If your Instagram audience is from different parts of the world, it might be difficult to post content right at the hours when all your followers are active. It's common that if an influencer or brand is, say, from the US, it's likely that part of their European audience doesn't see each and every post they publish.
If that's your case and you know that the lion's share of your followers are from regions whose active hours don't match those when you're online, take a look at our advice.
What's the Best Time to Post on Instagram for Global Brands & Influencers?
If your business is global or you're an influencer with followers outside of your region, this is crucial to plan a 24-hour Instagram posting strategy. If you’re only posting during your local hours, you’re losing part of your international audience.
Try posting at these times (EST) throughout the week:
- Monday at 6 am, 10 am, and 10 pm
- Tuesday at 2 am, 4 am, and 9 am
- Wednesday at 7 am, 8 am, and 11 pm
- Thursday at 9 am, noon, and 7 pm
- Friday at 5 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm
- Saturday at 11 am, 7 pm, and 8 pm
- Sunday at 7 am, 8 am, and 4 pm
Remember that while these are the best times to post for each day, not every day gets the same level of engagement. If you’re only posting a few times a week, focus on Wednesdays and avoid the weekends.
💡Suggested read: Best Time to Post on Instagram in 2022
How Else to Find Out the Best Time to Post on Instagram
The right time when your audience is online depends on your target personas' age, occupation, hobbies, and so on. The larger your audience is, the more complicated this is to post to cover everyone's active hours.
To learn the time when your audience is active, go to Instagram Insights, Audience, and find the tab Followers that contains information about the hours and days when your audience is active.
Being aware of the time when your audience is online is vital, even though Instagram doesn’t rank publications chronologically. This influences the whole algorithm for showing your content to followers.
Why Is the Right Post Timing Significant?
If you know the time when your audience is active, you can assume when a lookalike audience that doesn’t yet follow you is active as well. Then, if your followers engage with your post, it has all chances to get discovered on the Explore Page and attract a new audience.
The Instagram algorithm will prioritise your content if it detects more people interact with it; so the right posting time is important to get discovered not only by your audiences but to increase your chances of being found by similar personas.
💡Suggested read: Instagram Officially Reveals How Its Algorithm Works
Speaking of the post frequency, it’s all up to you. Some businesses post up to three times a day, but the followership and engagement are low. Others publish three times a week and nail it with their content.
Quantity is secondary. What you need to focus on is the quality and diversity of the content.
💡Suggested read: Create an Instagram Content Plan for Your Business
Once you’ve set your content scheduling rhythm, try to maintain this. If you start posting less often, your engagement rate is at risk of falling.
When to Post on Instagram If You Have a Global & Diverse Audience?
If you have a large following and the audiences live in different timezones, you can try these three approaches we suggest below.
Strategy 1. Post regularly at different hours. For instance, three times a day – in the morning, mid-day, and evening in your timezone. These posts, obviously, will appear at different hours in the feeds of those followers living in different countries and continents.
This strategy will work if some of your followers live in the same timezone as you do. Utilizing this approach, make sure you pick the 'active hours' of your timezone.
Strategy 2. Track the hours when the majority of your audience is active, and publish content at the time.
Strategy 3. Analyze what time is preferable for your most valuable audience. To discover this audience, you can use Google Analytics. Figure out who visits your website, buys your products/services more often, and where they are from. Then, based on these insights, publish posts closer to the timezone of your profitable area.
This strategy is flexible and depends on your goals. For instance, if your most-active audience lives in the UK, and you want to attract customers from New Zealand, publish content in the NZ timezone.
To achieve better results, test all of these strategies and find out which one works best for you. While testing, pay attention to the engagement to impressions ratio.
Post Right on Time with Combin Scheduler
Planning Instagram posts ahead saves time, keeps your content in the limelight, and increases your productivity.
Combin Scheduler, unlike many other content planning tools, actually posts content for you, not sends you reminders to post it manually. Use Combin Scheduler to auto-publish posts and stories while you're asleep or away.
Follow the steps below to schedule posts to your Instagram account.
- Install Combin Scheduler. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
- Log in to your Instagram account within Scheduler.
- Once you are logged in, Scheduler automatically locates you at the posts scheduling page. Click Add New Post at the bottom of the application window to start planning your post.
- Drag and drop images or click Choose Photo to select pictures for the post.
- Add text for caption into the input field. Intervals, paragraph breaks, symbols and emoji will remain unchanged in the published post.
- If you want to, you can tag location in the post. Type the name of the place into the Location input field.
- Select the posting date and time. Scheduler synchronizes with the timezone of your OS.
- Click Post Now. Your post will be published at the scheduled time.
Keep Combin Scheduler launched until your posts are on Instagram. If the look of the opened Scheduler window annoys you, leave the application running in the background instead of quitting it.
At the menu bar, click Tools and select Preferences. Enable the setting Run Combin Scheduler in background when it’s closed. After that, Scheduler will be minimized when you click X to quit it.
How to Schedule Instagram Content Properly: Best Practices
Don’t schedule too far ahead
Remember this: you can’t plan all the content for your Instagram, so don’t. Find a comfortable window of time for planning and fill the gaps.
Besides, you need to remain flexible and keep an eye on what’s going on in the world. It may be awkward when you publish a funny post announcing your new product, but the whole world is busy discussing some global tragedy.
Don’t spam
Too frequent posting is spam-like from Instagram’s and your audience’s perspectives.
Interact with your audience
When you schedule your posts using a third-party tool, and they’re auto-published, you are good to go and do other tasks. Sure, you can forget about content planning for a while, but it doesn’t mean you can forget about your followers. What do you make content for, in the first place? People. Talk to these people when they respond to your content.
💡Suggested read: How to Set Up Auto Reply on Instagram Direct Messages
Use special scheduling tools
Auto-publishing and scheduling are effortless with tools like Combin Scheduler. This software allows you to plan posts and stories in bulk and auto-publishes them for you.
Within the app, you can easily edit your content, control the visual concept of your grid layout, and make sure your posts will attract your audience’s attention. Add a location, hashtags, and tag other users to stay on top of people’s feeds.
If you have more than one Instagram account, you can easily manage several of them.