These days, Instagram is everchanging as technology develops and trends come and go. Instagram is getting increasingly harder to navigate as its algorithm continuously updates to accommodate the needs and wants of its 1.4 billion users. This has led to many social media accounts noticing a drop in their engagement rates and they’ve started to lose followers at a much faster rate than usual.

Low engagement rates on social media can often dishearten us however, there are ways around this! Ultimately, this is just an indication that you need to create a consistent posting schedule to suit the current behaviors of your target audience. This can include experimenting with new content and paying a little extra attention to when you’re uploading your Instagram posts and stories.

One of the most frequently asked questions about social media today is, how often should you post on Instagram? We’re here to tell you that this answer varies for every account. There are a few steps that you need to take in order to determine what the best posting frequency is for your account. This blog will give you all the best tips and tricks to boost your engagement rate. This will include walking you through the different content types that will work for your account and your audience as well as how to adjust your posting frequency so that you’ll maximise your engagement levels.

Before you make any changes to your content or uploading schedule, take a look at your insights and analytics. This will help you to identify what areas you have been performing well in and what you’d benefit from changing. Some good resources to use for this are Planoly and Hootsuite. These resources can help content creators, business accounts, and social media managers to see exactly what works for their audience and develop a new and improved social media strategy.

Creating a new strategy and posting frequency will help you to post quality content, develop a stronger social network, grow your customer base, and even reach new audiences. This will help Instagram users increase their social media success.

Here are a few things to look out for:

Even if you haven’t had an Instagram post that has gone ‘viral’, there will be some of your posts that have outperformed others in terms of engagement. It’s important that you take the time to identify the common factors between those popular posts. For example, were they posted on the same day of the week? Were they reels? Do your posts containing static pictures or videos get the most likes, comments, saves, and shares?

You should also take note of any trends that might’ve influenced these posts and consider them when thinking about what type of content you want to post on Instagram moving forward as this will help you understand your follower’s behaviors and preferences.

Following both of those steps will help you find the best posting frequency and create the high-quality, visual content that your followers and other users will love.

After identifying what posts Instagram users react to the best, you can experiment with different content types and see what generates more engagement.

For example, if your reels are outperforming your other posts you can use that to your advantage and try using sounds that are trending to add variation, or try posting vlogs or tutorials to try out new content styles, and see what works best for your audience. When doing this, make sure to keep track of your video ideas, and trending sounds that you want to use so that you can make sure that you stay on top of your ideas and stay consistent with your content quality.

When it comes to posting on different social media platforms, timing is everything. You can easily lose engagement and even lose followers depending on your posting schedule and timing, even if you’re posting the right type of content. You can easily work out what posting times will generate the most engagement by tracking your performance (explained above) and adjusting your schedule accordingly.

However, don’t be fooled. Your audience activity will change with different social media platforms. For example, you might find that uploading one post weekly to your Facebook page might work well for your audience, on the other hand uploading a post on Instagram every day might be more appealing to your audience on that platform. So make sure you track the engagement and activity on all social platforms as they will vary.

Maintaining a consistent posting schedule that works for you and your audience will become easier over time and you will get results faster. There is no one way to plan your content and your schedule, it’s something that varies for everyone depending on how you prefer to work and operate. Once you’ve found what works for you, posting content on Instagram that your followers love and respond well to will happen more naturally as you learn their behaviors and preferences.

Whether you have social media teams helping you, or you’re working solo, it’s absolutely key that you commit to your posting schedule. You can even create your own resources to help with this such as using a planner and creating a content calendar to manage your social media posts and ideas.

Once you’ve studied your insights and analytics and found the type of content that you’ll be using moving forward and a schedule that maximises your engagement. It’s time to put that to the test!

Stick to your new posting schedule for one month. It’s generally recommended starting with five Instagram posts and Instagram stories per week. Then you can begin gradually increasing that frequency each month to see how your audience responds and how your engagement rate changes. Make sure you also pay attention to how your follower activity changes. Once you’ve done this for a few months you’ll find the right frequency and have a clearer idea of what works for you and generates the most social media success on Instagram.

Don’t forget to use these key factors in your posts to ensure you’re optimising your content for the best possible success rate:

• Create engaging and memorable captions that can entertain, educate and spark conversation to increase the chances of people interacting. You can also include keywords that relate to your account and the content you’re posting so that they will show up on the explore page, increasing the chance of you gaining new followers as a result of your post’s success.
• Include relevant hashtags. If someone follows a hashtag that you have included in your post, your content will show up on their Instagram feed and again, this will increase the chance of you gaining new followers and maximise engagement on your posts.

Both of these practices will improve the reachability and searchability of your account and content which increases your organic reach.

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer about how often you should post on Instagram. Posting more often increases the opportunity for your audience to engage with your Instagram posts. It will also provide you with more data to analyse so you can continue to adjust your Instagram content as your audience behaviors change. We recommend that you find the right balance between a consistent and sustainable content schedule, keep experimenting with different types of content, and keep track of your insights to determine what will work best for your audience on Instagram.