Instagram has become a necessary platform for companies marketing to consumers, it boasts the highest growth and engagement rates of any social media platform and is now used by the majority of top brands around the world. However, despite having over 400 million monthly active users and being a major platform for social media marketing analytics for Instagram are not widely available. Buffer, Hootsuite, Twitter Analytics and many other programs provide useful analytics in order to maximize your social media strategy for other platforms but the options for Instagram are very limited. There are programs like Iconosquare that can provide basic analytics but obtaining data on your followers isn’t easy. With the rise in Instagram advertising where mobile ad revenues are projected to reach 2.81 billion by 2017, it is likely that analytics for Instagram will greatly improve but for now we must rely on the limited analytics available and reports which analyze data from Instagram users to provide the general best times to post.

In this post I will round up some of the more reliable studies done on Instagram posting and give you an answer to the question “when’s the best time to post” once and for all, or does time even matter?As you can see the most popular hours to post are 1am and 4pm yet 1am is not when users are most engaged so your post is likely to get buried within the 80 million photos that are posted to Instagram every day. Since Instagram is primarily a mobile app people tend to check the platform throughout the day so it is more important to post when there is less content to compete with.

1. A study released by AdWeek shows that you may want to post near breakfast time as there aren’t many new posts showing up between 6am and noon (less than 8% of posts occur in the morning) but people are still checking their Instagram feeds during this time. It’s not recommended you post earlier than 6am as there are a surprising amount of posts put up in the first 6 hours of the day.

2. Huffington Post, using data from Latergramme, found that Wednesday at 5pm is the ideal time to post.

3. A major factor to consider when deciding on when to post is where most of your followers located. Due to the lack of analytics for Instagram it’s difficult to determine where your followers are located but you may be able to get a sense of this by manually looking at a sample of your followers feeds and determining what percentage are in what time zone. You may also find the best method is just to test out different times of day and determine when you receive the most engagement. Iconosquare can track your accounts posts over a timeline and give you recommendations on best times to post based on the data from your own account.

4. As you can see in the following graphic by Simply Measured Instagram engagement for top brands really does not fluctuate all that much, there seems to be a spike around 8pm so you could test this as a best time to post but I think this answers the question of ‘when is the best time to post’ with IT DOESN’T MATTER (or it’s at least not the most important factor when planning your Instagram posts.

However the graphic below provides useful information if you’re trying to determine when there will be less traffic on Instagram (i.e. less competition for your post).

And again this information shows engagement is the same whether it’s Wednesday prime time, off hours or on the weekend.

So when is the best time to post on Instagram? The answer doesn’t really matter but that’s not the answer you want to hear so I believe 5pm Wednesday is a great time to test to see if you get greater engagement as well as weekday mornings (6am-noon).