So you have been posting some amazing snaps to your Instagram profile which you think are your best work but you are struggling to find people to agree with you.

This may have less to do with what you are posting than it does when you are actually posting it.

There are several ways to figure out when is the best time for you to actually post to Instagram, depending on who your followers are and what they do. There have also been a lot of theories about when is the best time overall across all of Instagram to post your grams. Latergramme ran an analysis of over 61,000 posts to determine which posts got the most engagement and figure out when is the best time to post to Instagram.

It turned out that on average the most successful times to post on Instagram are 2am and 5pm. The middle of the night might seem like a strange time to post to social media, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Of course at 2am your follower’s feeds will be quite dead because less people are posting at that time, but more engaged Instagram users are online at this time. The appearance of 5pm is actually no surprise because if you think about it most people are finishing up work and are procrastinating on social media before they go home.

However each day of the week has its own ‘best time’ to post.

Sunday: 5 pm

Monday: 7 pm and 10 pm

Tuesday: 3 am and 10 pm

Wednesday: 5pm

Thursday: 7 am and 11 pm

Friday: 1 am and 8 pm

Saturday: 12 am and 2 am

These times are when your posts will be get most engagement that does not mean likes or comments. What you really want is people engaging, so it doesn’t matter if they are don’t actually like it.

This study was best on the best time on average across a sample of accounts, so this may not be the best time for your account and your audience. If you want to get a more in-depth analysis of what is happening on your Instagram profile then you may not actually need to look much further than the app itself.

In order to access analytics about your Instagram profile, you need to make sure it’s set as a business profile, you can easily switch from personal profile to business profile. Head to the settings on the Instagram app and scroll down to ‘switch to business profile’. This will give you access to Instagram’s social media management tools such as the ability to learn about your followers. Once you have switched to a business profile you need to look at your analytics to figure out what time you should be posting to suit your followers.

If you click to see more information about your followers you can scroll down to see when your followers are most active on Instagram so you can choose which time will best suit you and your audience.

You can test and experiment with times for a while to find what is the best fit, and use the Instagram analytics to figure out what is driving your engagement and impressions. There are some social media tools you can use to tell you things about your audience and target market.

Use Union Metrics Instagram Account Checkup to find out what is going on behind the scenes with your profile. Simply Measured and Iconosquare will also provide keys tools you will need to engage your Instagram audience.

Once you have figured out when you should be posting to Instagram you can use post schedulers such as Later, Buffer, Hootsuite, and Postify.

Article written by: Aisling Moloney