How Often Should You Post on Instagram

Did you know that after Facebook, Instagram is one of the favorite social media platforms that people love to use? And interestingly, most people open Instagram accounts to have a number of followers. Some might have thousands of followers, whereas some might have millions of followers. But succeeding on social media platforms or, in simple words creating your own place on social media can be a tricky job.

Instagram, or what people commonly call as Insta, is a visual content-based platform, i.e., where people either upload reels, photos, live streams, or IGTV clips. We all uploaded content on Instagram but did you get thousands or millions of followers? Obviously not! Now the next question that might pop into your mind is how often you should post on Instagram in 2022 to get larger audience/followers. In this article, we will talk about how often one should post on Instagram or how the frequency of your post affects the number of followers.

Does Posting Frequency Play an Important Role on Instagram?

It is predicted that by 2023 around 1.2 billion people worldwide will be using Instagram. A recent survey revealed that Instagram is the most used social media platform after Facebook. People spend thousands of hours on this social media platform engrossed in watching reels or making them.

Since Instagram is a visual content platform, it helps new businesses or various brands to increase their audience/customer base through Reels, Instagram Stories, Live Streaming, and feature like IGTV. Also, it has been proved time and again that most people grasp things better with visual content. With the features provided by Instagram, one can reach a larger audience. That means, one can have scope to a bigger market in a very short period of time.

So, if your primary focus is to expand your business, then your target audience should be the millennial. It is because they are the age group that spends their maximum time on this social media site and also helped many businesses to start off on a good note. Now the basic question that might bother you is how you would target such an audience.

Focus on quality

Generally, a post is relevant for 48 hours. But if you want your post to have a prolonged lifespan on Instagram, then you have to pay attention to the hashtags you use or reply to the comments, or use trending stickers or fillers. You might have heard the phrase “it is the quality that matters instead of quantity.”

In the case of these social media platforms, especially on Instagram, if you want to reach out to a larger audience, then you have to focus on quality instead of quantity. It is very well possible that even if you post content after hours of research, you might not get the expected results out of it, i.e., the audience might turn a blind eye to it.

So, to ensure that your content receives the desired amount of ‘likes,’ ‘views,’ and ‘shares,’ you have to understand what the audience wants or how your ads would be acceptable to people.

Posting frequency

When you are posting something on your Instagram account, you have to take care of the frequency at which you post things. If you are too infrequent with your posts, then you won’t be able to capture a large audience and will also soon lose many followers due to your infrequent postings. If you post too often, it will end up irritating and bothering your followers. As a result, you will lose them too.

Let’s have a look at these two cases in deep.

· Posting Too Often and Too Much

Let’s take an example to understand the case of posting too often and too much. Suppose a new brand/business wants to reach out to the audience. They start posting tons of posts in a day at frequent intervals. What do you think will happen? Well, this will simply result in spamming, i.e., it will clutter the feeds of your audience and end up irritating and upsetting them with such a large amount of content. As a result, instead of reaching out to a large number of people, many of them will end up unfollowing you.

So it is advisable that you shouldn’t post too much too often and always remember the phrase “quality over quantity.” Instead of posting too often, it’s advisable that you maintain a schedule. For example, instead of posting every other day make a plan where you can frequently post without spamming your audience's feed. If you are posting about something on Monday at a particular time, you can write to your audience that the next post relating to the post on Monday will be scheduled on Wednesday at the same time. This way, the audience/followers will know when and what to expect from your posts. This process of scheduling will also help you fetch new followers too. It will also maintain your consistency without cluttering your follower’s feeds.

There is another way by which you can make your scheduling a bit easier. You can take the help of the application named Awesome Social. It is a social media managing application designed specifically for teams. This application helps you to plan, schedule as well as edit your posts. You can check out the list of the best Instagram scheduling tools as well.

· Posting too little

You must have heard that “be it too much or too little, extreme of anything is bad.” Similarly, not only is posting too much isn’t good for your business but also too little will do you no good. As we eat food to provide our body with energy, similarly, posting content serves as food for your social media platform. Today's generation, i.e., the millennial at large depend mainly on social media for news, updates, or new launches.

Billions of people in the age group of 18-34 spend hours of a day just going through various posts on Instagram. So if you want to capture this particular chunk of people as your follower/audience, then you can’t keep your account dormant or post too little. The moment you start posting too little and end up being too infrequent, a lot of people will lose interest. As a result, the algorithm that works behind keeping your posts and account relevant will end up moving your account down in terms of ranking and making your posts irrelevant.

In simple terms, as a brand/business, you can’t afford to lose followers just because your posts are infrequent and too little, i.e., to remain in business and to attract the audience, you have to keep up the quality and post them in a consistent manner.

How Often to Post on Instagram on?

Now, as a new brand/business, this question might have come to your mind at least once: how often to post on Instagram on 2022 so that you remain in the top game? Well, honestly, there's no particular schedule that everyone can follow to get optimum results. Rather there are different factors like your present number of followers and your goals that determine the fact of how often you should post on Instagram. The rule of thumb is that you post 2 – 3 times per day.

If any brand or business is questioned is what’s their goal when it comes to posting on Instagram, the common answer is getting a large number of followers at its disposal. But it is not the number of followers that always matters. Suppose you do have 40k followers on your account, and you receive an average of 3-4k likes on your posts, then you’ve already lost the game. This large number of followers that you have are either fake or have lost interest in your brand/business.

Points to remember

A brand that gets successful through the help of social media platforms like Instagram always looks out for its reach rate, i.e., the percentage of followers that view their posts/story, and its engagement rate. That is, how actively the audience is involved with the content by giving their comments and likes. To make things simpler for you, let’s remember these three-pointers.

• If you have less than 1k followers, you should post 14 times per week, i.e., 2 times a day at significant intervals.
• If your followers range anywhere from 1k to 250k followers, you can post 14 – 20 times per week, i.e., 2 to 3 times per day at significant intervals.
• Lastly, if you have more than 250k followers, you can easily post once a week and remain consistent about it.

When it comes to posting ‘Reels’ on your account, you can easily upload 4-7 reels per week to get maximum engagement as well as reach rate. As for ‘Stories,’ you can follow the same schedule as the ‘Reels,’ and for IGTV, you can go once a week. You can make use of Instagram Scheduler tool like Awesome Social to handle things on Instagram with ease.

How Often Should You Post on Instagram Takeaway

The main thing you’ve to remember is that you should never degrade your quality as it will affect your followers directly, and always try to understand what resonates with your audience. Once you get this half, the game is won!

Free Instagram tools:

• Free Hashtag Generator
• Image splitter & Instagram Grid Maker
• Instagram Line Break
• Image Resizer for Instagram