How to Find the Best Time to Post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is when your own followers are most active, and the place to find it is your Insights: on a professional account with at least 100 followers, open Total followers and look at the most active times by day and hour. Then test: post at those times for a few weeks and compare engagement, because generic “best times” charts average millions of accounts that aren’t yours.

Timing matters most in the first hours after posting, when early engagement helps a post travel. This guide covers finding your times, testing them, and using competitor data when your own account is new. Insights are covered in how to see Instagram Insights. After posting, who shared or reposted your Instagram post shows how far it travelled.

How Do You Find When Your Followers Are Online?

Open your Professional dashboard, then Insights, then Total followers, and scroll to the most active times. Instagram shows follower insights such as growth, top locations and age range once you have at least 100 followers (Instagram Help Center). Listed below are the 4 steps.

1. Tap Professional dashboard on your profile.
2. Open your insights and tap Total followers.
3. Scroll to the most active times and switch between days.
4. Note the 2 or 3 busiest windows.

How Do You Test Posting Times?

Post similar content at different times for a few weeks and compare engagement per post. Listed below are the 3 rules that make the test fair.

• Keep content similar, so timing is the main difference.
• Compare medians, not single posts; see how to calculate Instagram engagement rate.
• Use your audience’s time zone, shown by their top locations.

What If Your Account Is New?

Without 100 followers, use your niche’s competitors as a proxy: look at when their best-performing posts went up. Their audience overlaps yours, so their timing is a reasonable starting point until your own Insights fill in.

How to Find Best Posting Times From Competitor Data With apidojo

Collect competitors’ recent posts, then group engagement by the hour and day each was posted. apidojo’s Instagram Scraper on Apify returns each post’s createdAt, likeCount, commentCount and the owner’s followerCount, at $0.50 per 1,000 posts (Apify).

import pandas as pd
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("apidojo/instagram-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": ["https://www.instagram.com/rival1/", "https://www.instagram.com/rival2/"],
    "maxItems": 200,
})
df = pd.json_normalize(list(client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items()))

posted = pd.to_datetime(df["createdAt"]).dt.tz_convert("America/New_York")
df["day"], df["hour"] = posted.dt.day_name(), posted.dt.hour
df["er"] = (df["likeCount"].fillna(0) + df["commentCount"].fillna(0)) / df["owner.followerCount"] * 100

print(df.groupby(["day", "hour"])["er"].median().sort_values(ascending=False).head(10))

Change the time zone to your audience’s. With only a few hundred posts, treat the result as a starting hypothesis, not a rule. Tracking competitors over time is covered in how to track competitors on Instagram.

Does Posting Time Still Matter on Instagram?

It matters less than content, but it still affects how quickly a post gets its first engagement. Reels can also keep finding viewers long after posting, so a great reel at an average time beats a weak one at the perfect time.