Jason Pantana has, yet again, revealed an Instagram hack you’ll want to implement ASAP if you want to get more eyes on your content.
According to a recent study by Sprout Social, which Jason mentions in his post, about 64% of marketers pre-schedule their posts—mostly on the hour, quarter-hour, or half-hour marks.
And with the sheer volume of content hitting Instagram, content posted at the top of the hour (or at the 15- and 30-minute marks) has a lot more competition for audience engagement than content posted between those high-traffic intervals.
To stand out and reach your intended audience, you need an unconventional approach.
How often do you open Instagram at exactly the top of the hour, anyway—or at the 15- or 30-minute mark? Not that often, right? And what you would have seen at the top of the hour is probably not what you see when you open the app five to seven minutes later.
We say this not to get you worrying about what you’re missing but to make a point: posting at the top of the hour does not give your content a strategic advantage.
If anything, it’s more likely to do the opposite.
Avoid (or at least minimize) the Instagram gridlock
As Jason pointed out in his post, the average Instagram user spends 6-7 minutes at a time scrolling through their feed. If any particular posts arrest their attention, maybe they’ll spend more time on the app—or maybe they’ll be more likely to close the app once they’ve finished engaging with that one.
Also, since Instagram is continuously updating, the posts you see when you open the app at the top of the hour are likely different from those you’d see if you opened it a few minutes later.
Thing is, with so many posts scheduled at the top of the hour, those are the most crowded times of the day to put your content out there. And that means your audience is less likely to see it, especially if they’re only scrolling for a few minutes at a time.
If you post something at a less conventional time, as Jason suggests—say 10:07—it has less competition and better odds of being seen.
And if more people see it, more are likely to engage with it, too, especially if it ticks other boxes for them (strong hook, familiar brand, relatable meme, etc.)
The traffic equivalent (to borrow Jason’s analogy) of posting at the top of the hour is like waiting in rush hour traffic to get to the store when everyone and their neighbor are heading home from work. And while you can’t completely avoid competition on Instagram, you can at least pick a less crowded time of the day to post, giving your content its best chance at getting noticed.
Give it a try. Then, head on over to Jason’s post and share your thoughts.
