Instagram. A photo sharing social Web service that lets you share your life with friends and family through a series of pictures which you post using your smartphone. Activity on Instagram is monitored and calculated through likes on a picture. One gets likes on their Instagram pictures by their followers. The more followers you have, the more likes you’ll probably have. But is posting a picture just because you have a lot of followers guaranteed a lot of likes?
You ever think you have such a great pic, that it’s bound to get likes. Whether it’s a “Throwback Thursday”(tbt), a picture with someone famous, or a picture with all your friends, the occasion and importance of the picture can really affect the amount of likes your picture gets. But theirs one thing that people generally overlook when it comes to posting a picture, and that’s timing.
Lattergramme, a service for Instagram that lets users manage and schedule Instagram posts, did an analysis of over 61,000 posts seeing when photos see the most likes and comments. What they discovered was that if you want your followers to pay attention to you and see your posts, posting at 2 am and 5 pm EST are the best times to do so. The also found out that the worst times are 9 am and 6 pm EST. Posting on Wednesday’s will give you the best day to have interact with your followers.
Latergramme founder Matt Smith broke down as to why posting at 2 am and 5 pm are the best times. “”We think this is because less people are posting at that time and that more engaged users are using Instagram at that time,” Smith told the Huffington Post. Latergramme was also able to find out what times are the “hottest” on certain days. Like on Monday, the concluded that 5 pm is the worst time to post that day and 7 pm -10 pm are the best. Like on Saturday’s, 2 am is the best time to post, and 7 am is the worst. The analysis was able to determine what days you should posts on and the times you should do so in order to getting the most interactions and essentially the most likes.
I found another analysis that complied the research of 10 different studies in determining the best time one should use social media. When it came to Instagram, it was deduced that 2-3 pm and 8-9 pm on Mondays and Thursdays were the best time to post. The 10 studies found out that there really isn’t that much of a difference between “best days to post” because Instagram engagement everyday is fairly steady and consistent.
I then found a Fortune 500 study that took 123 Instagram accounts of Fortune 500 companies and examined all the posts from the companies. They concluded that “Throwback Thursday” is the day people tend to post pictures the most, but in the case of overall effectiveness of a photo, the day doesn’t matter.
If I were to do an experiment in finding the best time to post on Instagram in order to get the most follower interactions, I would start off by hypothesizing that posting at night, during off-work hours on the weekends will get you the most likes. I think that using the knowledge of posting on the weekend would be ideal, for no one will be working so they’ll have more leisure time on social media. I would take in count the correlation between posting on a certain day (Mcm, tbt) + the hash tags used to amount of likes received on a photo. To determine the best day to post, I will add a post likes and comments together, then I would divide this by the user’s follower count. By doing this on every day of the week, we’ll be able to determine which day sees the most engagement amongst one’s followers. I would then take multiple accounts and use them in this experiment. I feel like doing an observational study or experimental study wouldn’t make that much of a difference. If we did an observational study and just observed the amount likes a post gets compared to others, we’d be able to see the real results of the posts without changing the environment of the posts. If we did experimental, we would be able to control the time of when an account posts. I would have 168 accounts partake in this experiment and have each account post once during a week. Since there are 7 days a week, and 24 hours in a day, that’s how I got 168 accounts. One account will post on Sunday at 12am, and the next account will post on Sunday at 1 am, and so on until Saturday at 11 pm. In the controlled experiment, the independent variable will be the time posted and the dependent variable will be the most interaction amongst followers (likes, comments, follower interaction). Whichever account gets the most likes, comments, and followers interaction will essentially prove which time is the best time to post.
Works Cited:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/25/get-instagram-likes_n_6751614.html
http://coschedule.com/blog/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/
I definitely use instagram frequently, so this was a good blog to read. I totally agree that it’s all about timing, and its amazing how just posting an hour before or an hour behind “prime time” can change the amount of likes you get. Just because you have a lot of followers doesn’t men you will get a lot of likes!
Your blog post was definitely eye-catching, especially to me as a girl who uses Instagram quite frequently! It’s funny how there is actually a science for when to post on Instagram to achieve the optimal amount of likes, but it definitely does make sense when you really think about it. Posting at 7 am on a Saturday is definitely a bad idea, especially for a college student with many student followers. Saturday mornings are for sleeping in, especially if you were out the night before, so it is logical that the likes on a post will not be as high versus if you posted it on a Saturday afternoon. It is quite laughable that our generation values likes on a post so much that there is a science to when you should post, and even more laughable that sometimes I find myself obsessing about likes! You can read more about our generations’ obsession with Instagram in a more comedic standpoint here!
Your blog title was super head-line attracting and definitely relevant in society today! Everyone tries to post an Instagram at the “perfect time,” so maybe there is a scientific method to it. You definitely found a lot of studies on this subject and went in-depth with the results and the reasoning. However, despite how specific these results are, I would still like to know how these studies were conducted. How big was the sample size? Did they track the amount of people active on Instagram at a certain time? What about confounding variables? The list is endless. Holidays, game days, birthdays, and vacations, could also increase the chances of getting likes. What the studies neglect to acknowledge is that time is just one component of the Instagram process but it is not necessarily everything. What you post and the possible occasions surrounding it can also come into play. More information and data is needed to prove the legitimacy of these studies, otherwise it could be coming from anyone claiming they know the “best days to post.” However, I did find your study idea to be extremely planned out and it applied the scientific components very well. Overall, great job! Here are 5 Insightful Instagram Stats that you might enjoy!
Your blog title was super head-line attracting and definitely relevant in society today! Everyone tries to post an Instagram at the “perfect time,” so maybe there is a scientific method to it. You definitely found a lot of studies on this subject and went in-depth with the results and the reasoning. However, despite how specific these results are, I would still like to know how these studies were conducted. How big was the sample size? Did they track the amount of people active on Instagram at a certain time? What about confounding variables? The list is endless. Holidays, game days, birthdays, and vacations, could also increase the chances of getting likes. What the studies neglect to acknowledge is that time is just one component of the Instagram process but it is not necessarily everything. What you post and the possible occasions surrounding it can also come into play. More information and data is needed to prove the legitimacy of these studies, otherwise it could be coming from anyone claiming they know the “best days to post.” However, I did find your study idea to be extremely planned out and it applied the scientific components very well. Overall, great job! Here are 5 Insightful Instagram Statsthat you might enjoy!
As a teenage girl, I have had this conversation with my friends many times before. I find it to be very interesting yet so dumb. As a culture, we should be more concerned with other things and not when the best time to post on Instagram is. I have my own theories about when to post. I agree with the one finding that 2 am is a good time to post. I don’t think that many people are posting during that time, so they will be more likely to like a picture. Also, if people are asleep, when they wake up the next morning to check their Instagram, it will be there. I thought about third variables that could occur, and I think that the biggest third variable would be the picture. People are not necessarily going to like a picture just because it is there. They may like the picture just based on if they like what is in the picture. I could post a picture with a friend, and all of her friends are more likely to like it then. I can’t believe I am talking about this on a science blog. I do like your experiment though, I think that it would really work. Something to think about would be to have the participants post similar pictures to ensure that there isn’t any bias. Thank you for bringing up this hot topic!
Hahaha you can find scientific data to back anything. That’s a good topic for a college blog, I bet a lot of people are going to take some tips from this blog, I wonder how significant the difference actually would be or if it is mostly just speculation.