How often should you be posting on Instagram to maximize reach and resonance?
According to a new study by Buffer, the more you can post to IG, the better, with users who post more frequently seeing clear engagement and reach benefits.
Buffer analyzed over 2 million posts from 100k Instagram accounts to identify key trends in posting and the relation of such to engagement. You can check out the full study report here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key notes.
First off, the data suggests that posting on Instagram between 3 and 5 times per week can more than double your follower growth rate, while posting 6–9 times per week, or even more, will increase your growth rate even further.
Worth noting that posting here refers to Instagram feed posts (photos, Reels, and carousels), so IG Stories are not included in this analysis.
And as you can see, the data suggests that posting more often is clearly beneficial. Which is not overly surprising, as it gives you more opportunity to hit with your posts, but it is also a lot of work.
But then again, with new AI tools and creative options, maybe you now have more capacity to post more content. If that’s a path you feel comfortable going down.
In addition to gaining more followers, posting more often can also increase your reach:
Though as Buffer notes:
“That’s pretty common sense – the more you post, the more opportunities you have for appearing in your followers’ home feeds, the Reels feed, or even the explore page. [Though the data also shows that] accounts that post more tend to get more views on every piece of content.”
Indeed, Buffer says that accounts that post 3-5 times weekly see around a 12% average reach boost per post, while posting 10x per week increases that to 24%.
So if you want to maximize your IG performance, you need to post as much as you can, in order to align with what its algorithm rewards, right?
Well, Buffer does additionally note that more is not always better, with content quality also playing a key role in performance. So if you start posting more often, you may achieve gains like this, but you could also risk lowering your content quality, and turning off your audience as a result.
So relevance and value are also key considerations, and you probably should start posting for the sake of it, just because the data suggests that IG rewards more updates.
But the insights here do suggest that posting more often is a good thing, and that creators and brands shouldn’t worry about overwhelming their audience with too many updates.
You can check out Buffer’s full IG performance study here.
