Posting times

Best time to post, for small businesses.

Your customers are on their phones around their own working day, which for most local businesses means early morning, lunchtime, and the hour after work. The useful thing is that this is knowable rather than guessable: your own audience's active hours are reported by Instagram, and for a business with a physical location they usually line up with when people are deciding where to go.

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The shape of the week

Early morning
Lunchtime
The hour after work

Early morning

Before the day takes over. Something short does better here than anything asking for ten minutes of attention.

How this audience spends its day, not hours read from anybody's account.

The shape of the week

When small businesses are actually reachable.

Early morning

Before the day takes over. Something short does better here than anything asking for ten minutes of attention.

Lunchtime

The window where somebody decides where to go later, which for a business with a door is exactly the decision you want to be standing in front of.

The hour after work

The longest of the three, and the one where a person will actually read a caption to the end or send you a message.

The hours every guide repeats describe everybody, not small businesses, and we have not checked them against any account. They are on the posting times guide.

Find your own hours

Three tests for a small business account.

Run each one for two weeks and change one thing at a time. The number to compare is named beside each test, because likes alone will tell you the wrong story.

1Post the week's stock on Monday morning instead of Friday.Compare: Replies and orders in the following two days.
2Move the weekend post to Thursday evening.Compare: Profile visits and taps on your contact button.
3Answer the most common question as a reel instead of a story.Compare: How many people still ask it by DM.

The number worth watching here: replies and dms, not followers. A local business does not need an audience, it needs the few hundred people who can actually walk in or order. One message asking whether you are open on Sunday is worth more than a thousand followers in another country, and the follower count will never tell you that.

In Synclify

Your own hours beat any average.

Connect an account and the guessing stops. Synclify reads 90 days of your own audience's hours, day by hour, in your account's timezone, and a week's plan schedules into them.

Read from your posts and your followers' activity, per account, never from an industry average.