“How often I should post on Instagram?” The Fort Knox of social conundrums. We bet you’ve asked yourself that question about a million times but have never been able to figure out the answer.
Since the algorithm’s inception, it’s been really tough for brands to nail that Instagram posting frequency sweet spot. So many factors are now at play when it comes to a content distribution strategy, and a non-chronological feed basically means that no one can predict when their posts will be seen by their followers, even when actively monitoring activity stats.
This can prove to be problematic for a business trying to optimize all visual asset output on such an important channel. Social media has made brand marketing so much more effective, yet so much more complex than it once was. The proximity to consumers offers a closeness and insight into a brand’s target market that never would have been possible before, but its incessant evolution makes it impossible to keep up with, let alone to master.
But where there’s data there are facts, and while things change literally every single day on Instagram, the numbers are always right on cue like the prompter whispering from behind the curtain. Post engagement is the holy grail of Instagram success, but attaining the highest reach per post is also an important KPI, especially as audiences become increasingly flooded with new content to consume every second.
To figure out how often to post on Instagram based on reach, we took a sample of 1,400 brands that posted between one and five times a day over the past six months, then analyzed their account reach to see if output frequency was correlated. Here’s what we found.
If you post on Instagram once a day, that asset is likely to have a +3.39% individual improvement over your average reach, but it decreases from there. If you post twice a day, both assets risk having -3.12% of the reach that an average post would have gotten. If you post three times a day, it goes down to -6.17% of the average reach, and so on.
So if you’d been wondering whether how much you’re posting every day affects the reach of your creative assets, the answer is yes. The more you publish to your Instagram feed, the less reach your individual posts receive. With that said, the more you post, the higher your overall reach will be. While the reach on unique posts statistically tends to be lower when posting more, that’s still almost double the impressions you might get if posting less. It’s simple math and you gotta find what’s right for your brand according to your goals and Instagram strategy.
Remember that these are averages, and some accounts fall way above or below these figures—you do you, always.
Now you know.
