Something interesting happened on my Instagram account recently.

I asked a question and I had the best engagement level I have ever had on my account.

There were a number of factors for the increase in engagement:

• I posted a question when more people were online
• The people who responded initially knew each other and had a conversion about the question
• Others saw the level of engagement and responded
• It was an easy to answer question

The question asked was, ‘How often do you post on Instagram?’

The response was speedy. The post itself got 15 comments with an hour of posting. I posted the question in my story, highlighted it on my page and posted it on my feed.

Having it as a story got me 3 responses, much better than other responses received previously.

There was a point in time, when I posted 3 times a day on Instagram. I opted for 3 times a day as it allowed me to post a variety of topics within a niche, which allowed me to use a variety of hashtags.

The purpose of doing this was to increase followers.

You see, I have never really subscribed to asking friends and family to follow me on social platforms. Especially if the social platform relates to my business. I am happy for them to follow me if they want to, I just don’t want them to feel obligated to follow me.

So getting followers who do not know who I am and follow me because they like what I have to say is an important part of my social platform strategy as is building relationships with others who are in a similar stage of building their business.

Needless to say, when I get lots of likes and comments on my posts or have questions answered, I get very happy. The part of me that looks for acceptance from others gives a little fist pump.

In collating the response to the question asked, here are the responses I received.

Posting Frequency

It looks like, when it comes to how often to post, some have found posting daily to be too often, others tend to post when time permits.

Engagement

A respondent mentioned the number of likes per post decreased the more times images were posted. This was also found to be the case with other forms of interaction on a post, i.e comments.

Expert opinion tends to change on what is the best practice and this could be because of all the changes made by social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., that take place throughout the year.

Thanks to data from scheduling apps, it is easier to set some sort of rule of thumb to follow when it comes to posting on social platforms.

According to research done by CoSchedule, the image below shows how often to post to each of the most popular platforms. The image also shows how long a post lasts on each platform.

Based on these 2 bits of information, should we post more often on Facebook and Twitter?

If a tweet only lasts 18 minutes and we are to only tweet 15 times a day, how will our content be seen?

This is where posting at the right time of day comes in. By looking at the analytics of your posts, you can determine what time of day would give you the best chance of reaching your audience.

Another way to determine the best time of the day for your post to be published is by knowing your target audience.

• When are they likely to be online?
• Do they work?
• Do they have children they have to drop off and pick up from school?
• Are they male or female?

Knowing the answers to these questions would give you an indication of when they are likely to be online.

For instance, if your audience are women who work and have primary school age children, you can publish posts during lunch and at night, before 10pm. That would be the time she’ll most likely be able to engage in what she sees.

This is an example of how to come up with a posting schedule manually. Thankfully, majority of scheduling apps have this feature built into their platform.

All you need to do to get suggested posting times is to determine number of posts per day and which days of the week you would like to publish the posts on your social platform.