, the more useful this will be for you as you'll discover what times your current and potential new followers like to browse Instagram.
First of all, let's take a look at the analytics section within the app:
Click on 'Your Profile'.
If we click on 'Insights' we can see that we can see our post history and activity.
You can also click on 'Photos' to see when your posts received the most likes, comments and shares: This will show you what time of day is best for when you publish new content.
But we want to know more than this - we want to know what times are best for all Instagram activity. To do this, we need to go back to the Insights page.
When you are on the insights page you should click on 'Total followers' to see the statistics. In Total followers page you will find several information about your followers such as: the number of followers you currently have, where your followers come from (top locations), age range, gender and lastly the most active times.
Scroll down a little bit to get this last information.
- This is useful to see how many followers you have in each time of day. If you like to be online during certain times, this is a great way to track when the most people are active on Instagram.
- You can compare your follower activity to days of the week or months of the year (overlapping circles) to see how your follower count is distributed.
For example, if you wanted to be online around lunch time but we can see from the graph we don't have many followers at that time, you might want to think about when else in the day it might be best for us to post our content:
If we decided that 1pm was when our followers like to be online, then that means we could post our content at 1pm instead of lunch time.
Unfortunately, this information isn't available to everyone... yet! Instagram has recently allowed all users to see how many people view your posts. But they haven't yet made this sort of data available to everyone, which is why you won't be able to see the times your followers are most active. But hopefully it'll be released in an update soon!
Until then... make the best of what you have by understanding how your followers think and behave. This is a great way to improve your Instagram marketing strategy.
If you need help with growing your Instagram account check out the plans we offer where do all of this for you!
How to analyze account results with the Instagram Statistics tool
2 min.
Introduction
Statistics is a tool for companies to get information about subscribers and what content they are most interested in. With it, you can better understand your audience and get all the information you need to create effective content.
In this course you will learn:
- where to find the Statistics tool and how to use it;
- find out more about your followers, when they are online and how they interact with your photos and videos;
- how to use this information to reach an audience and achieve company goals.
All the information you need at your fingertips
With Instagram Insights, you can grow your reach, get the results you want, and build a community of people who care about your company.
This tool breaks down the demographics and user behavior data into three sections: Actions , Content and Audience .
Acts
Content
Audience
Actions
Learn how people interact with your contenton the Section in the interaction of . Profile Visits : The number of times your business profile has been viewed.
Find out how many people have seen your content
On the Actions tab in the Where content is found section, you will find the following information:
- Reach : the number of people who viewed your stories.
- Impressions : Total views of your posts and stories.
How to use it:
Use the metrics from the "Interactions" and "Where content is found" sections to schedule your posts.
For example, if you reach more people on Tuesdays, your followers may be more active on that day. Post content related to your business on Tuesdays and you can increase the number of views and interactions with your company.
Content
Find out how your posts, stories and promotions are performing.
The Content tab shows the performance of your posts, stories and promotions. You can filter the data shown by metric types, dates, and content types.
How to use it:
The metrics on the Content tab will help you understand which post formats resonate with your followers the most.
For example, if you see that your Instagram stories are getting more impressions on certain days than regular or boosted posts, then you should post more stories to your business account on those days.
Audience
Find out which people are following your business profile
The Audience tab provides detailed information about your subscribers. You can find out their gender and age, as well as find out in which regions your content is most popular. You'll also find out what time of day your followers usually log on to Instagram and what days of the week they're most active.
Note. For demographic metrics (such as people's age and gender) to be available to you, your business Instagram account must have at least 100 followers.
How to use it:
Use audience metrics to create content that is relevant to your followers
For example, if the majority of your followers are between 25 and 34 years old, you'd better post content that is appropriate for that age group.
Where to view Instagram stats
The stats are available in your account and in the individual posts you create.
To access it, you must meet the following requirements:
- You must have the Instagram app installed on your phone.
- You must be signed in to your company account.
View Statistics in your company account
To do this, follow these steps:
- Log in to your company account on Instagram.
- Click the icon in the upper right corner to open the sidebar.
- Select "Statistics" to get information about activities, content and audience.
How to view statistics for individual posts
To do this, follow these steps:
- Log in to your company's Instagram account.
- Touch an existing publication.
- Click View Statistics.
What's next?
To learn more about the metrics available in Statistics, see this Facebook Help Center article.
You can get acquainted with the results of marketing research on the Facebook IQ portal.
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How to view statistics on Instagram and what it means
How did followers come across your account? What posts do they most often save, which ones do they forward to friends, after which ones do they most often decide to call or write? What cities do they live in? How old are they? What days of the week and what time of day are they most active on Instagram?
Statistics Instagram allows you to find out this most valuable information and, thanks to it, work more accurately with your audience and increase sales.
First of all, statistics must be activated
To access statistics, you need to switch your account to a business profile. Click on the menu (horizontal stripes) in the upper right corner, select from the list "Settings" , then "Account" and "Switch to a professional account" .
More on this: "How to create a business account on Instagram."
Statistics will be collected from the moment you switched.
Post statistics
Now under each post we have a sentence "View statistics" . By clicking on it, we see several numbers.
We had information about the number of likes and comments before. But now we also have "airplane" - the number below it shows how many times your publication was sent to direct to other people. And also "flag" - it signals how many times your post has been saved.
"Profile visits - 9" . What do these words and numbers mean? The fact that 9 people who viewed the publication wanted to go to your profile.
Is it good or bad?
It may be different. This could mean that your subscriber thought:
“Wow, what a great post. I really wanted to buy from them. I’ll go see what kind of company this is, maybe I’ll ask them a couple of questions about the product.
”
Or vice versa:
“Who wrote such nonsense? When did I manage to subscribe to this? For what? I’ll go look at their profile, maybe I’ll remember why I signed up, if this is not something promising in the future, I’ll unsubscribe as soon as possible.
What is "reach" on Instagram
"Reach" is one of the most important characteristics, for which many entrepreneurs simply lay down the bones.
It shows how many people actually saw your post. For some, this figure may be shocking. Did you think that you have 10 thousand subscribers, and statistics show that each of your posts is seen by no more than 1 thousand people? Yes, it happens, and very often. Coverage from 30% to 60% is a good indicator for commercial accounts, 10% -15% is very common.
By "swiping up" (i.e. tapping the stats with your finger and dragging it up the screen), we see more stats.
What does it mean, for example, if you see such data in the "Interesting" section?
"Subscriptions - 2".
This entry indicates that two people who saw your post decided to follow your account. That is, they were not subscribers before. How do you know how they came across your post? The answer may be further.
Coverage - 1026 . The post was seen by 1026 people, we have already talked about this. Curiously, more than half of these people (52%) were not our subscribers. How did they see our post? We will also look for the answer to this question in the following data.
"Impressions - 1597" . This entry means that the post was shown 1597 times. And Reach showed that our post was seen by 1,021 people – a lot less. How can this be? Very simple. The number of impressions is almost always greater than the reach, which means that part of the subscribers saw your post two or more times.
"From the Main - 770" . That is, 770 people saw your post just in their feed. These are your followers.
"From hashtags - 582" .
582 people came across this post thanks to hashtags. Here is a possible answer to the question of how 52% of people who were not our subscribers found our post, and where these two new subscribers came from. All of them came to you by hashtag, and two of them became interested in the account and stayed. Unfortunately, this cannot be said for sure, we can only guess by comparing the data on hashtags, subscriptions and the number of people reached who were not subscribed to you before.
"From profile - 7" . These seven first came to the main page of your account, and from there they already went to the post. In what cases does this happen? For example, another Instagram account linked to you, people came to your main page, and from there they went to the post. Either the link to Instagram was on your website, or customers saw the name of your account in the office. There may be many options. The main thing is that people first went to the profile, and then they came to this particular publication.
"From Another - 240" . This line tells you the number of people who came to your post from other sources. For example, someone sent them a link to this post in Direct or shared it in another way (in an email, via messengers, on a website), or your post was saved, and then they looked at it again, and this re-view was counted in the line " From the Other."
This way we can see the statistics of any post that was published after switching to a business profile.
We also have the opportunity to find out the statistics of the account as a whole.
Account statistics
To see the account statistics, we again need to go to the menu (horizontal bars in the upper right corner) and click on the line "Statistics" .
Here we see tabs "Content" , "Actions" and "Audience" .
Content tab
In this tab, by default, we are shown our posts and stories sorted by reach.
First, the most popular - that is, those who received the largest coverage, and then in descending order.
We are also told how many posts and stories we had in total in the last week (45) and how this compares to the previous week (5 more).
We can sort both posts and stories by different parameters and for different periods. By clicking on the button " All ", we get the opportunity to select posts with the most likes - to do this, select the line with the word "Like marks" . Or the one with the most comments. Or separate those posts, after viewing which readers started calling you - for this you need to select "Calls" . Or the ones that reposted the most.
You can also see the most successful posts by the sum of all these indicators - likes, comments, calls. To do this, select the first line - "Involvement" .
We can also make a selection for different periods - a maximum of 2 years, a minimum of 7 days.
And see separately the comparative indicators of photo posts, video posts, carousels.
The same with stories. We can sort them by ostentatious indicators - "reach", "clicks to the site", "calls" and others, and also make a selection for different periods, but the maximum possible period in the case of stories is 14 days.
Action tab
In this tab, you can see how reach, impressions, and other important indicators have varied over the past week - the number of visits to the profile, clicks on the site, clicks on the "Getting Directed" button.
Featured
Featured shows our total reach and impressions for the last week.
We see that the coverage was 3854 people, and it is very much reduced compared to the previous week.
Total impressions - 17698 people, and also a noticeable decrease compared to the previous period.
Also on the chart, we can see on which days the coverage was more or less.
And by pointing a finger at this graph, we see specific figures - one and a half thousand coverage on Monday and Wednesday, almost the same on Tuesday, on other days much less.
Interactions
In the "Interaction" block, you can see how many visits to the profile, clicks on the site from the profile, clicks on the button "How to get there".
We are also shown a graph of the distribution of this activity during the week. We see that the most actions were on Wednesday - 57 pieces.
To see specific numbers, touch this graph with your finger.
Audience tab
In this tab, we can see how the number of your subscribers has changed over the past week, in which cities and countries your subscribers live, how old they are, and what time they are most active.
Growth
This tab gives us information about the number of subscribers. In particular, about how many people have unsubscribed from us, how many have subscribed, and what the result is an increase - it can be positive and negative, when after all the subscriptions-unsubscribes, the number of subscribers has decreased.
In our example, 12 unsubscribed, 16 subscribed, the final result is plus 4 subscribers this week.
Below we see a graph of the number of subscribers. We see a failure on Saturday. We can press our finger on this failure, and we will be shown more detailed information about it. We see that on Saturday, December 7, three people unsubscribed from us and no one signed up.
And if we want to find out what kind of publications led to such a result, we can click on the button "View publications" and we will see just posts and stories for December 7-8 and statistics on them. In this way, you can understand which publications readers do not like. Although in our case the numbers are too small to speak of conclusions. Rather, they are within the bounds of statistical error.
Top locations
Below we can see information about the cities in which our subscribers live.
As expected, the Moscow children's center, whose account we are considering, has the majority of subscribers from Moscow.
And by clicking on the button "Countries" , we will find out from which countries in what proportion we have subscribers.
Also, most are expected from Russia, but there are also from Kazakhstan, the USA, Ukraine and even Brazil.
Age range
In the next section, we can see what age men and women are in our account.
We see that our subscribers are dominated by people aged 25 to 34 years, slightly less women and older men - from 35 to 44 years old.
Interestingly, our account is also followed by schoolchildren under the age of 17 and older people over 65. Where Instagram has gone!
Gender
Here we are shown that 71% of our subscribers are women, only 29% are men.
Followers
This section is called “Followers” for some reason, although it would be more correct to call it “Followers Activity”, because that is what it shows: at what time of the day and what days of the week your followers are most active on Instagram.
By clicking on the button "Days" , I see that the most intense color is on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
