How Many Times Should You Post to Instagram a Day

Does Instagram penalize people on Instagram who post too much?

In fact, they’ve gone on the record to say that they don’t penalize people solely based on their posting frequency.

Combine that with the fact that the algorithm also prioritizes showing you the most recent posts uploaded by people you follow, and you’ve got all the incentive you need to start posting more.

Post more, to a point

However, there naturally is a point of diminishing return. There is a posting frequency above which you will start getting fewer Likes and comments on your posts.

Posting too much could result in the following negative effects:

1. You could start to annoy your followers, which could negatively affect your posts’ engagement rates.
2. You could overcrowd your own content and not give your followers enough time to see and engage with your posts.

The key is to find the posting frequency that 1) generates the most comments, Likes and general engagement on your posts and 2) doesn’t annoy your followers or overcrowd your page.

How to find your optimal posting frequency

Fortunately, finding your optimal posting frequency is pretty easy. It requires you to conduct a simple experiment: upload more daily posts every week for two months (or longer) and monitor how your engagement rate is affected.

For example:

• Week#1: post twice a day
• Week#2: post three times a day
• Week#3: post four times a day
• Week#4: post five times a day
• Week#5: post six times a day
• Week#6: post seven times a day
• Week#7: post eight times a day
• Week#8: post nine times a day

Note: to save you time, schedule your posts ahead of time using a free desktop scheduler

After the eighth week is finished, go back and look at the number of Likes, comments, shares, and/or views your posts received week after week.

You can do this manually, but to save you the time and energy, you could also use Instagram Insights.

Instagram Insights is a free analytics tool provided by Instagram to Instagram business accounts.

Fortunately, it’s free to create (or switch to) a business account and only requires that you have a business page set up on Facebook. Once you have your account set up as a business account, you find your Insights at the top right corner of your Instagram page.

Once inside your Insights, navigate to the “Content” tab. Under the “Content” tab, scroll down to “Posts” and tap “See all”.

Here, among other metrics, you can see which of your posts produced the most:

• Engagement (total of all possible types of engagement)
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares

You can then look at data from each month throughout your experiment and answer the following questions:

1. Which month had the highest engagement rate?
   • Average Engagement Rate (%) Per Post = Total Engagement / Follower Counts / Number of Posts x 100  
2. How many times a day did I post during that month?

By answering these two simple questions, you can then gain an idea of how many times a day you should be posting to ensure the most possible engagement on your posts.