Influencer marketing has become the darling of marketers to build brand awareness, connect with target customers, and even boost sales. The global influencer marketing market size has more than doubled since 2019. The current value? A whopping 21.1 billion USD.

There’s no doubt about it: Influencer marketing works.

But if you’re still baffled by the depths of influencer marketing, I don’t blame you. There’s so much to know, confusing conflicting advice, and plethora of tactics to keep up with.

With this A-Z ultimate guide on influencer marketing, you’ll know exactly what you need to do and how.

What is influencer marketing?

First, let’s cover the basics. Influencer marketing is when you ask a content creator with a sizable, engaged audience to promote your brand and its products. You can do influencer marketing to generate marketing assets, build brand awareness, or improve sales.

In return, you pay the influencer a flat rate, a commission for their sales, free products, or a combination of the above three.

For example, if you’re a fashion brand, you might collaborate with an influencer who creates content around outfit inspiration, like Kate Hutchins.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kate Hutchins (@kateehutchins)

Who is an influencer (and who is not)?

Before we move ahead, let’s clear the air about who exactly is an influencer. It doesn’t need to be someone with millions of followers — it’s who has influence over the purchasing decision of your potential customers. The creator’s audience should turn to them for product recommendations and trust their advice.

For example, Lauren Mae has only 18.1K followers on Instagram (and 118K subscribers on YouTube). That might not seem like a lot, but her followers trust her reviews and are confident in her recommendations.

Whether you’re planning to hire a big-name celebrity or an online personality, remember: Popularity doesn’t always translate to influence.

Is influencer marketing worth the hype?

A resounding yes.

The right influencers come with built-in social proof — when you form a partnership with such creators, you borrow the trust they’ve built with their audience for years. That stamp of approval is priceless to gain the reputation of a reliable brand among your potential customers.

Not to mention: You get to tap into new audiences of your potential customers.

Multiple studies have proved the power of influencer marketing:

• A report by TikTok confirmed 64 percent of its users had bought a product after watching a creator advertising it.
• A survey by Izea found more than half of the respondents had purchased a product because they saw a social media influencer using it.
• The same survey also had 35 percent of respondents saying that influencer posts are the number one way to get them to try new products.

Influencer marketing is worth the buzz that surrounds it. But getting the best results out of it is no cakewalk. You need a well-thought-out, customized influencer marketing strategy to get the most bang for your buck.

How to create an impactful influencer marketing strategy?

The success of your influencer marketing campaign is entirely dependent on your strategy. Your influencer marketing plan can’t be the cookie-cutter guidelines followed by big brands — it has to be customized to your target audience, budget, and goals.

Here is how to make the influencer marketing strategy for your company in five steps:

Step 1: Get crystal clear on your influencer marketing goals

What does the success of influencer marketing look like for your brand?

Your answer dictates what kinds of creators you partner with, how you run your influencer marketing campaigns, and which metrics you track to measure performance.

For example, clothing brand Son de Flor practiced influencer gifting to generate awareness about their summer sale — partnering with creators such as Barbara, Rebeka Markewich, and Bront-Marie.

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A post shared by Barbara • UK | Scotland Travel (@discovermyscotland)

Your influencer marketing goals will also be dependent on your overall business objectives. If growing revenue is critical to the business at this stage, influencer marketing should be geared toward that too.

Based on your campaign goals, decide what metrics you can measure to check whether you’re on track. These metrics become your key performance indicators (KPIs).

For example, suppose you’re an ecommerce business aiming to grow revenue by increasing the average order value (AOV). In that case, your influencer marketing KPI can be: “Increase AOV by [XX%] from collaborating with [YY] influencers by [DDMMYYYY].”

This KPI will help you determine how close (or far) you are to reaching your goals.

Learn more: 9 Social Media Goals You Can Set for Your Business (and How to Track Them)

Understanding where influencer marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy and business objectives will help you build a solid foundation. Now, you have clarity on the destination you want to go to rather than aimlessly following a generalized map.

⚡Remember: Focus only on “what” you want from your influencer marketing efforts in this step. “How” you accomplish it will come in later.

Step 2: Map your ideal influencer and collaboration

The second step is figuring out the best path toward accomplishing your influencer marketing goals.

For example, if your influencer marketing KPI was to “boost sales by 25 percent for new product launch in three months,” your action plan might be collaborating with creators and giving them trackable affiliate links or discount codes.

Side note: Use Buffer’s UTM builder to track all unique influencer links and attribute website traffic to the right source. Create a campaign using the tags feature and customize the tracking under settings.

Learn more: How to Track Every Link and All the Traffic From Social Media

You need to determine four things to map your ideal influencer partnership(s):

• Platform(s) for running your influencer marketing campaigns
• Type of collaboration you can do to accomplish your goals
• Size of influencers you’d look for based on your budget
• Number of creators you can partner with

Let’s explore these four things in more detail.

1: Platform(s) for running your influencer marketing campaigns

You can do influencer marketing on plenty of social media sites today — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and even newsletters.

Although some platforms might be more well-known than others for influencer marketing, there’s no one right answer to which platform you should choose.

Find out where your potential customers hang out and dedicate your influencer marketing budget to creators on that platform.

If you’re a B2B business, your target customers might be more actively looking for your product on Twitter, LinkedIn, and leading industry blogs than on TikTok or Instagram.

For example, Reforge is a company that sells courses taught by tech experts. Their audience is likely to take action by reading trusted newsletters like Why We Buy. On sponsoring this newsletter, Reforge found more than 85 percent of the traffic driven to be qualified and meaningful.

Don’t hunt for popular social influencers just because your competitors are. Do some audience research and find where your customers like to hang out and who are their trusted sources of influence. You might discover creators like Katelyn Bourgoin (Why We Buy’s writer) are more impactful than irrelevant celebrity endorsements through Instagram posts.

And remember: You don’t have to stick to one platform in your influencer marketing efforts. It helps to have a wider presence. But it’s best to start slow — run influencer campaigns on one platform, learn valuable lessons about what works, and then move on to the next platform.

2: Type of collaboration you can do to accomplish your goals

There are many types of influencer partnerships you can do. Here are the top five:

There are other forms of creator partnership, too — like co-creating products with an influencer or Instagram takeovers. You can also mix and match various types of influencer endorsements — like money expert Tori Dunlap and custom clothing brand Dalya did a giveaway of a co-created blazer.

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A post shared by Tori Dunlap — Money Expert (@herfirst100k)

Which type of collaboration should you create with influencers? It depends on your budget and campaign goals. Product seeding and affiliate partnerships are for companies with small budgets that want to get influencer-generated content and/or sales. Giveaways are the ideal choice when you want to generate buzz about a particular launch.

Kynship, an influencer marketing agency, recommends choosing your influencer collaboration method based on your yearly business revenue. They call it their influencer marketing pyramid structure.

Maybe you can’t follow this playbook to a T — because influencer marketing budgets vary even in brands with the same yearly revenue. Take it with a grain of salt — use it as a reference to see what might work out best for you and alter it to fit your requirements and constraints.

The best teacher is trial-and-error to see which type of creator endorsements get you the best return on investment (ROI).

⚠️ Remember: No matter what type of influencer collaboration you choose to do, display it correctly under FTC guidelines.

3: Size of influencers you’d look for based on your budget

There are four kinds of influencers divided by follower count.

⚠️ Note: These are generally accepted categorizations. Many companies differ in how they divide influencers by follower size. Some data also has a fifth mid-tier influencer with a following range of 50,000 – 500,000.

You might think the more followers an influencer has, the more positive results they can get for your brand. Isn’t the best influencer the one with the highest follower count?

The reality is different: Smaller influencers (nano-influencers and micro-influencers) have higher engagement rates compared to bigger influencers. Why? Smaller influencers have more relatability. It’s easier to feel like you have something in common with a busy parent than with Gigi Hadid.

A 2019 survey found 72 percent of its respondents prefer micro-level social media influencers over larger celebrity influencers. Another reason smaller influencers supersede bigger influencers is authenticity — a Morning Consult report confirmed 88 percent of people value authenticity over a large following.

Take what happened with mega-influencer, Alisha Marie: She promoted the skincare brand Clean & Clear in one of her YouTube videos when her followers called her out for inauthenticity. They knew a big influencer like her doesn’t use a cost-effective brand like Clean & Clear because she had previously done a non-sponsored video about her skincare routine, and Clean & Clear was nowhere in sight.

This isn’t a case for discounting the impact of successful influencers with large followings. They can certainly make a dent and improve your brand’s reach at scale. But small businesses and startups can see a significant impact by collaborating with a large volume of nano and micro-influencers.

Take cleaning products brand, Purdy & Figg: They practiced product seeding for over 2,000 micro-influencers when they began their influencer marketing campaigns. The result? An astonishing 690 percent increase in total orders.

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A post shared by Michelle Boyd (@mumzyhacks)

You should also consider partnering with nano and micro-influencers because they’re cost-effective, have less red tape (no agents are typically involved), and have a more niche audience.

Even if you have some wiggle room in your budget, incorporate a mix of both smaller and larger influencers in your campaigns.

4: Number of creators you can partner with

The last piece of the puzzle is determining how many creators you can partner with across each platform. You might have fewer influencer partners if you’re also extending your creator family to include macro-influencers. If you’re sticking to only nano and micro-influencers, the total number of influencer partners might be higher for you.

Remember to not only think about your budget here. Also think of your general social media team bandwidth. Managing each influencer relationship takes a ton of work — contract, guidelines, tracking, and admin. If you’re a small team, be mindful of how many influencers you can manage realistically.

You can also consider outsourcing some tasks to software, agencies, and freelancers.

• Many marketing tools can help with influencer discovery, content tracking, and outreach
• Agencies can take complete or partial control over your influencer marketing campaigns
• Freelancers can assist with finding influencers and vetting their profiles

You lighten your workload for all options, but it costs extra, and you may lose some control over the process.

Step 3: Find relevant influencers

The influencers you choose can make or break your influencer marketing campaigns — they’re the most important piece to get right. But for companies who run campaigns in-house, finding the right influencers is the biggest challenge, according to a report by Influencer Marketing Hub.

There are a plethora of marketing tools in the market to help you with influencer discovery. But the issues with most of these influencer marketing platforms are:

• they have a huge learning curve
• they have a limited influencer database
• they tie you into expensive yearly contracts

Modash and SARAL are two tools with monthly plans, transparent pricing, and a vast influencer database. If you have a large budget and require agency support too, Fohr might be worth checking out. Evaluating other tools? Check if they are:

• Under your budget (some tools go upwards of $25,000/annually)
• Not just a creator marketplace (a creator marketplace means they require influencers to sign-up on their platform to be displayed, significantly shrinking the creator pool)
• Offering a deep influencer analysis (with metrics like engagement rate, example sponsored posts, and audience insights)

Even with the helping hand of tools, you must thoroughly vet each influencer profile to determine if they’d fit your brand. Here are five quantitative and qualitative questions you should be asking to evaluate each creator in your shortlist:

Do their audience demographics overlap with your target market?

Most influencer marketing platforms provide audience breakdown. If you want a more trusted source, you can ask the influencer for their media kit — which will contain insights into their audience.

Does the influencer have a high engagement rate?

A high engagement rate depends on the social media platform and the size of the influencer. Dash Hudson found TikTok’s average engagement rate to be 4.7 percent, Instagram’s 3.3 percent, and YouTube’s 3.7 percent. Set a benchmark of at least two percent for every influencer you evaluate. Engagement rate calculators by Modash (for Instagram) and GRIN (for TikTok and YouTube) can help.

Does the creator have fake followers?

Since influencers are paid in part for the size of their audience, many resort to buying followers and engagement to pump up their metrics.

There are plenty of fake follower checker tools out there, but you can also make this a qualitative check:

• Go through the comments on a popular post by the influencer. If it’s filled with generic statements like ‘nice pic’ or emojis, it’s a red flag that the comments are by bots. Organic marketing doesn’t look like that — it’ll have relevant comments related to the post.
  
• Some posts have a lot more engagement (likes, comments, shares) than their standard posts. The influencer might have gone viral, or they might’ve bought engagement.
  
• The follower-to-engagement ratio is off. If an influencer has 100K followers, but only 5K likes on their posts, it’s a sign they might’ve purchased followers.

⚠️ Note: Having at least some fake followers is expected because of bots on nearly every social media channel. Don’t get swayed by a few fake followers; just keep your eyes open for an unusually large number of them.

Does the influencer engage with their audience via Stories, comments, and DMs?

You don’t want to partner with an influencer who’s not in touch with their audience.

Check the comments and Stories by the influencer:

• Do they use features like Q&A to help their audience?
• Do they take the time to respond to their followers’ questions?
• How often do they show up on Stories answering queries they might’ve received in their DMs?

A creator can’t respond to every comment and DM, but the influencer should respond actively to as many comments and DMs as possible. Ultimately, it shows how much personal connection and trust exists among the influencer and their audience.

Does the influencer align with your brand’s values?

High-quality content creation isn’t the only benchmark you should be looking at. A creator can produce top-notch content and still be a misfit for your influencer marketing campaign.

Check the non-sponsored content of the influencer and see if it overlaps with your brand voice.

Dig a little deeper to know what the influencer’s values are. What personal stories do they talk about? What values show up in their content and audience interaction? This should align with what your brand stands for.

Brand alignment is a qualitative check — you’re essentially checking if your “vibes” will match with the influencer. But it’s an important question to evaluate to ensure a partnership that doesn’t seem forced.

Don’t want to use an influencer marketing platform for discovering influencers? Here are three no-software methods:

1: Hashtags and search

Hashtags are relevant on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. If you’re a beauty brand, for instance, search for hashtags such as #beautyproducts or #beautybloggers.

Choose both niche and generic hashtags to search more thoroughly and unearth more creators.

Simply searching for relevant keywords also works on Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Top-performing, relevant content will show up from various creators — who you can then evaluate.

Twitter also has an excellent advanced search functionality for researching influencers who are thought leaders on niche topics.

2: Find influencers who are following you already

Many small creators might be already creating user-generated content for your brand. Monitor your follower list and track who’s tagging you in their posts using social listening.

For example, skincare influencer, Vanessa Lindemann, regularly posts non-sponsored skincare reviews. Brands she’s posting positively for can approach her for collaboration — it’d be a solid partnership since she already likes their products.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Vanessa L. (@vanessasskin)

Similarly, you can also check if any of your recent customers have a decent following on social networks. There’s no better brand advocate than a happy customer.

⚡Pro-tip: Ask your customers who they follow and trust online. This way, you take influencer recommendations right from the source to find your best-fit creator partners.

3: Find influencer lookalikes

If you’ve found an influencer you like, social media channels do the job of recommending similar influencers. Spot the downward arrow on Instagram and TikTok ( “⬇️”) and filter for “related” content on your YouTube recommendations.

The algorithm of all social media platforms will also work to show you similar content by various creators. So spend some time on each channel to train the algorithm to your brand interests.

Step 4: Start reaching out to influencers

Once you’ve shortlisted influencers, the next step is to start reaching out to them. Where should you reach out to influencers? Email is the right choice since DMs might get buried under other messages — especially for popular influencers. You can use DMs to follow up with creators after your first email outreach.

Where do you find influencer emails? If you’re using any influencer marketing software, emails might be available inside the software itself. If not, influencers share their email publicly.

• On TikTok, influencers share their email in their bios.
• On YouTube, it’s under the “about” section in their channel.
• On Instagram, either the influencer will have an email in their bio, or there’s a separate email button on the app.

⚡ Remember: If the email-in-bio and email-in-button differ for any Instagram influencer, read the influencer’s bio. It’ll likely have an email marked for brand collaborations. If not, send your outreach message to both emails.

For other social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitch, LinkedIn, and Twitter, check the influencer’s bios for the correct email address. If there’s no email address in the bio:

• Check their Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube profile for an email address
• See if they have an email present on their landing page or website
• DM them to ask them for the right email address

What should your influencer outreach email say? It depends on the type of influencer collaboration you’ve chosen. If you’re sending a no-strings-attached gift to influencers, your message should say that. Similarly, your ask will be different if you’re looking for influencers for a paid sponsored post.

Here’s a template you can build off from:

“Hey [influencer name],

I’m [your name], the [your job role] at [your company’s name]. I’m reaching out because we love your content and wanted to ask if you’d be interested in a partnership?

We like you because [mention why you chose the influencer] and our products would help your audience [describe how your product is beneficial for their audience].

You’d be a perfect fit for our [details about your influencer marketing campaign].

Interested? Shoot me a reply, and we’ll take it from there!”

Customizing what you’re saying to each influencer is crucial. An influencer might receive many emails from brands like yours every day — personalizing is an easy way to stand out.

⚠️ Remember: Don’t use words like “free” in your email subject lines. Email providers might notice a pattern and mark you as spam, or influencers might tune you out, thinking you want free content. Use something that leverages the curiosity gap, like: “We think [your brand name] and [the influencer name] are an instant right swipe!”

Struggling to get replies from influencers? Don’t lose heart. Follow up a few times before pausing for a few months and regauging an influencer’s interest in your offer.

If you get no reply, understand that it wasn’t meant to be and find other influencers who might be a better fit. Don’t take the lack of a response personally!

If you have had low response rates from influencers across the board for a long time, ask for feedback from your peers or a creator on your outreach message.

Step 5: Set up influencer marketing logistics

Influencer marketing is a ton of admin work. Before beginning any partnership, you must have:

• An official influencer contract
• Influencer briefs for each campaign or post
• Established in-house processes for payment, tracking, and communication

Let’s cover these three aspects in more detail.

An influencer contract

Contracts are non-negotiable, no matter how much you trust the influencer.  It makes things official, and you have something to refer back to in case of disagreements.

What should go into an influencer contract?

• Data you’d require from the influencer for measuring campaign success
• Ownership details about influencer-generated content
• FTC guidelines and other legal requirements
• Timelines of submission, approval, and posting
• Content production and distribution process
• Payment method and payment terms
• Campaign Goals and KPIs

⚠️ Remember: Some influencers might charge extra for transferring ownership of their content to your brand — especially if you want it permanently. This cost is worth it because you can repurpose influencer-generated content into paid ads, display it on your website, or reshare it on your brand socials.

Learn more: How These Small Businesses Repurpose Content

Influencer briefs for each campaign or post

Influencer briefs are context-dependent, depending on your type of collaboration and the freedom you want to offer to the influencer. Include:

• An overview of your company and campaign goals (keep it concise)
• Deliverables the influencer owes you with timelines (posts, videos, and everything else)
• Legal disclosure on how to signify the partnership (FTC guidelines, where in caption should the disclosure be)
• Guidelines on caption and visuals (what they should write, where they should get their free images from)

⚡ Pro-tip: While you should include some guidelines on captions and visuals, offer creative liberty to your influencer partners. They know what works best with their audience — and you don’t want your collaborative post to feel like an ad by putting words in their mouth.

Established in-house processes for payment, tracking, and communication

Who is responsible for communicating with influencers, ensuring they post on time & submit by the deadline, monitoring their post performance, and tracking their payment?

Depending on your team size and structure, have these processes in place before beginning influencer partnerships. Knowing who is responsible for what tasks guarantee accountability and clarity. It also makes your influencer relationships a smooth experience.

Tracking influencer posts is doable when you’re partnering with a handful of influencers for one campaign. But what happens as you begin to scale your efforts? The thought of manually tracking hundreds of influencer content can cause the most efficient marketers to break a sweat. Don’t worry: Use Buffer’s tags feature to attribute influencer posts to the right campaign.

Not only can you track posts easily with this feature, but also measure performance. Buffer has a detailed report for each campaign — including posts, impressions, engagement, comments, and more.

You can also export all this data and build custom reports on Buffer — sharing data points on each campaign with stakeholders.

Take a free trial of Buffer to access this feature today.

Influencer marketing is a long game

The thing about influencer marketing is it isn’t a quick one-and-done game. You need some time to nourish influencer relationships, experimentation to find out what works best for your audience, and patience to see positive results.

But the payoffs are worth it — authentic marketing, instant consumer trust, and (eventually) an uptick in sales.

Hopefully, with this guide, you know how to grab your slice of the influencer marketing industry.

Facebook Stories are are different from the Facebook posts you usually see on your timeline - they're short photo and video collections from Facebook users that can be viewed an unlimited amount of times and disappear after 24 hours

The story format, originated and made famous by Snapchat, was added as a feature on Facebook in 2017. Today, one billion stories are shared on social media across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp every single day.

The feature is focused around Facebook’s in-app camera which allows users to overlay fun filters and lenses to their content (popular for taking selfies) as well as add other fun elements like stickers, emojis, GIFs, polls, questions, music, and location tags to their photos and videos. It's a great tool to add to your Facebook marketing strategy to share content.

To start creating a Facebook Story, tap “Create story” at the top of your feed.

We’ll show you everything you need to know about Facebook Stories: how to share them on your profile or Page, how to view Stories, and how to comment or reply with a message.

How Facebook Stories work: a complete guide

Similar to Instagram Stories, content shared to stories will appear at the top of the Facebook News Feed. To view a story, users simply tap a friends’ story at the top of the Facebook app.

While viewing a story, users can also reply with a direct message sent through Facebook Messenger or leave a public comment.

How to use Facebook Stories

Step 1: Access the camera

To create a story on Facebook, you first need to access the camera. You can do this by tapping the camera icon on the Facebook mobile app.

Step 2: Create your content

Facebook users can share both photos and videos to stories. Once you have the camera open, you’ll be able to record your video or snap a quick photo. You’ll also notice a range of lenses and filters available to embellish your content.

To take a photo, tap on the button in the center of the screen and to record a video hold down this button.

You can also upload images from your phone’s camera roll by tapping on the album icon on the bottom left of your screen. We launched Stories Creator to help you quickly create thumb-stopping Stories for free. If you are interested in creating custom Stories images, we’ll be so glad if you want to give Stories Creator a go!

Step 3: Share to your story

Once you’re happy with the post you’ve created, the next step is to share it to your story. To do this, tap the Share button on the bottom right of the screen.

Once you’ve shared a post to your story, it will display for 24 hours and then be gone forever, just as Instagram Stories work. Videos and photos posted in a Facebook Story won’t show up in the News Feed or on a user’s timeline by default, but users can choose to share to the News Feed as well if they’d like to.

Facebook Stories for Pages

Facebook Stories are also available for all Facebook Pages.

To post a Facebook Story from your Page:

1. Open up Facebook’s mobile app on iOS or Android (Stories can only be posted on mobile)
2. Go to the timeline of any Page for which you’re an Admin
3. Tap “Create”
4. Choose "Story"

Just like users’ Stories, your Page's story will appear for 24 hours and won’t be shared as a feed post to the Pages’ timeline or the Facebook News Feed.

Over to you

Have you tried Facebook Stories yet?

We’d love to hear what you think about this update. Will you share your day on Facebook? How will you manage stories across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?

Instagram reach can seem like magic. How do some creators get tons of it while others rarely see it? How come sometimes you get wild reach, and other times it's crickets?

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. In this article, we’ll share 14 ways to get more views on your Instagram content.

What does “Instagram reach” even mean?

Instagram reach is the number of unique people who view (and hopefully interact with) your Instagram posts. You can track Instagram reach for a single post, for your Instagram profile, or for a social media campaign. Along with the number of unique visitors, you also get insights into the demographic of the people who saw your post or profile.

This reach can be organic or paid. Organic is when the Instagram algorithm shows your posts to similar audiences. Paid reach is when you purchase Instagram ads to sponsor your content — it has a “sponsored” or some other CTA label attached to it.

Jade Beason, creator coach, and digital marketing expert, says the biggest myth is believing paid reach is the same as getting organic reach.

“When you reach people organically, you’re a lot more likely to not only reach your right audience but also hold their attention. This is because people tend to ignore paid ads more than they do organic content.”

In this article, we’re exploring ways to boost your organic Instagram reach.

What is Instagram reach rate?

Instagram reach rate is the percentage of followers who see your Instagram post. Unlike Instagram reach, it’s unique to your followers only and doesn’t include non-followers who view your post.

Instagram reach rate is calculated as: (Total reach / Number of followers) * 100

For example, if your reach is 500 and you have 5,000 followers, your Instagram reach rate is: (500/5000)*100 = 10 percent.

What is a good Instagram reach?

The right answer? It depends — on your profile and the type of Instagram post you’re evaluating. Let’s look at some data.

One study from June 2022 categorized the average reach based on the number of followers an Instagram creator has.

• Instagram creators with 500 to 2,000 followers reached 292 people via in-feed posts, 114 people via Instagram Stories, and 1,600 people via Instagram Reels.
  
• Instagram creators with 2,000 to 10,000 followers reached 964 people via in-feed posts, 244 people via Instagram Stories, and 3,400 people via Instagram Reels.
  
• Instagram creators with 10,000 to 50,000 followers reached 4,400 people via in-feed posts, 698 people via Instagram Stories, and 16,800 people via Instagram Reels.

Another analysis of 876 businesses found brands with smaller following (less than 501K) should reach 34 percent of their audience through posts and 7.5 percent of their followers through Instagram Stories.

⚠️ Remember: Don’t take these numbers at face value. Reach can differ widely based on industry, algorithm changes, campaign goals, and location.

How is Instagram reach different from Instagram impressions?

Instagram reach, and Instagram impressions are often used interchangeably, but they are different terms.

Instagram impressions are the number of times your post was seen. Unlike Instagram reach, impressions don’t consist of unique people. If the same person sees your Instagram Reel three times, it’ll count as three impressions but one reach.

With the terminology discussion out of the way, let’s discuss how to get more views on your Instagram Reels.

How to get more views on your Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels are famous for being the primary booster of Instagram reach. Here’s how you can capitalize on them to grow your reach by leaps and bounds:

1: Grab attention in the first 3 seconds

People are having a marathon in their Instagram Reels tab. You have to grab their attention in the first three seconds to get them to stop the scroll.

Get rid of the introductory words — like “hey people!” — and get right to the point. Tease what the audience will get if they watch your reel to entice curiosity — and deliver on that promise.

Some good hook ideas you can customize for your Instagram Reels to boost video views:

• This one tip/fact will blow your mind
• Do you struggle with [a problem your target audience struggles with]? Follow these X tips
• These X things are holding you back from [result your target audience wants to achieve]
• Did you know [a surprising fact your audience would love to know, but might not be aware of]
• How to [something your audience wants to learn] for free/in X easy steps
• Secret to accomplishing [something your audience wants to achieve]

A good example is creator Erin McGoff — all her Instagram Reels highlight a curiosity gap and begin with a bang that keeps people hooked.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Erin McGoff ✨ (@advicewitherin)

⚡ Pro-tip: Came across a scroll-stopping hook example while browsing Instagram? Instead of hoping you’d remember it while creating content, save it on Buffer using the idea feature.

Inspiration is notorious for striking at random times — when you’re walking your dog, watching a show, or preparing dinner. Saving the idea ensures you never lose the thread.

2: Use a mix of speaking-to-the-camera and trending audio

Using trending topics and audio can boost your Instagram reach significantly. How do you find these trends?

• Follow the @creators account on Instagram, where they share Reels Trend Report regularly to keep you looped in on what’s popular on Instagram.
• Spot the upward arrow (↗) when scrolling Instagram Reels. These are trending audios, and there’s likely a similar format to create content, spun on different topics by various creators.
• Instagram is rolling out a feature (currently in the U.S.) where you can see what’s trending around the world in a separate “Reels” tab on your professional dashboard.

“Don’t you dare [do a specific thing] as a Wes Anderson movie” is a good example of what’s “trending” content. Creators from across the globe put their own personality, humor, and niche to it to create Instagram Reels in a similar format.

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A post shared by Robert Zivko (@robert.zivko)

Along with trending content, you also want to produce original, evergreen content where you’re talking directly to the camera about a specific topic. It builds community, connection, and true value for your audience.

Ankita Chawla, marketing consultant and content creator, follows a ratio of 60:40 — where 60 percent of the time, she focuses on producing original speak-to-the-camera Instagram Reels.

“Original content needs to be more in volume as compared to trending content. The speed at which your community will get to know you and start trusting you will be much higher if your original content is more,” she says.

3: Make Instagram Reels that get people commenting, saving, and sharing

Instagram Reels’ engagement boosts when it gets a lot of attention — in the form of comments, saves, and shares.

• For more comments: Have a call-to-action that asks the audience what they think of a particular topic in your niche. Or ask them to comment their favorite part/tip from your Instagram Reel. Giveaways are another great way to boost comments on your Instagram Reels — ask your followers to comment about something specific to participate in the contest. Don’t be afraid to get creative here! A good example of a comment-driven call-to-action is this Instagram Reel by Michaela.

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A post shared by Michaela Fong | Small Business Tips & Education (@smallbizbabescommunity)

• For more saves: Share Instagram Reels that share advice, lists of resources, or tools that your followers can refer back to later. Think: What would my target audience can’t remember from just a video, but would want to reference in the future? This Instagram Reel by Maeve is an excellent example of how to pack info in a video your audience would like to save.

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A post shared by marie ✦ UX/UI designer (@maeve.ux)

• For more sharing: What kind of video would your audience like to share with their friends? Funny and relatable content is the most shareable of all — think of memes you can create in your niche. Apart from humor, you can also rely on aesthetic, informational, and educational Instagram Reels to boost the shareability of your video. AI company, Tl;dv, often creates funny kits on their Instagram Reels, which their audience would DM to their friends.

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A post shared by tldv.io - AI Meeting recorder (@tldv.io)

4: Write well-thought-out captions on your Instagram Reels

If a hook grabs your audience's attention, the Instagram caption ensures you don’t lose it after the first three seconds.

Whether your captions on Instagram Reels should be short or long is debatable.

• On one hand, it isn’t easy to read the text below Reels — advocating for captions to be shorter. People also might not prefer reading long captions because they come to the Reels tab for video content.
  
• On the other hand, captions — when well-formatted — provide more context to your Reel and can make your Reels more discoverable because Instagram’s search bar reads them. Plus, if your followers are discovering your reel in their home feed and not the Reels tab, the caption is easily readable.

A 2023 study found Instagram captions perform best when either they’re very long (over 2,000 characters) or very short (under 20 characters).

The right answer is: It depends. Don’t cut yourself out if your Instagram Reel requires a long caption. But if your video can do with a short and sweet caption, don’t ramble. Katie Gatti Tassin is a creator who has just the right length of captions (with a clear CTA) — not too long and not too short.

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A post shared by Money with Katie | Podcast & Blog (@moneywithkatie)

The best way is to experiment and see what your audience prefers. Do you see an increase in reach when you write longer captions? If yes, continue giving more details below your Instagram Reels. If not, stick with shorter captions.

(Pssst…you might be able to embrace your inner novelist when Instagram releases their text-based app.)

⚡Pro-tip: Don’t use call-to-actions in your caption like “offer available for a limited time” because your Instagram Reels may start gaining traction after a while. Your caption for any post shouldn’t become irrelevant if you see a boost in your Instagram reach a few weeks after publishing. If you want to write a time-sensitive caption, update it when the offer ends.

5: Share your Instagram Reel in your Instagram Stories

An easy way to boost your Instagram Reels’ views is by sharing them on your Instagram Stories. When people view your Story, it will count as another view of your Reel.

Sharing your Instagram reel on Instagram Stories is also important because all of your followers might not get your new reel in their feed — and Stories are a great way to let them know you’ve added something new to your feed.

How to boost your reach for Instagram Carousel posts

If you thought Instagram would be all about Reels, Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram) is here with some news: Photos are still very much in play for increasing your reach. Carousels are Instagram posts where you can add up to ten photos or videos in one post. Your audience swipes left to see the next slide.

It’s even debated that Carousels are the types of Instagram posts that provide the most engagement (although it’s more complicated than that). Here are three ways to increase the reach of your Instagram Carousels:

6: Create a story, tutorial, or listicle that keeps people swiping

The biggest thing to take care of in Instagram Carousels is people keep swiping to the next slide. Tanishaa Bhansali, an Instagram coach, explains why:

“The beginning of your Carousel post has to be a hook, and the entire post has to be like a story stitched together. People should feel that itch, that curiosity to keep reading until they reach the last slide. This will boost the watch time of your Carousels’ post, and it’ll get pushed to more of your followers.”

There are many engaging Carousel post ideas you can experiment with, such as:

• Tutorials on how your target audience can do something using your product
• Tell a story using graphics and/or text
• Before/after images

Cosmix Wellness’ Instagram account is a great place for Carousel post inspiration. The wellness brand frequently shares before/after pictures, customer testimonials, and behind-the-scenes stories of its new product launches.

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A post shared by Cosmix - Superfoods (@cosmixwellness)

Right now, GenZ is using TikTok as a search engine. The day when Instagram users start using this social media platform the same way isn’t far away. Instagram is already using the keywords on your Carousel’s posts to understand the topic — so ensure your Carousel posts contain the words your target audience might be searching for.

7: Keep your design clean

Branded design is excellent for announcing product launches, sharing happy testimonials, or spotlighting something in your company. But when you’re sharing educational, shareable Carousels, we recommend keeping your design clean and simple.

Why? Instagram users have varying opinions on what constitutes ‘good design,’ and the idea of aesthetics is subjective. They might not want to share branded content or design they don’t find appealing enough to associate with.

Your Carousels in plain white or colored backgrounds with readable font are risk-free of these personal preferences. Trivarna Hariharan is a good example of how implementing this can lead to a wide reach — she has no Instagram Reels on her account, only Carousels. She has 191,000 followers, and that number is rapidly growing.

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A post shared by Trivarna Hariharan (@trivarnahariharan_poetry)

This doesn’t mean you only have to stick with white, especially if you want a grid that pops. Enhance your social media images using your brand colors as the background for Instagram Carousels that are educational and shareable.

8: Use a variety of content types in your Instagram Carousel posts

Who said Carousel posts have to stay limited to text? Tie in images, videos, and text together to create an enticing and curiosity-driven Instagram Carousel.

Various content types keep people engaged and “show” things — a superior experience to text alone. Morgan Starr-Riestis, a holistic wellness therapist, often uses Carousels that start with an on-brand headline or tweet, but transition into relatable memes and comics.

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A post shared by Morgan | Holistic Therapist + Life Coach (@mind.psy.guidance)

This doesn’t mean you’re forbidden to use text-only for your Instagram Carousels. What you should include in a Carousel post often depends on the topic and your brand voice. But we definitely recommend experimenting with using emojis, interactive elements, images, and videos for your Instagram Carousels and monitoring if these posts get more reach compared to text-only posts.

How to get more views on your Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are an underrated content type to boost your Instagram reach. They might not be as relevant as Instagram Reels or Carousel posts to reach non-followers — because they don’t show up on the explore page — but they’re still crucial in reaching your existing followers.

(Now you can schedule and auto-post your Instagram Stories using Buffer!)

Here’s how to increase the reach of your Instagram Stories:

9: Use interactive elements in your Instagram Stories

The best part about Instagram Stories is they come with many interactive elements to engage your followers — question stickers, polls, music, links, GIFs, and Instagram is always coming up with more.

This widens the use cases of Instagram Stories exponentially. Instagram Stories can come in handy for:

• Asking your audience their queries on a specific topic
• Polling your followers on what they’d like to see from you
• Sharing the behind-the-scenes of your business with your audience
• Running fun quizzes to share knowledge about a topic in your niche
• Informing your audience about the new posts in your feed by resharing them on Instagram Stories
• Teasing an upcoming in-feed Carousel post, Instagram Reel, or product launch by using the countdown timer
• Forming a personal connection with your audience by sharing bits from your personal life (if you feel comfortable doing that)

Helpful reading: How to Quickly Create Great Instagram Stories with Templates

Here are examples of three Stories by Loe Haley, Katie Gatti Tassin, and Sarah Yudkin using various Instagram Stories’ features to communicate with their audience.

The more people interact with your Stories (reply in DMs, answer a poll, ask a question, tap a sticker), the higher the chance of the Instagram algorithm pushing your Stories at the top to your followers.

⚡ Remember: People watch Instagram Stories to know the creators they’re following. Share bits from your life and encourage your audience to communicate with you by regularly showing up on Instagram Stories.

10: Add text to your Instagram Stories

This pointer is most relevant for speaking to the camera on your Instagram Stories or showing something through your back camera.

Instagram users often view Instagram Stories during their lunch break, waiting in line in public spaces, or when they’re bored. They might not be able to hear your video, but they can read text. Instagram lets you add a live transcription on all your Instagram Stories — which you should use to make your Stories more accessible.

Also add the topic of your Instagram Story as text at the top so your followers immediately understand what subject you’re speaking on. Use text to keep them engaged, add a call-to-action, and add nuances you might’ve missed speaking on video.

These Instagram Stories from Shreya Pattar and Carleigh Bodrug are great examples of adding topics and a summary of what you’re speaking about in your Stories.

11: Let your Instagram Stories expire

Instagram Stories are only active for 24 hours. If you upload a Story every two hours from morning to night, there will always be at least one Story on your feed.

The issue is Instagram Story views can drop after your first Story of the day — especially if the first Story wasn’t engaging enough for your followers to click to the next Story. You might notice a sharp decline in Instagram Story views on your first Story for the day versus the tenth.

To reset the Instagram algorithm, let your Stories fully expire before you reupload another batch or even a single Instagram Story. Take a breather for at least a couple of hours (or 24 hours if you wish) before you upload another Instagram Story after seeing a decline in Instagram Story views.

You can also try doing this reset regardless of a downfall in your Instagram Story views. Observe if taking a couple of hours of pause in between increases your Story views. If yes, practice letting your Instagram Stories expire every day.

How to increase the reach of your Instagram profile

We covered many tips on increasing the reach of specific content types on Instagram. But these aren’t the only ways to multiply your Instagram reach. Here are three tips to increase the reach of your Instagram profile as a whole:

12: Optimize your name or username to be clear and search-friendly

It’s one of the easiest Instagram growth and reach strategies: Add keywords to your Instagram username and name.

(Then, use your Instagram bio to specify exactly what you do and who you serve.)

It might not be possible for you to add relevant keywords in both. You might want to keep your username consistent across social media platforms or have it be your name instead of your business’ name. But you can still use keywords in addition to your name to show what your Instagram profile is about.

For example, see the Instagram names of Emily Durham, Nisha Vora, and Sam Bently. They’ve added what they do and post about alongside their name.

You can add your profession, what you post about, or what you stand for in your Instagram name or username. Your profile will show up when people search for the keywords embedded in your name or username, so ensure you use something your audience often searches about.

⚠️ Warning: Deliver on the promise you make in your Instagram name or username. If you’ve added a “healthy recipes” keyword on your Instagram profile, ensure the majority of the Instagram content you create is of healthy recipes or surrounding the topic.

13: Collaborate with other value-matching creators

Collaborating with other creators in the same space who share your values is the easiest way to tap into a new audience. You can create a new reel together, go live at once, do account takeovers, and more. The ideas and creative potential is endless.

For example, Emily Durham and Blake Johnston collaborated to create a funny Instagram Reel about interviewing a finance bro.

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A post shared by Emily Durham | Career Coach 🇨🇦 (@emily.the.recruiter)

It was a fit because both creators have overlapping audiences who like to be entertained and informed. Their voices and tone are also similar — which only adds to the fun.

Partnerships aren’t limited to creator-with-another-creator, though. If you’re a small business, you can partner with influencers to review your product or share user-generated content too.

14: Post when your audience is online

There’s no one best time to post on Instagram to get more reach. Your audience might be online at a different time than you expect. The only surefire way to get your timing right is to check your Instagram insights to find your audience’s “most active times” and schedule your posts — whether they’re Carousels or Reels for that time only.

Instead of sticking to Instagram’s insights only, use Buffer’s analytics to find the best times to post. Why? Buffer doesn’t limited to telling you the best time to post, but also shares the best types of posts and post frequency.

The best part? It’s easy to understand and navigate the platform — even if you’ve never used social media management tools.

Apart from these actionable tips, there are many other questions and debates on best practices to follow to increase reach on Instagram. Here are their answers:

How often should you post on Instagram to increase reach?

In a Q&A on Instagram’s @creator account, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said the ideal posting frequency is “a couple of feed posts per week and a couple of Instagram Stories per day.”

Does posting more content on Instagram lead to an increase in reach? Yes. But you will eventually see a decline in reach if you don’t post high-quality content.

There are no hacks here. Aim for a number that’s realistic for you — whether that’s one post a week, to begin with. The key is to be consistent and avoid creator burnout.

Shannon McKinstrie, a social media trainer, emphasizes the focus should always be on creating high-quality content over shooting for quantity.

“Instagram's algorithm favors accounts with an engaged audience, and when you're focusing quantity, the quality of your content often takes a hit, and then next thing you know, your engagement rate plummets, and Instagram won't do you any favors when that happens. So it's best to focus on high-quality content that resonates with your audience and post about four times a week. Static posts last about three days in the newsfeed, and Reels can last for months if they perform well. So trust me...quality over quantity always.”

Some things that can help with speeding up content production:

• Batch-create content and schedule it in advance
• Repurpose your existing content into Instagram posts
• Repost your old high-performing content (yes, do this with no shame!)
• Find the “Use template” option available in some Reels to hop on trends easily
• Do episodic content (like “social media Fridays”) to talk about one theme consistently

It’s a good social media strategy to batch-create some of your monthly or weekly content and hop on trends the rest of the time. Leave some room for spontaneity.

A recurring series — like Carleigh Bodrug’s Scrappy Cooking episodes — is an excellent way to build a community, consistently generate content ideas, and create evergreen content.

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A post shared by Carleigh Bodrug (@plantyou)

Dominik, a social, creative-preneur, and SMM agency owner, agrees:

“Having some sort of recurring series that naturally makes people want to binge your content is something we see again and again blow people up recently. Any type of content where people feel like they’re part of something, in the middle of something, or anything that follows somewhat of a storyline is what definitely works pretty well right now. Of course, content like this takes a lot longer to create than your average 7-second trending audio Reel, but these things have a shelf life.”

⚡ Pro-tip: Use Buffer’s Instagram scheduler to automatically post your Reels, Stories, and Carousel posts. Schedule it for the right time, and never worry about manually posting something ever again.

Which content type should you prioritize on Instagram?

Instagram Carousels or Reels — which should you focus on creating more? It depends on what your audience wants.

There’s no one right cookie-cutter answer. Instagram’s algorithm monitors your followers’ activity and shows content they engage with. If your audience loves Carousel posts, it’ll show more of that to them in their Instagram feed. If they love videos, Instagram will show Reels.

When we asked Meagen Harriman, Instagram Strategist and Content Creator, if Carousels posts are essential for growing on Instagram, she said:

“I wouldn't say that it's vital, but it's a smart type of content to include in your strategy if you want a better chance of success. Everyone should try to use them and track their insights to see how they perform. If you try them out and find that they are not performing well and you don't like creating them - don't continue to use them!”

We also asked her about an ideal ratio of Reels to Carousels.

“Regarding the ratio of Reels vs. Carousels, that too will vary based on each account and each creator, but if I had to choose an "ideal" ratio, I would say for every two to three Reels, share one carousel,” she said.

Instagram analytics are your best friend here. Many insights, like most saved content, number of views, and number of shares, are available natively on the app. But if you’re serious about your Instagram marketing, use social media management tools like Buffer that provide detailed analytics for each post, custom reports based on metrics important to you, and overall performance monitoring.

Should you have an Instagram business or creator account?

An Instagram business profile is for brands who want to run ads. It’s meant to help businesses connect with their prospective customers. Creator accounts are for public figures, artists, and influencers. They’re suitable for brand collaborations and building a community.

Does it matter whether you have an Instagram business account or an Instagram creator account for gaining new followers and boosting your reach? Instagram says no.

Reach wouldn’t be affected by what type of account you have, so go ahead and set it to whichever one meets your requirements.

Does purchasing the blue checkmark your reach on Instagram?

Getting verified on Instagram is now easy. You can buy the blue checkmark using the app. (Note: Only individuals can do this, not brands, since it requires you to verify your identity.)

But does getting verified affect reach?

The head of Instagram said yes, faced backlash over it, and redacted what they said based on feedback received.
The short answer: Getting verified should have no impact on your reach.

Lia Haberman also tested it and said nothing about witnessing (or not witnessing) an increase in reach — although she did report it’s easier to stand out in notifications with a blue checkmark. But this benefit would only be available until purchasing the blue checkmark becomes second nature, and every other account has one.

That said, there’s no shame in buying the Instagram verified blue checkmark. Benefits like impersonification monitoring and live chat support are strong enough reasons to buy the badge if you want to.

What role do Instagram hashtags play in amplifying Instagram reach?

The relationship between reach and Instagram hashtags is still very will-they-won’t-they. Creator coach Jade says hashtags can still help with reach, but it’s not their primary purpose. The sole purpose of hashtags is to help you become more visible when Instagram users actively search for hashtags you’ve used.

Instagram’s creator account has many tips related to hashtags. They recommend using three to five relevant hashtags — any more won’t bring you any increase in distribution.

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A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

Use a mix of popular and niche hashtag categories to rank for your targeted hashtags. Free hashtag generators can help you find these hashtags, and Buffer’s hashtag manager can help you categorize and group hashtags together.

Should you use hashtags? Yes. But not more than five. And don’t spend a lot of time on a hashtag strategy because they aren’t the be-all-end-all for reach.

Does posting with a TikTok watermark decrease your reach on Instagram?

It might. Instagram has guided creators not to post Instagram Reels with a watermark. This doesn’t mean you can’t cross-post your TikTok videos or other video content. But export them raw first and write the same text using Instagram’s Reel editor.

It’s normal for your Instagram reach to fluctuate up and down

Remember, it’s normal for your Instagram reach to go up and down a bit. It’s not always about your content: Sometimes, the algorithm changes might affect your reach. Other times, it might be seasonal (like people spending less time on social media during the holidays).

Don’t put “increasing reach” as the sole focus of your social media marketing strategy. Increased reach is the output of listening to your audience, creating content that resonates with them, and aligning with Instagram’s algorithm.

The tips mentioned in this article can definitely help — but creating high-quality content and building a community is a prerequisite to them.

Finding the best time to post to Facebook can massively help your business stand out and reach more of your audience.

You will learn

• How to determine your best time to post on Facebook, based on your data and audience
• Overall best practices for Facebook timing
• The tools and tips to make sure you're giving yourself the best chance to raise the visibility of your Facebook content

Finding the best time to post to Facebook can massively help your business stand out and reach more of your audience—even as Facebook organic reach continues to decline.

But knowing the best times to post, can be a challenge and we’d love to help.

In this guide, we’ll share exactly how you can find the best time to post content on your Facebook Page for maximum reach, exposure, and engagement.

Ready to jump in?

Is there a best time to post on Facebook?

There probably isn’t a single best time to post on Facebook.

Plenty of studies that have attempted to uncover a ‘best time to post to Facebook’, Twitter, Instagram and almost every other social media marketing channel, with each study finding a wide range of results (we’ve even created our own studies here at Buffer).

According to a Buffer study, the best time to post to Facebook is between 1pm – 3pm on during the week and Saturdays. We also found that engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays.

The best time to post to Facebook is between 1pm – 3pm on during the week and Saturdays.

However, other studies uncovered that the best time to post to Facebook is:

• Thursdays and Fridays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. are the best times to post on Facebook [Hubspot]
• Thursday at 8 p.m.  [TrackMaven]
• 1–4 p.m. late into the week and on weekends [CoSchedule]
• Off-peak [Buzzsum0]

All of these studies can be helpful to point marketers in the right direction. But almost every study reveals a different ‘best time to post’ and, in reality, the best time to post depends on a number of factors that are specific to every business: What’s your industry? In what location is your audience based? When are they online? Are you sponsoring your post?

We’d love to flip the conversation and say that instead of looking for a universal ‘best time to post’, maybe we should be focusing specifically on when is the best time for your brand to post.

Looking for the best time to post on Instagram? Check out our guide here.

Why there’s no universal best time to post on Facebook

The content crush is truly upon us. There’s more content shared to Facebook than any of us could ever consume, and as such, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm helps to determine what is shown to us every time we open up Facebook.

On their Business blog, Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology, Brian Boland explains:

"On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and Page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on.

"As a result, competition in News Feed — the place on Facebook where people view content from their family and friends, as well as businesses — is increasing, and it’s becoming harder for any story to gain exposure in News Feed."

Whenever you post to Facebook, you’re essentially competing against at least 1,500 others post for a place in the News Feed and timing is only one of a number of factors that determines which content appears.

With this in mind, it’s also possible that the best time to post could also be the worst time.

Let’s say a study found the best time to publish is 6pm on a Friday, and every brand was to try and push content to their audience at that time, it’s likely that very few of those posts would be seen due to such high competition.

The same is true for saying off-peak times are best to publish – if all brands post off-peak then there will be more competition, and so they should go back to posting at peak time.

It’s all very muddled and there’s no clear answer. As such, I’d argue that there’s no specific time that’s best to post to Facebook.

So, when should you post to Facebook? A couple of strategies you can try

If there’s no ‘best’ time to post, how do you decide when to share your content to Facebook?

To answer this question, I feel like there are two approaches we could use:

1. When your data tells you
2. When it’s relevant

1. When your data tells you

When it comes to marketing and digital strategy, the best data is always your own. And, thankfully, Facebook has a ton of data available for all page owners and admins. A comprehensive understanding of your own audience on Facebook and how your content is performing will bring more success, than generic insights drawn from studies on a wide variety of Pages from a range of industries and brands.

2. When it’s relevant

This one is a little less scientific. But some content will work best in-the-moment or at a time when it’s most relevant. A great example of this is the content many sports teams share to Facebook to update fans on the scores or breaking news.

For your business, the same can also be true. Some pieces of content will perform best when they’re relevant. For example, the best time to share content related to the launch of your new product tends to be directly following the announcement. Or if you had an advert on a local TV station, it’s best to create and share social content around the same time that it’s broadcast.

How to use Insights to find your best time to post on Facebook

If you’re looking to find the best time to post on Facebook, the first best place to start is Facebook Insights.

To see your Page Insights, click Insights at the top of your Page:

Once you’re in the Page Insights dashboard, there’s a wealth of data available to you. For this post, though, we’re going to dive into a couple of specific areas to help you discover when to post your content.

How to find out when your fans are online

From the Insights dashboard, select Posts in the left-hand column menu. This will take you to a detailed breakdown of the days and time your fans are most active on Facebook: 

This chart shows the average times across the week. You can hover over each individual day to see an overlay of how that day looks vs the averages. Here’s an example of how Sunday’s tend to look for our Page (the dark blue line is data for Sunday):

What does this data tell us?

Here at Buffer, we can see our audience is online 7 days per week and that there’s no specific day where we see a spike. We can also see that from around 9 am in the morning the number of people online is gradually increasing up until around 4 pm where the number begins to decline slightly.

There are plenty of ways to interpret this data. But, to me, this would suggest our best times to post are during the work day between the hours of 9 am – 5 pm when our audience are most active on Facebook. I’d recommend testing a variation of times between those hours to see what works and if there’s a best time at all.

Another experiment we’ve been trying off the back of this data is posting at off-peak times. Brian, our social media manager, has recently been posting when less of our audience is online and we’ve been seeing some success between 3 am – 5 am.

How to find posting times of successful posts

Facebook Insights records reach and engagement figures for every post you share to your Facebook Page. This data can be found in the same place as the data for when your fans are online. Head to your Page Insights, click Posts and below the graph showing times your fans are online, you’ll see ‘All Posts Published’.

Here, in the ‘Published’ column, you can see the date and time when each post was published to your Facebook Page. With this data you’re looking out for any trends regarding the times. For example, do posts published around a specific time tend to receive more reach or engagement.

Note: If your posts are Sponsored or Boosted (like many of ours in the above screenshot), this could also skew your data a little as these posts are likely to gain significantly more reach than organic posts regardless or the time they’re published.

What does this data tell us?

Personally, I think our data on the Buffer Facebook Page is pretty inconclusive at the moment. It’s clear that posts published between around 10 am – 12 pm seem to do well, as do posts at around 5 pm. But I’d love to test a bunch more variables before making any clear conclusions.

Putting your data into action

Once you’ve identified your best times to post to Facebook, it’s worth testing those assumptions in the real world. One of the easiest ways to do this is by scheduling your Facebook posts—this saves you from having to open up Facebook and manually post at each of your best times.

Buffer offers a simple and intuitive way to schedule your Facebook posts at the ideal times. Here’s a quick guide on how to test your best posting times using Buffer:

1. Connect your Facebook Page to Buffer

First, head over to your Buffer dashboard.

Then, if you’re on the free Individual Plan, click the Connect More button at the bottom left of your dashboard and then click Page or Group under the Facebook option.

If you’re on a paid plan (Awesome, Business, Enterprise), click on the  Add a Social Account button at the top left of your dashboard and then choose Facebook Page or Facebook Group.

2. Set up a new scheduling time

Once you’ve connected your Facebook Page to Buffer, you can set your ideal posting times as a schedule and Buffer will automatically schedule your content for those best times.

To set up a new schedule, select the social account you’d like to customize the posting schedule for on the left hand side of your dashboard and then click on Settings > Posting Schedule.

From the drop down menu, underneath “Add a new posting time”, choose the day or days you’d like to add the time to. In addition to being able to select specific days, you can also choose to add a posting time to “Every Day”, “Weekdays” or “Weekends”. Then, select the time you’d like to add and then click Add Posting Time.

Once a time has been added to your schedule, it can be modified by changing the hours and/or minutes. Times can be deleted from your schedule by hovering over the time and clicking the  X icon.

3. Add content to your queue

Now you’re all set and ready to start scheduling content.

When you’re scheduling posts, you don’t need to think about the date and time it should be published, all you need to do is add it to your Queue and it will automatically be placed into the next available time slot and published as part of your usual posting flow.

Try Buffer for free now with a 14-day trial.

Focus on sharing great content (as well as the best times)

When one of your Facebook friends gets married, the chances are you’ll see their wedding photos stuck to the top of your News Feed all day, regardless of the time they’re posted. This happens because wedding photos, whether you like them or not, are great content and as soon as they’re posted, a bunch of people rush to like, share and comment on them.

If you want to succeed on Facebook, your content will be just as important as the timing.

YouTube joined the short-form video race with Shorts, its answer to the vertical video format popularized by TikTok. Now, creators are encouraged to publish short-form content, whether adapting their longer videos or creating exclusively shorter videos.

Part of growing on any platform is figuring out ways to ease the content creation process so you can focus on the creative side, and Shorts is no exception. In this article, we’ll walk you through one aspect of easing your process: scheduling.

How to schedule YouTube Shorts (in Buffer)

Buffer now supports scheduling for YouTube Shorts — yay! It’s really easy and free. Follow these simple steps to share your videos.

Step 1: Connect your YouTube account to your Buffer account

Open up your Buffer account on a desktop or your app to get started – and if you don’t have one, sign up here.

Step 2: Select the "Add Channels” button on the bottom left-hand side of your dashboard.

You have the option to connect to a variety of social platforms and marketing channels within Buffer.

Step 3: Choose Youtube from the options

Clicking on YouTube will take you to your YouTube account, where you need to permit Buffer to post on your behalf.

Step 4: Authorize Buffer to connect to your Youtube Channel

Once you do that, you’ve officially connected YouTube as a channel.

And that’s it! You’re ready to start scheduling Youtube Shorts.

Step 5: Upload and schedule your YouTube Shorts

Once you’ve connected your YouTube account, you can start sharing your Shorts. In your Buffer account, select your profile picture with the YouTube logo in the left corner, then click ‘Create Post’ or choose one of the pre-populated time slots.

This will open up the Composer, where you can drag and drop your video from your desktop into the Composer.

Buffer will show you all the details you typically need to add for YouTube videos – title, age restrictions, category, visibility, and so on.

After you’ve uploaded your video and added all the details, you have several scheduling options.

If you want to publish it immediately, you can share your video instantly. If you already have other content queued up, you can add it to the start or the end of your queue. Or, you can schedule it for a custom time outside your regular posting schedule.

Alternatively, you can save it as a draft if you want one of your teammates to review it first or if you want to come back and work on it later.

Why schedule in Buffer vs. directly on YouTube?

You might be wondering what gives Buffer an edge over native scheduling. Scheduling in Buffer allows you:

• See all your content in one place, no matter what platforms you publish on
• Plan campaigns holistically
• See an overview of your upcoming content laid out in a calendar
• Reschedule your content when needed with ease

Best of all, you can share the same video to other connected channels that have short-form video available – Reels and TikTok!

How to schedule to YouTube (on YouTube)

Here’s how to schedule your YouTube Shorts directly on the YouTube platform.

Step 1: Sign in to your account

To start scheduling from YouTube, sign in to your YouTube Studio account. In the top-right, click CREATE > Upload videos > Select Files.

To schedule a video's publication time, you have to first set the video as "scheduled" or "private" on the upload page.

Step 2: Select your video and enter the details

Select the file you want to upload and enter your video details.

Step 3: Schedule your video

On the “Visibility” tab, select Schedule.

Set the date, time, and time zone where your video will be published.

Then, click Schedule.

Optional: Change your YouTube Shorts schedule anytime

You can edit your schedule any time you want by following these steps:

• Select Content from the left Menu

• Select the drop-down on the video you want to edit in the “Visibility” column. To change the scheduled publish time, ensure the visibility is Private, choose the new time under “Schedule”, then Schedule.

• To publish the video immediately, select Save or publish and set the visibility to Public.

• Click PUBLISH and you're set!

Why should you schedule your YouTube content?

YouTube is another platform to distribute video content that you create elsewhere and reach another audience — by scheduling, you can plan out this kind of repurposing.

Scheduling is also a good strategy if you’re batch-creating content. And if you’re short on time. Plus, to post at optimal times when people are online.

Here are the top three reasons you should be scheduling your YouTube content.

1. More than any other reason, scheduling allows you to build consistency with content creation, which can be powerful for growing an audience.
2. Scheduling allows you to focus on planning and having content ready in advance – even for days when you can’t get to creating.
3. YouTube scheduling helps you stay organized with your posting, so you can focus on what matters most – growing your platform.

Whether you’ve been creating YouTube videos or just considering the platform, there’s no better time than now to start publishing.

What should you schedule on YouTube Shorts?

Worried you don’t have anything to post on YouTube Shorts? Don’t be! There are many ways to get over the initial bump of content ideas.

You can use Buffer’s inbuilt AI Assistant if you find yourself stuck in a creative rut and unable to come up with ideas at any stage of scheduling. Use it to generate:

• Ideas tailored to your account, as long as you provide it basic information about your business and target audience

• Titles based on your description of your finished video and fresh video ideas that are tailored to your account

• Video caption ideas and hashtag suggestions

You can also repurpose existing content to populate your YouTube Shorts page by reposting your best Reels and TikToks. Repurposing in this way allows you take content that you already know has performed well or resonated with your audience, and putting in front of a new group.

As long as you’ve created content somewhere, anywhere, you have content ready to go live.

Consistency is key to your growth as a creator

There’s no better partner than Buffer as you explore and create for YouTube Shorts. Thanks to the interconnectedness offered on our platform, you can easily manage all your short-form content from one place and any other social platforms you might be active on. This way, you stay consistent and focus on your goals while your hard work goes out to your audience.

We did our own testing, asked our creator friends, and snooped around in Facebook groups to find these 30+ free Instagram tools.

These tools will help you research, create, and schedule high-quality content that inspires and engages your audience. You’ll pull powerful insights from analytics to collaborate better, optimize and grow your Instagram, and win more revenue. Visually plan your content calendar and make your profile a "must-follow" with Buffer's suite of Instagram scheduling and analytics tools.

Free tools for planning and scheduling Instagram content

On Instagram, success often comes from consistently publishing content that interests your audience. These tools will help you create the right type of content, and publish consistently for better results.

1. SparkToro

SparkToro is an audience research tool that helps you learn who your audience engages with, and what they talk about online.

With its free plan, you’ll discover the topics that interest your audience, and the language and hashtags your community uses. That way, you can generate tons of high-performing content ideas based on real data.

2. Analisa

Analisa is an AI Instagram tool that helps you analyze tons of competitor data. You can learn how often the top influencers in your space post per day to guide your content calendar.

Although its data is limited in the free plan, you can use it to see some of your competitors’ top-performing posts — and mine content ideas from them.

3. Buffer’s Content Calendar

Schedule and see your entire content plan for weeks or months!

The visibility the calendar provides will help you spot and fill gaps in your content strategy. That way, you’ll make sure you’re planning in advance, and consistently sharing content. Buffer will also show you the best times to post for your unique Instagram account. So that you’re publishing content at the right time.

Free tools for creating Instagram content

Even the best creators need help sometimes. These content creation tools will give you access to free, easy-to-use templates for your feed, Reels, and Stories.

4. Buffer’s AI Assistant

The second AI tool for Instagram on the list, Buffer’s AI Assistant helps you generate text for your content and captions in seconds.

From trending topics to quotes and industry-specific topics, use Buffer’s AI Assistant to shorten your content creation time without sacrificing quality.

5. UNUM

UNUM is a visual planner app that allows you to see what your profile grid will look like after you post your next few photos. You can also edit your photos and videos, draft your caption and hashtags, and schedule your posts with the app.

UNUM has Instagram analytics tools and scheduling capabilities, but we like it for its design templates.

With its free plan, you get 18 grids to plan your posts and 500 photo and video uploads per month. There are paid options available, which give you access to more planning grids and a higher upload limit.

6. Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform that’s wildly popular with busy creators for its versatility.

The website features templates that come in every format you need, including your Instagram feed and Stories. It also has easy-to-use drag-and-drop features, so you don’t have to be a graphic designer to make quality assets.

Canva also comes with a stock library full of photos, animations, music, and videos to help you create ads and Reels.

Canva is free to use, but its paid plan unlocks even more design features, like the ability to create a brand tool kit and access to the best designs.

7. Unsplash

Unsplash is a free photo library with over three million free-to-use photos.

If you don’t want to use your own photos for Instagram, you can find high-quality stock photos on Unsplash. The best part? You don’t need to attribute most of the photos you use. Here’s what their license page says:

“Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.”

8. Unfold

The Unfold app is a Squarespace product with over 200 templates to create beautiful Instagram Stories.

Unfold comes with built-in fonts (so you’re not limited by Instagram’s selections) and photo-editing tools.

Unfold is free to use, but its paid plan unlocks even more design templates and features.

9. Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark)

Anyone familiar with Adobe Spark will be thrilled to learn that it’s been improved and rebranded as Creative Cloud Express.

This tool is Adobe’s solution for well-designed social media templates with easy-to-use, drag-and-drop features. It’s also a good alternative to expensive photo-editing apps thanks to its basic editing features like resizing, background removal, and file conversion — go from JPG to PNG or from PNG to JPG in a snap.

There are thousands of templates available in Adobe’s library, in addition to fonts, stock music, and a limited selection of stock images from Adobe’s library.

Adobe Creative Cloud Express is free, but the paid plan gives you access to even more assets, music, and design features.

10. StoriesAds

StoriesAds is a tool specifically designed to help you make high-quality Instagram Stories (and vertical videos).

It provides several templates so that you don’t have to create a video from scratch. You’ll also get a prompt to customize your video so it doesn’t look like a template.

Its website states that the tool is “Free for a limited time,” so you might have to pay to use its marketing tools in the future.

11. Stories Creator

Buffer’s Stories Creator is a powerful tool to create high-quality, eye-catching Instagram Stories to help you grow.

If you’re short on time or just starting out in design, you’ll love the simple-to-use interface (and the templates!).

Start by uploading an image you want to use (you can also choose a solid background color). Upload your logo or any other branded assets. Then, type a message using any font from Buffer’s font library—letting you move away from Instagram’s limited choices.

12. Remix

Remix by Buffer lets you easily transform content from a link, tweet, or Shopify product into beautiful Instagram graphics.

Imagine your customers tag you in tweets about how amazing your products are. Remix lets you grab those tweets, turn them into well-designed image assets, and post them on your Instagram feed. This means you can share positive customer feedback on multiple social media platforms at once.

Plus, it’s a free and simple tool to use. All you need to do is download the app, paste in the link you want to share, and the tool creates a well-designed asset for you.

13. Capcut

Capcut is an Instagram video editor that allows you to add cuts, effects, transitions, stickers, and animated text to your videos before your upload on Instagram.

You can create videos for your Reels, and download them in 4k resolution using this tool.

14. Adobe Podcast (Enhance)

Do you have trouble with the quality of your audio? Adobe Podcast’s Enhance feature can take your audio from sounding like nails on glass to being rich and crystal clear.

Then you can combine your professional-sounding audio with your video using a video editing tool.

15. Quillbot

If you struggle to come up with the perfect caption for your Instagram posts, Quillbot can help.

Just spill all your raw thoughts into the interface and click ‘Rephrase’ till it spits back a caption you like.

Free tools to increase engagement and get new followers

Take control of your Instagram presence to increase post engagement, drive traffic to your website and widen your customer base. These tools will help you do it.

16. Buffer

Buffer is an all-encompassing social media management tool designed to help individuals, marketers and small business owners schedule posts for their social media accounts across multiple platforms.

The tool lets you plan and monitor social media campaigns, and respond to user comments and DMs. Buffer also gives you customized recommendations to grow on Instagram.  

The best part about Buffer is that it’s simple and easy to use — plus, it’s the most affordable third-party Instagram scheduling tool out there.

17. Start Page

If you want to optimize your link-in-bio for a mobile-first experience, Buffer Start Page gives you a customizable microsite (a landing page for all your important links).

Start Page is one of the best Instagram tools to have if you’re interested in building a brand that grows beyond Instagram. You can link to your other social networks, your store, and other important pages.

It’s perfect for businesses on Instagram that don’t have a website yet. It’s also a great solution for businesses that are in the process of rebranding or updating their website, so you don’t lose out on valuable traffic while your main site is down.

18. Creator Studio

Creator Studio is Meta’s (Instagram’s parent company) own content management tool and any professional account can get access to it.

You can create, schedule and manage posts, and find monetization opportunities from existing content.

That said, there are some limitations to Creator Studio. There is no dynamic asset control, so Creator Studio doesn’t automatically compress incorrectly sized images to fit the platform (unlike other tools for Instagram management and posting directly in the app).

These limitations may disappear over time, but for now, Creator Studio remains a good solution for managing in-feed, photo-based digital marketing content.

19. Ads Manager

Ads Manager is the central portal for managing paid advertising campaigns across Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network).

This tool lets you create Instagram ads, build campaigns, manage campaigns, and benchmark and monitor the results with all the Instagram growth metrics. It also lets you experiment with A/B testing, dynamic creative, and audience segmentation in order to refine your advertising strategy.

You don’t have to pay to use this tool or configure it for your Instagram, but you’ll need to pay to run ad campaigns.

20. Hashtag Expert

Hashtag Expert uses AI to find the best hashtags for your audience. That way, you can create posts that show up for the hashtags that potential ideal Instagram followers follow.

Start by entering one hashtag, and the software will generate a group of similar high-performing Instagram hashtags you can use in your posts. You can copy multiple hashtags at once to batch upload in a post’s caption.

21. Gleam

Gleam is a marketing app designed to help you manage contests and giveaways online.

We like this app because it offers a free plan to host an unlimited number of contests.

Gleam has paid plans for any Instagram professional account that wants access to more features.

Free tools to find Instagram influencers and UGC

Influencer marketing places your products and services in front of more eyes. The problem is, identifying the right influencers for your audience can be a challenge. These tools will help you find influencers, manage tagged content, and connect you with content creators who love your brand.

22. Brand Collab Manager

Brand Collab Manager is a native Meta tool that helps connect brands with influencers.

It’s free for Instagram and Facebook users, but there are conditions you need to fulfill in order to qualify. One of them is “have an authentic, established presence on Instagram from Meta. This also includes maintaining a sufficient follower base.”

There’s no clear number for what an ‘established presence’ and ‘sufficient follower base’ means, but old conditions were 1,000 followers and at least one of the following: 15,000 post engagements in the last 60 days, 180,000 minutes viewed in the last 60 days, or30,000 one-minute views for three-minute videos in the last 60 days. In addition, you must be the page admin for the page you are submitting, and your page must be located in an eligible country.

One of the biggest benefits of the Brand Collab Manager is that brands can easily research influencers and creators that fit their audience. The tool also lets brands manage influencer contracts and payments, along with campaign performance.

23. ShortStack

ShortStack helps businesses manage contests on social media — particularly Instagram.

But what makes ShortStack stand out is its tool to manage user-generated content (UGC). Once you run a contest, the app will log every tag from users across the platform, so it’s easy to find photos and videos from users that hype your brand instead of relying on the Instagram algorithm.

Its free plan lets you host an unlimited number of contests and collect up to 100 entries. ShortStack also has paid plans if you want to collect more entries and get more advanced features.

24. Repost for Instagram

Repost for Instagram lets you repost an Instagram post on your Instagram account with just a few taps, while also giving credit to the post owner.

Before you repost any photos or videos, remember to get permission from the post owner and give them credit in your caption. Not only is this required by Instagram’s terms of use, but it's also doing right by the amazing creators and businesses on Instagram.

To get permission for reposting, you can send the post owner a DM, comment on the post, or connect via email.

If you are using the Buffer mobile app — Android or iOS — you can also easily add a repost into your Buffer queue.

25. squarelovin

squarelovin is a social media marketing app designed specifically to help e-commerce brands.

The app has some analytics capabilities, but we love it for its user-generated content (UGC) solutions. Not only will the app comb through Instagram to find any posts and videos your brand is tagged in, but it also helps you turn UGC into shoppable content on your feed.

26. Storyclash.ai

Storyclash.ai is a visual creator discovery tool. It uses AI to find creators who fit a description — ‘woman in blue dress on an boat’, for example.

With Storyclash, you can find and collaborate with authentic influencers who already produce the kind of content you like.

Free tools for monitoring your Instagram analytics

Analytics are the secret sauce to refining your marketing strategy. These tools help you see trends in user engagement with your content so you can see what’s working, what’s not working, and where you need to shift resources.

27. Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights is an in-app analytics feature for anyone with an Instagram business or creator account.

It shows you important metrics, like engagement rates, audience growth, and follower demographics.

Here’s how to access your Instagram Insights:

1. Log in to (or create) your Instagram for Business account.
2. Go to your profile.
3. Tap the Insights button.

Note that you’ll only be able to see insights for the period of time you’ve had a professional account. For example, if you’ve had a personal account for five years but just made the switch to a professional account one month ago, Instagram Insights will only have information from the past month.

28. Buffer Insights and Analytics

Buffer is a free app to plan and schedule social media content, but it also comes with an in-depth analytics tool to help you monitor your content’s performance.

The tool organizes every key metric you want to measure—including likes, comments, shares, tags, clicks, reach, and more—into one clean and simple-to-use dashboard. Insights are presented in beautiful graphics that you can screenshot and use in your reporting. It’s also one of the only free options on the market to offer insights on Instagram Stories.

29. Keyhole

Keyhole is an analytics tool that lets you automate your reporting process.

You can also customize a dashboard to show the information that’s most important to you and your stakeholders.  

Keyhole is free with a 7-day trial (but you don’t need to put down a credit card). We recommend using the time to conduct a comprehensive audit of your Instagram, finding out exactly what’s working and what could be refined.

30. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is primarily used to monitor channel growth and track the performance of your Instagram content.

This app features a clean and simple dashboard that automatically calculates engagement rates (impressions, likes, comments, reach, etc.) and percentage of change over time.

You can enjoy a free version of Iconosquare for 14 days. After that, you will be offered a paid version of the app. Use the first 14 days to pull as much information as possible, like best times to post, audience demographics, and top content.

31. Buffer’s UTM Generator

A UTM generator will help you tag your links so that you can understand which campaigns are driving traffic or sales to your website.

You can use the generator to tag special promotions, influencers you collaborate with, and much more!

Just remember to think of your audience when you create your tags — they can see it in their browser’s URL bar!

How far can free Instagram tools take you?

Quite far, if we’re being honest.

Pricing often indicates quality, so it makes sense to wonder what the catch with free tools is. But most free tools (we can speak for Buffer, at least) allow creators, marketers, and small businesses access to some features you’d only expect from a paid tool.

The major limitations would be around the number of channels you can connect, how far out you can schedule posts, the number of credits you get, and advanced features and analytics.

For example, Buffer's Instagram First Comment feature which allows you to schedule the first comment after your post (including hashtags and/or other information), is only available on paid plans. But you can add location tags to scheduled posts, and shorten links with our integrated link shortener for free.

A good rule of thumb is to consider: how important a paid feature is to your business, if there’s a workaround to get that functionality for free, and if the time and mental energy required to implement that workaround is worth it compared to a tool’s fee. A little help is better than no help at all, but if you’re often hitting blocks with your free tools, then it’s time to upgrade so you can grow your small business on Instagram without limitations.

More than 500 million users now use Instagram Stories daily and posting your feed content to Stories is a great way to boost reach and engagement.

This feature lets you quickly share a post as a sticker to your story for your friends and followers to see anytime you find something in your feed that inspires you.

How to share feed posts to Instagram Stories

To share feed posts to stories:

1. Tap the paper airplane button below the post (like you would to send a direct message)
2. You’ll then see an option on the following menu to “Add post to your story”
3. Tap it to see the feed post as a sticker with a customized background ready to share to your story. You can move, resize or rotate the photo or video. You can also use drawing tools or add text and stickers.

Any post shared to Stories will include a link back to the original post and include the original poster’s username.

Only posts from public Instagram accounts can be shared to Stories. If you have a public account and would like to opt-out from letting people share your posts to stories, you can do so within Instagram’s settings.

How brands can use this feature

Many brands and influencers already use stories as a way to drive attention to their latest feed and promote their latest posts. This process allows users to directly link to their latest feed posts, rather than taking a screenshot of a post and manually adding it to stories.

This feature enable brands to use stories as a way to cross-promote their feed posts to their audience on stories — people who may have potentially missed the post in the feed.

It's similar to Twitter’s quote tweet functionality, where users can share content from the feed, but also add their own thoughts and context around it.

This feature helps to better connect the feed to stories as well as providing a way for users to re-share some of their favorite Instagram content in a more public way than sharing with a couple of friends via a direct message.

What tools do you use to get your online marketing work done?

Can you do all the same work of a digital marketer, and do it for free?

The list of tools you use—often referred to as a marketing stack—probably covers a variety of different uses and needs, everything from social media marketing to content to email and lots more.

Is it possible to have all these great tools without paying a cent?

It was a fun challenge to come up with a way to build a $0 marketing stack, to find free alternatives to popular paid tools and services. I’m grateful for all the amazing companies out there that offer such value for so little. Here’s the list I came up with for free alternatives to paid tools. I’d love to know what you think!

What’s in the stack?

The $0 Marketing Stack: Free Alternatives to Paid Tools

For a quick overview, here are the tools I found that seemed to be great, free options for some popular paid services.

1. Buffer
2. Canva
3. Google Analytics
4. Hotjar
5. Simply Measured
6. Open Site Explorer
7. Charlie
8. HubSpot Email Marketing and HubSpot CRM
9. WordPress
10. Crowdfire
11. Medium
12. Wistia
13. SumoMe
14. Segment
15. Peek
16. Google Scholar
17. Google Trends
18. Blog Topic Generator
19. Content Idea Generator
20. Readability
21. Hemingway
22. Onpage Optimization Tool
23. After the Deadline
24. Readability Test Tool
25. Save Publishing
26. Followerwonk
27. Latest.is
28. Tweriod
29. Must Be Present
30. Conversation Score
31. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report
32. LikeAlyzer
33. Fanpage Karma
34. Facebook Page Barometer
35. Quicksprout
36. Website Grader
37. SharedCount
38. Newsle
39. Rapportive
40. MentionMapp
41. Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

1. Social Media Scheduling: Buffer

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar

Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing all in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.

How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and to schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.

We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read then add.

Also free:

• Planly (free for 1 user and 2 social channels)

2. Design: Canva

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign

Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.

How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.

Also free:

• Pablo
• Gimp
• Pic Monkey

3. Real-time Analytics: Google Analytics

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat

Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.

How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.

Also free:

• Go Squared (free for the first 100 visitors and 1,000 data points)
• MixPanel (free for 25,000 events per month)

4. Website optimization: Hotjar

Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg

Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.

How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.

Also free:

• Inspectlet (free for 100 recorded sessions)
• SumoMe Content Analytics

5. Reports: Simply Measured

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports

Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.

Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:

1. Twitter Follower Report
2. Twitter Customer Service Analysis
3. Facebook Fan Page Report
4. Facebook Content Analysis
5. Facebook Competitive Analysis
6. Facebook Insights Report
7. Instagram User Report
8. Social Traffic Report
9. Traffic Source Report
10. Google+ Page Report
11. Vine Analysis

Phew! That’s a lot of reports!

How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight on where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Also free:

• Followerwonk
• SumAll’s free version

6. SEO: Open Site Explorer

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro

is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords and competitors.

How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.

Also free:

• SEO Book
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Keyword Tool

7. CRM: Charlie

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SalesForce

A lot of the best CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) help you stay abreast of your current and future customers. Think of a futuristic address book. The best ones are loaded with features and information. Charlie is a bit of a quick-and-easy hack to get to know a person really well.

How to use Charlie: Intended as a tool to help you prep for meeting new people, Charlie gives you a full run-down of a person—social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc.—by looking at your upcoming calendar or running an email address. If you’re wanting info on a single person ad-hoc, simply enter their email address into Charlie, and they’ll tell you everything.

Also free:

• HubSpot’s Free CRM
• Norbert

8. Lead generation and pop up tool: HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM

HupSpot Marketing Free allows marketers to easily generate email leads from their website with a free pop up tool.

How to use HubSpot Marketing Free: You can gain a lot of great information about your leads from HubSpot Marketing Free. This pop up tool quickly gathers email addresses from your website and provides key data points like employer and which pages your leads have visited. And if you’re wondering which pages are converting at higher rates than others, it can help with that, too.

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Cirrus Insight

Also free:

• Hello Bar
• SumoMe

9. Landing Pages: WordPress

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Unbounce, LeadPages

For those who are running their website or blog via WordPress, perhaps the fastest and easiest way to set up a landing page is simply to create a new page. If you blog with WordPress, the blog content you create falls into Posts. The static content for landing pages—“Download our ebook,” “Sign up for our webinar,” etc.—can be made quite easily via Pages.

How to use WordPress: Build a new landing page in WordPress, and use this as the focal point of your social media ad campaign or your social media updates. Certain plugins like WooDojo even let you hide the content in your sidebar for particular pages, which could be a great option for minimizing the look of your page.

Also free:

• Unbounce free plan (includes Unbounce branding)

10. Twitter management: Crowdfire

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Crowdfire premium

Twitter has been so generous to open up its app to developers to make some really great tools. Sure, you can manage your Twitter profile directly via Twitter (an always free option), or you can try out tools like Just Unfollow, which allows for bulk sorting and filtering of your followers, along with insights into the demographics of the people in your audience.

How to use Just Unfollow: One way that many experts recommend to keep your Twitter following count in line with your Twitter follower count is to routinely check to see which accounts are following you back and to remove the ones that aren’t. With Just Unfollow, you can do this quickly and easily all from one page—and even whitelist the unfollowers whom you’d like to keep following.

Also free:

• Tweepi
• Manage Flitter

11. Blogging: Medium

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Ghost

It feels a bit funny to list Medium as a tool (it’s really more of a network or social media site), but when it comes to starting a new blog as cheaply and quickly as possible, Medium can’t be beat.

How to use Medium: Many young startups kick off their blog at Medium, where they enjoy a built-in audience from the start and have networking tools to help their content spread. Plus, one of Medium’s newest features is an email newsletter where you can automatically get in touch with people who follow you by sharing your latest articles.

Also free:

• WordPress.com
• Blogger

12. Video: Wistia

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Wistia Pro, Vimeo Pro

Once you’ve created an amazing video to share on social media or your website, where will you put it? The default seems to be YouTube, which is quick and easy but comes with less control and potentially some unrelated ads or suggestions. Wistia is made for marketers’ videos because the player keeps people on your page—or sends them precisely where you want them to go next.

How to use Wistia: After you’ve uploaded your video, you can hop into the settings and add things like call-to-action buttons or email capture formsat the end of the video. Wistia also makes it easy to view heatmaps and viewing trends of your videos, like how far most people get through your video, when they pause or click, etc.

Also free:

• YouTube
• Vimeo

13. Share buttons: SumoMe Share

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Easy Social Share Buttons

The ubiquitous share buttons you see along the side of blog posts, many of them come from SumoMe. The any-website buttons (you don’t have to run a WordPress blog to use them) are part of the SumoMe suite of website products. If you’re okay with some SumoMe branding, you can add the buttons for free to any page and customize the networks that appear by default.

How to use SumoMe Share: SumoMe gives you a lot of control over the appearance of the share buttons, both in which buttons are displayed and where on the page they’ll sit. One of the great features also is that they look good on mobile devices, so you maintain a great way to encourage sharing no matter where your audience is reading.

Also free:

• Digg Digg (what we use on the Buffer blog)
• Flare

14. Analytics: Segment

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Usability Tools

I’ve heard Segment described as the one and only interface you’ll ever need for all your third-party apps. And I sure do see it recommended a lot. From what I can gather, Segment makes it easy for anyone—engineer or not—to connect new software to your website; once the Segment snippet is added, you can connect other apps like MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc. just by clicking around in your Segment dashboard. Segment handles all the visitor data for you.

How to use Segment: Rob Sobers put together a really handy guide to how he’s set up Segment for his SaaS business.

15. Testing: Peek

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Optimizely, User Testing

When it comes to understanding how people are using your website—A/B testing, user testing, that sort of thing—there are some really fantastic paid options that can give you lots of insights. There’s also Peek, a free tool from User Testing that lets you see and hear a five-minute video of a real person using your website.

How to use Peek: For first-time insights, you may wish to have a person go  through your website or blog from the home page. Later on, you might ask for someone to test out a certain flow through your website by starting someone on a landing page. The tests take about 2-3 days to complete, and you can run three Peek tests every month.

Also free:

• Optimizely free plan

Even More Free Marketing Tools!

We went hunting for even more top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing to benchmarking and analyzing. Here’s hoping you find the perfect shortcut for your work!

Free Marketing Research Tools

We’ll start at the beginning: researching topics, sites and ideas.

16. Google Scholar

I don’t know why more people don’t talk about Google Scholar, but I love this tool for researching science-heavy articles and digging into emerging studies. It limits your search to articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Pair it with a Google Alert to get amazing research on your topics of interest delivered right to your inbox.

17. Google Trends

See what the world is searching for and how interest in concepts has changed over time with Google Trends. For example, I feel like I’m suddenly hearing about “growth hacker” and “growth hacking.” Are you, too? I input those terms into Google Trends and it looks like there is a sudden new interest in the concept.

18. Blog Topic Generator

Stumped for ideas? Give HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator a few nouns that describe your content areas and it’ll spit out a week’s worth of post ideas.

19. Content Idea Generator

Enter a keyword for a fun, irreverent suggestion from Portent’s Content Idea Generator.

Free Reading and Writing Tools

These tools offer help with readability, keyword density and spelling and grammar.

20. Readability

Drag the Readability bookmarklet to your toolbar to convert any content on the web into a simple, easy-to-read format with an estimate of how long it’ll take you. Also check out the other bookmarklet options here, including one that sends longer content to your Kindle to read later.

21. Hemingway

Simple, clear writing – we all strive for it. Get a little help with Hemingway. Paste a passage into the app and you’ll get an analysis that  highlights overly dense passages, unnecessary adverbs and more.

22. Onpage Optimization Tool

This free onpage optimization tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas is a one-stop look at what’s going on a specific page of your site. Toss in a URL and see stats on keyword density, internal and external links and more.

23. After the Deadline

A Chrome extension, After the Deadline checks spelling, style, and grammar wherever you go on the web.

24. Readability Test Tool

Enter a web address or a block of text into the Readability Test Tool for an easy-to-understand analysis of your content. This tools measures a ton of different readability scores, and does a good job of explaining each one.

Free Twitter Marketing Tools

These tools help you maximize your Twitter presence, from timing to sharing to analysis.

25. Save Publishing

Instantly find passages under 140 characters with Save Publishing, a handy bookmarklet that highlights tweetable passages on your screen. Post to Twitter with one click (or Buffer simply by highlighting a passage and clicking the Buffer extension)

26. Followerwonk

We hope you’ve already heard of Followerwonk, one of Buffer’s many partners in amazing social media data. In addition to offering lots of super useful data about timing on Twitter, Followerwonk also has some other neat Twitter features, like the ability to compare followers of different accounts like so.

27. Latest.is

It’s not breaking news. It’s not nonsense hashtags. Latest.is is an automatically generated list of interesting links on Twitter, surfaced through an algorithm that focuses on “the people that always tweet the best links – first” (no, it doesn’t tell you who they are).

28. Tweriod

Tweriod analyzes your account to show you the best times to tweet for more exposure and replies. Bonus: Once you get your peak times, you can sync your Buffer account with them!

29. Must Be Present

A free tool from Sprout Social, Must Be Present calculates how often and how quickly you respond to comments and questions on Twitter (in exchange for your email address and a bit of other info).

Free Facebook Marketing Tools

These tools analyze one or more Facebook pages to deliver an analysis or report on your activities – particularly important as Facebook is always changing.

30. Conversation Score

Discover any Facebook Page’s influence, engagement and performance with Conversation Score.

31. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report

To analyze your own Facebook account and get lots of interesting data about your connection, the language you use, the times of day you post and more, try Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook report.

32. LikeAlyzer

LikeAlyzer provides you with recommendations and feedback on your company’s presence on Facebook based on metrics including presence, dialogue, action and information.

33. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is all about competition. Compare two fan pages by entering their names or IDs and see which ones comes out on top.

34. Facebook Page Barometer

Agora Pulse’s Facebook Page Barometer keeps track of how your Facebook performance stacks up against the average performance of 6,000+ pages.

Free Website Analysis Tools

These tools give you an overall look at many different facets of your site or marketing strategy.

35. Quicksprout

by QuickSprout is a really comprehensive website audit, social media analysis and competitor report, all in one.

36. Website Grader

HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you the overall performance and “grade” of your website based on mobile factors, SEO, security, speed, and performance, plus tips on how to improve your website…

37. SharedCount

Want to see how your content (or anyone else’s, for that matter) has spread across the web? For sites that don’t display social media share button numbers, just paste the web address into SharedCount. Or use the multi-URL dashboard to enter lots of different web addressed and export a quick report.

Free Relationship Tools

These tools focus on connecting with new people and strengthening relationships with existing connections.

38. Newsle

Got some thought leaders or industry influencers you want to keep up with? Sign into Newsle through Facebook or LinkedIn and it’ll track your Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections & email contacts and let you know when they’re in the news.

39. Rapportive

Make your email work harder for you by installing Rapportive, a Chrome extension that helps you get to know your contacts better by showing their photo, job, company, LinkedIn profile and recent tweets.

40. MentionMapp

See how any Twitter user is connected to others with MentionMapp, which makes all your connections visual and simple to understand and explore.

Free Miscellaneous Tools

41. Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

Is it your Internet connection, or is your site (or someone else’s that you’re desperately trying to reach) really down? Find out with this simple website. Just enter your site:

And it’ll let you know if it’s just you or if the site is, well, down for everyone.

Over to you

Which of your favorite tools would you add to this list?

Did you notice any new ones that might be worth trying?

I’d love to hear from you about the free tools you’ve found most helpful and how you’ve put them to good use. Feel free to add any thoughts at all in the comments below. I’m looking forward to chatting!

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, Death to the Stock Photo

One of the first few things people see when they visit your social media profiles is your cover photo.

Whether it’s your Facebook Page, LinkedIn Company Page, or YouTube channel, your cover photo is the biggest image on the page. And people will see your cover photo even before they see any of your posts.

So how do you make your cover photo show up the exact way you want it to be?

One of the key factors is the size. Without the correct dimensions (width and height), your cover photo might be cropped to fit the space available and people will miss the important details on your photo.

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all cover photo size for all the social media platforms, the information is out there.

We’ve collected all the answers here so that you can have a single point of reference for all cover photo sizes.

The best cover photo size for all major social media platform

Some social media platforms display cover photos slightly different on the desktop and on mobile. But in general, here are the ideal cover photo sizes for the platforms with a cover photo.

(Feel free to click on a social media platform to see more details for that particular platform.)

Facebook – 851px x 315px (Profile, Page, and Group), 1200px by 628px (Event)

LinkedIn – 1584px x 396px (Profile), 1128px x 191px (Company Page)

YouTube – 2560px x 1440px

Twitter – 1,500px x 500px

Ideal cover photo size for Facebook

Facebook profile and Page cover photo – 851px x 315px

The ideal size for your Facebook (personal) profile cover photo is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. According to Facebook, your cover photo has to be at least 720 pixels wide.

There are five important details to take note of when creating a cover photo for your Facebook profile:

1. Your cover photo will look slightly different on mobile.

On mobile, Facebook shows your cover photo at a different dimension — 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall. Facebook will either show more of your image if your image is tall enough or crop the sides away.

From my tests, 820 pixels wide by 462 pixels tall is an ideal size for both desktop and mobile. Facebook will show the blue section on the desktop and both the green and blue sections on mobile.

2. You can reposition your cover photo on the desktop.

In case you have any important details at the top or bottom of your cover photo and you worry that Facebook will crop them away on the desktop, Facebook allows you to reposition your cover photo by dragging it up or down.

3. Your profile photo, your name, and a few buttons overlay your cover photo.

As you might have noticed in the example above, several things overlay the cover photo. You might want to take this into consideration when choosing or creating your cover photo. On mobile, your profile photo will overlay your cover photo in the middle.

A good rule-of-thumb is to avoid having any important details in the lower half of your cover photo that might be hidden behind your profile photo.

4. Facebook shows only about half of your cover photo when someone lands on your profile.

When someone navigates to your Facebook profile, Facebook would not show your entire cover photo immediately. They have to scroll up a little to see the full image.

To encourage people to scroll up and check out your full cover photo, you might want to have something attractive enough in the bottom-half of your cover photo.

5. According to Facebook, if your cover photo has your logo or text, your logo or text might show up better when you use a PNG file.

Facebook Group cover photo – 820px x 462px

The Facebook Group cover photo is almost identical to the Facebook Page cover photo — just at a higher resolution.

The ideal cover photo size is 1,640 pixels wide by 856 pixels tall (or 1.91:1 ratio). But the area visible on the desktop is 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall (same as the Facebook Page cover photo). Your photo has to be at least 400 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall, according to Facebook.

Another thing you might want to think about is how your cover photo shows up in the Groups section of the Facebook mobile app.

It’s best to have your copy in the center of your cover photo for the copy to show up nicely.

Facebook event photo – 1200px by 628px

The recommended size for the event photo, according to Facebook, is 1200 pixels wide by 628 pixels tall.

For a public event, anyone who views the event can see the event photo. For a private event, only people who are invited to the event can see the event photo.

Ideal cover photo size for LinkedIn

LinkedIn profile background photo – 1584px x 396px

1. The ideal aspect ratio is 4:1.

Your LinkedIn profile background photo is displayed at a 4:1 aspect ratio. LinkedIn recommends using photos that are 1584 pixels wide and 396 pixels tall.

If your background photo looks blurry after uploading, LinkedIn has some suggestions for you:

If your background image appears blurry or pixelated, please choose an image with a file size. Photos will also look better than images with logos. If your image is still blurry or pixelated, you may want to run it through a compression tool such as Trimage for Windows or ImageOptim for Mac before uploading it to LinkedIn.

2. Your profile photo will cover your background photo a little on mobile.

In its mobile app, your profile photo covers a different section of your background photo, as seen in the screenshot below.

LinkedIn Company Page cover photo – 1128px x 191px

1. Your profile photo will cover a small section of your cover photo.

While LinkedIn recommends the dimensions of 1128 pixels wide by 191 pixels tall, your profile photo covers a small section on the left, so it might be best to keep the important aspects of your photo to the middle of the photo if possible.

(The minimum dimensions required by LinkedIn is 1128 pixels tall by 191 pixels wide.)

2. Your profile photo covers a little more of your cover photo on mobile.

Keep this in mind when uploading your cover photo.

Ideal channel banner size for YouTube

2560px x 1440px

1. Your channel banner looks differently on the desktop, mobile, and TV.

The cover photo for your YouTube channel is known as the channel art.

Because YouTube can be viewed on a desktop, mobile, and even TV, your channel art will be displayed differently on different devices. The ideal dimensions that YouTube recommends are 2560 pixels wide by 1440 pixels tall.

Here are a few more details to take note of:

• Minimum dimension for upload: 2048 x 1152 px.
• Minimum safe area for text and logos: 1546 x 423 px. Larger images may get cropped on certain views or devices.
• Maximum width: 2560 x 423 px. This means that the “safe area” is always visible regardless of screen size. The areas to each side of the channel art are visible or cropped depending on browser size.
• File size: 6MB or smaller.

TubeSkills has created an awesome channel art template that you can use to see how your channel art will look like on various devices.

The template comes in a Photoshop file so you can overlay it on your image to get a sense of how your image will be cropped and displayed. Here’s an example:

2. Be mindful of your channel links.

When you are creating your channel art, you might want to avoid having any important details in the lower-right corner of your channel art.

That’s because your channel links will be placed on top of your channel art when viewed on the desktop and mobile.

Here’s how your channel art will look like on the desktop and mobile with your profile image:

For tips on optimizing your YouTube channel, you might like our guide on creating a YouTube channel.

Ideal header photo size for Twitter

1500px x 500px

Twitter recommends that your header photo be 1500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall — much wider than it is tall, compared to most cover photos.

It’ll be great to use an image that is wide enough to prevent Twitter from stretching the image and making it blurry.

1. Your profile photo overlays your header photo.

Just like your Facebook profile, your Twitter profile photo will cover a tiny part of your header photo. It’s great to be mindful of this so that your profile photo doesn’t cover anything important in your header photo.

2. Twitter allows you to reposition and scale your image.

Something nice about Twitter’s header photo is that Twitter allows you to reposition and scale the photo you uploaded to your liking.

Over to you

I hope you found this resource useful for creating the perfect cover photo for your social media profiles.

Do you have any tips and tricks for creating cover photos?

—

Image credit: Unsplash, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert YouTube channel

If you're serious about promoting your brand or business on social media, chances are you've already realized the power of Twitter. With millions of active users and a unique real-time nature, Twitter can be a game-changer when it comes to reaching your target audience and engaging with your followers.

However, keeping up with Twitter's fast-paced environment can be a daunting task. With thousands of tweets being posted every minute, it's easy for your content to get lost in the noise. That's why scheduling your tweets in advance can be a smart strategy to post your tweets at the right time, space them out throughout the day, and save you time posting ultimately maximizing your impact on Twitter.

Here’s exactly how to schedule your tweets, why it’s worth scheduling them in the first place, and a few best practices for scheduling posts to Twitter.

How to schedule tweets on Twitter

You can schedule tweets right within Twitter. Here’s how:

1. Open the Twitter website or app and log in. On the left-hand side of the page, select 'Tweet' and compose your message.
2. Write in the content you want to tweet.
3. Click the calendar icon to schedule your tweet instead of sending it immediately.

4. Choose the date and time you’d like to schedule your tweet to send at.

5. Press “confirm” to schedule your tweet. Your tweet will now be scheduled for the date and time that you specified.

This is a very manual process as you need to select the date and time every time you’re scheduling a tweet. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available so that you can schedule tweets alongside your other social media content more easily.

How to schedule tweets with Buffer

You can schedule your tweets for free with Buffer, a social media management tool. With Buffer, you can easily add multiple tweets to your queue and set them to post at regular intervals throughout the day.

Scheduling tweets with Buffer using your browser

Here’s how to schedule your posts to Twitter with Buffer from your browser.

1. Sign up for a free Buffer account. It’ll only take a few minutes and our free plan is free forever, no catch.
2. Connect your Twitter account to Buffer.

3. From Buffer, click 'Create Post' to create a new tweet. Here, you can compose your tweets and select when you want them to be posted.

4. When you are finished, click 'Add to Queue' and your tweet will be scheduled.

Scheduling Twitter threads with Buffer

You can also schedule your Twitter threads in advance with Buffer. When composing your tweet, simply hit “+ Start thread” in the bottom right to turn your post into a Twitter thread.

Scheduling tweets with Buffer from your phone

Scheduling your tweets from the Buffer app is just as easy as using your browser.

1. Make sure you have a Buffer account. You can sign up for Buffer for free.
2. Download the Buffer app for iOS or Buffer’s Android app.
3. Select “Add a new Channel” and connect your Twitter account.

4. Hit the plus button at the bottom of the app to create a tweet.

5. Select ‘next’ when you’re done drafting and then select when you want to post your tweet.

Should you schedule tweets or post natively?

Scheduling your tweets or choosing to post them doesn’t anything when it comes to how your tweets perform, so it’s really a personal decision.

Taking the time to schedule your social media posts in advance is a great way to:

• Ensure you stay consistent
• Post when your audience is online
• Batch your work
• Allow you to plan in advance

However, if you prefer the spontaneity of posting natively, it can be a great way to remain engaged with your followers in real-time. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide which method works best for your goals and audience.

Why should you schedule tweets?

There are a lot of great reasons to schedule your tweets in advance!

1. Scheduling tweets ensures quality and consistency

By scheduling your content in advance you can make sure that you’re keeping up with a consistent posting schedule. This helps you stay on top of your social media strategy, but it also builds trust with your audience because you keep showing up.

Scheduling tweets is also great if you have an upcoming campaign, which you want to use Twitter to amplify. While you are planning your campaign, you can create and schedule all your tweets in advance. When comes launch day, you don’t have to worry about the social media side of your efforts as your tweets will be posted smoothly at your chosen times.

2. Scheduling tweets allows you to reach a wider audience

Scheduling tweets is also a great way to ensure your content reaches the largest possible audience. By scheduling tweets at different times of the day, you can reach audiences in different time zones and start to learn the best time for you to be posting your tweets, which will ultimately help you increase your engagement and reach on Twitter.

3. Scheduling tweets lets you batch your work and plan in advance

It’s a good best practice to tweet one to five times a day if you’re working on growing your Twitter account. But that’s just Twitter, most people are also posting to Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, sometimes also daily. Posting to social media manually is entirely possible, but it can eat up a lot of your productivity and time in a day.

By scheduling your tweets you can plan out your content to be posted without having to manually post the tweet. You can also do batch content creation, and write several days or weeks worth of tweets at once, and then schedule them and focus on engaging rather than needing to create new content every day.

Scheduling also helps you plan in advance. You can take a look at an upcoming social media calendar to see if there are any holidays to celebrate and plan that content out beforehand.

Best practices for scheduling tweets

If you are ready to start scheduling your tweets, here are a few best practices to follow before you get started:

Use a social media management tool to schedule your tweets in advance

We recommend setting up a free Buffer account, where you can start adding in all of the tweets you want to schedule.

Schedule your tweets for the times when your audience is on Twitter

Pay attention to the best time to post on Twitter, but also to when you are getting the most engagement and schedule your tweets to be sent out at those times.

Mix up your tweet content to keep it interesting

Try new things on Twitter, like scheduling your Twitter threads or posting videos if you normally post only text, to see how it all performs with your audience.

Don't rely solely on scheduled tweets

Don’t “post and ghost” by scheduling all of your tweets and then not responding to any of the replies. Make sure that you have time set aside to engage with your followers when they reply to your posts.

Analyze your tweet performance

Make sure you are regularly looking at how your tweets are performing to see what's working and what's not and adjust your content strategy from there.

Scheduling tweets has saved us loads of time, we hope it can do the same for you! ✨

The bad news is there are no definitive “growth hacks” for increasing your number of followers on Instagram. No step-by-step guide can guarantee success. The good news? There are still things you can do to build your Instagram growth strategy.

Here are 13 ways to get more followers on Instagram organically — sorted by what level you’re at in your Instagram journey.

How to get more followers on Instagram for beginners

If you’re just starting with Instagram for your business, the first step is to tighten the nuts and bolts of your Instagram presence. Here are five essential things to get right before moving to more advanced practices:

1. Avoid buying fake followers like the plague

When websites sell 1,000 Instagram followers for the cheap pricing of $12.99 (yes, those are real figures), it’s enticing to snag a quick win to inflate your follower count. But purchasing fake followers does more harm than good:

• Instagram actively discourages and purges accounts that engage in fraudulent activities
• Fake followers are bots and not real people — they don’t engage with your account authentically or convert into customers
• You destroy your credibility and lose trust among your audience — which will make them unfollow you

Purchasing engagement such as views and comments or participating in engagement groups is equally futile at growing your Instagram account. You don’t just want a huge number of followers for the sake of it, you want to grow a meaningful community.

2. Embed keywords into your username and name

The Instagram algorithm prioritizes search results containing keywords in the name and username.

• Your username is your Instagram handle (your profile’s @name): Keep this the same as your company’s name and/or consistent with your profile’s username on other social channels to be instantly identifiable.
• Your name is your company’s name (or anything you like): Add relevant keywords here to improve your visibility.

For example, Ursa Major adds “skincare” in its name on Instagram to make the company easier to find when someone searches for skincare brands and solutions.

Adding a relevant keyword is also an opportunity to tell who you are and what you sell to potential customers at a glance — since it’s the first thing someone sees when they land on your profile.

⚠️ Remember: Add only one or a maximum of two relevant keywords to your name. Stuffing them can come across as spammy.

3. Optimize your Instagram bio

There are four elements you need to nail to unlock the perfect Instagram bio:

• A straightforward description of what you do and/or what you sell
• A stroke of brand personality
• A clear call to action
• A link

Your Instagram bio is only 150 characters. But it’s what makes or breaks your first impression on potential followers and customers. The science behind Instagram bios is to make them clear, creative, and complete. Anyone reading it should instantly know what your company does, how it can help them, and where they can learn more.

Odd Giraffe, a personalized stationery brand, hits the nail on the head with their Instagram bio.

For starters, their “Hello, paper person,” not only gives its bio a slash of character that’s uniquely them but also filters out who they’re speaking to: Someone who likes stationery. The following line is a crystal clear call to action that highlights what they sell and how they differentiate themselves (100+ designs).

⚡Pro-tip: Track which call to action drives the most clicks on Instagram. Crafting the perfect Instagram bio for your business involves examining different iterations to see what ‘clicks’ with your potential followers.

The link in bio is your chance to redirect your audience to an external page. You can add your company’s website or keep updating it based on your recent posts. But if you want to go the extra mile, use link in bio tools like Buffer’s Start Page to combine all your URLs into one. Look how photographer Ryan Johnson does this using Buffer:

Not just this: You can also customize the Start Page as much as you like to make it on-brand and track how each link is performing.

4. Cross-promote your Instagram handle on other channels

Redirecting potential customers from other channels to your Instagram profile is a lightweight strategy to make yourself discoverable and boost your following quickly.

For example, at Buffer we add our Instagram link on our website footer.

No one should have to manually go and search for you on Instagram if they already follow you in other places. Add your Instagram account’s link to:

• Your product packaging
• Your blogs (when relevant)
• Marketing and transactional emails
• Your website’s footer and/or sidebar
• Social media posts from team members
• Your and your employees’ email signature
• Bios on other social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube
• Networking events and webinars (Use your profile’s Instagram QR code for in-person events)

Your Instagram link doesn’t have to be big and flashy. A small Instagram icon or your QR code works for most places.

5. Find your best times to post on Instagram

What’s the best time to post on Instagram? When your audience is online.

There’s no one universal best time to share content on Instagram. Instead, aim to determine the ideal time to post for your followers.

How will you know when your audience is online? Instagram tells you through its insights in three simple steps.

Step 1: Tap “Insights” on your Instagram profile

Step 2: Scroll to “Your Audience”

Step 3: Tap “See all”

You’ll find your audience’s most active times at the bottom.

⚠️ Note: This feature is only available in the Instagram mobile app and not on the desktop.

Want to take it up a notch? Use Buffer’s analytics to determine the best times to post, the best types of posts, and the best post frequency. Buffer uses data from your previous posts and followers’ activity and organizes the numbers in a way that’s easy to understand.

Along with the time, also consider when your content is more relevant logically. A step-by-step video recipe will perform better post working hours when people cook. On the other hand, a coffee shop post might do better at the 2 PM afternoon slump.

Experiment with posting times to determine when you get the most reach and engagement.

How to get more followers for intermediate Instagram creators

Once you’ve set up your Instagram profile and followed the fundamental practices to grow your audience, you’re ready to move to more advanced methods. Here are five ways to achieve organic Instagram growth for your small business:

6. Build an Instagram marketing strategy

Having a clear idea of where Instagram fits into your overall social media marketing strategy will not only give you positive business results but also steer you in a laser-focused direction on what to post on Instagram.

But how do you create an Instagram growth strategy?

Step 1: Solidify your goals

Define whether you want to increase brand awareness, boost direct conversions, drive website traffic, or something else. Clarifying your goal dictates the content you post, your call-to-actions, and keeps your Instagram grid on-brand.

Step 2: Get a 360-view of your target audience

Knowing the basic demographics is crucial. But also go beyond that and deeply understand what your audience struggles with and how you can help them resolve their challenges using your Instagram content strategy.

Natasha Pierre — host of the Shine Online Podcast and a Video Marketing Coach for small businesses — says losing sight of your ideal follower in exchange for virality is the single biggest mistake creators make:

“People often focus so much on going viral and reaching as many people as possible that they lose sight of the ideal follower they're trying to reach. You could go viral today, and if you're reaching mostly the wrong people:

1) chances are it won't result in them following you, and

2) it would lead to a follower that's not an engaged community member if you're a creator or would never be a warm lead if you're a small business.

Taking the time to reflect on who your ideal follower is will help you create specific-to-them content which will not only result in better growth but quality new followers.”

Step 3: Define your brand voice and aesthetic

Craft a social media marketing voice that’s uniquely you so Instagram users can identify your posts without seeing the username.

Brand voice is hard to track or quantify, but it’s non-negotiable to be memorable. On Instagram, you can also define your aesthetic along with your brand voice. Use brand colors, stick to a consistent content theme, and have a personality.

⚠️ Remember: Your social media marketing voice shouldn’t differ vastly from your general brand voice. Reflect your company values on and off the app.

Step 4: Create content pillar themes and stick to them

Decide on a niche for your Instagram account. Have a few overarching topics you’ll post about, and don’t deviate from them too much. This has many benefits:

• You don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel for brainstorming content ideas
• Your Instagram community starts recognizing you for the type of content you create
• You don’t get distracted by the new, hot, shiny thing and keep revising your Instagram strategy

⚡Pro-tip: Do the best ideas come to you while doing the dishes or walking the dog? Use Ideas from Buffer to store thoughts whenever creativity sparks.

Step 5: Create a content calendar and post consistently

How often should you post on Instagram?

We recommend posting at least once daily — whether a carousel, a Reel, or a Story. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, recommends posting two feed posts per week and two stories per day.

Brock Johnson — an Instagram growth coach who grew to 400K followers in one year — says posting more frequently is the most surprising way to boost your Instagram following. But this often sounds like the route to creator burnout. Brock has a solution:

“Numerous studies have proven that the more you post, the more you grow. This, of course, feels unobtainable, unrealistic, and stressful, so I teach a strategy called "upcycling." Upcycling is essentially taking posts that you have shared in the past (and that performed well) and posting them again! Whether you are directly reposting the same content from before or creating an updated/tweaked version, it is likely to perform well again and take far less time, energy, and creativity to make!”

Batch content creating often comes to the rescue when creating a content calendar and posting schedule, but you often need to hop on trends to gain visibility — which means publishing Instagram posts on the go.

The ideal scenario is having a mix of scheduled and on-the-go posts. How to schedule Instagram posts? Use a scheduling tool like Buffer.

The best part? Buffer’s content calendar is visual, giving you a bird’s eye view of what you have coming up and the content gaps you need to fill.

7. Write compelling captions

It’s enticing to skimp over Instagram captions when you’ve toiled to create the perfect carousel or video. But Instagram captions hold more weight than you think: They can either nudge someone to follow you or scroll past you without looking.

For example, wellness brand Cosmix doesn’t simply write, “shop on our website!” on its Instagram posts. It explains the ingredients used, how their products help specific issues, and mentions the studies that back up their claims.

Don’t mistake long for better though: Instagram captions perform best when they’re either very long or very short (20 characters vs. 2,000 characters), according to HubSpot’s 2023 Instagram Engagement Report.

Writing the perfect Instagram caption is more about understanding your audience and the context of your post than trying to hit a character count. If you’re writing an educational post, it makes sense to have a longer caption. But when you’re sharing an aesthetic product image, shorter is sweeter.

If coming up with cheeky captions isn’t your forte, try Buffer’s AI assistant to have a rough first draft in seconds. For example, if you’re a skincare brand and want to post about wearing sunscreen indoors, write it as a prompt for Buffer.

⚡Pro-tip: Remember to make the first line count whether you write a short or a long caption. You can only see one to two lines of the Instagram caption while scrolling your feed, so a headline that leaves a curiosity gap and stops the scroll is crucial.

8. Use relevant hashtags

The right hashtags can expose your Instagram posts to a large and targeted audience.

How many hashtags should you use? The limit is up to 30, but Instagram recommends using only three to five hashtags.

But quantity isn’t where it’s at — you want to rank for your Instagram hashtags to make the most of them. Why? Many people follow hashtags to see posts about a topic or search for something specific. Your goal is to appear on the Explore page at first glance when someone uses your niche’s hashtag.

The right strategy is to use hashtags with a mix of popular and niche — this way, you don’t get lost in a sea of spam or remain hidden in your little corner of Instagram.

How do you find hashtags that’d appeal to your target audience? Use free hashtag generators to help you find relevant hashtags for your Instagram post. Add a few words about your image or video, and these tools will recommend the top hashtags that go well with it.

Curate a list of hashtags for your community and group them together using Buffer’s Hashtag Manager. For example, make a group of product-specific hashtags and another for niche or industry-specific hashtags. Select from your pre-saved groups on Buffer and add hashtags to your scheduled Instagram posts.

⚡Pro-tip: Use brand-specific hashtags to collate all user-generated content (UGC) about your small business in a single place. For example, we encourage our fans to use #BufferLove when discussing our products.

9. Understand your analytics

Regularly checking your Instagram analytics is key to understanding what’s working for you and what’s not. You might find that your audience responds best to entertaining Reels, but educational posts work best as carousels. Discovering trends guides your content creation strategy to get maximum return on investment from Instagram.

Instagram has native analytics on its app, but they’re pretty limited. You can’t see your individual post’s performance in a single window to analyze them side by side neither can you handpick metrics important to you. It’s better to use a third-party tool like Buffer’s analytics to get all the data at a glance and even make custom reports for stakeholders.

Which metric is the most important to track? It depends on your Instagram goals and strategy. For example, if you’re testing a new hashtag, knowing the number of new followers is more important than tracking likes from your current followers. But if you’re experimenting with posting times, keeping an eye on impressions is more important.

10. Collaborate with Instagram creators or other small businesses

Collaborating with other creators via influencer marketing or partnerships with small businesses is a win-win because it exposes both parties to a new community. The critical bit is ensuring you partner with a company or creator who aligns with your values and whose followers’ demographics & interests overlap with your target audience.

For example, the period tracker app, Flo, collaborated with Charity Ekezie and created a sarcastic, funny, paid Instagram post to highlight the social initiative by the company where premium features are available free of charge in several countries from Ethiopia to Haiti.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Charity Ekezie (@itssucrepea)

These posts are shown on both accounts — meaning all followers of your creator partner will see the shared post (and, by extension, your Instagram profile and small business).

If influencers with over a hundred thousand followers are out of your budget, run a micro-influencer campaign. Smaller creators often have a tightly-knit community who trusts their recommendations.

How to find these influencers? You can go through a manual Google search or search using hashtags and keywords on Instagram. A smarter approach is to use influencer discovery tools like Modash to save time and find relevant creators.

It’s not necessary to restrict yourself to partnering with individual creators. You can also form partnerships with other small businesses — like LinkedIn and Headspace collaborated to create a post about recovering from job loss.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Headspace (@headspace)

Instagram collab posts don’t necessarily have to be a shared post, either. You can also:

• Go live with a creator
• Do an Instagram account takeover
• Repost Instagram content from an influencer’s profile
• Post videos created by them natively on your brand account

How to get more followers on Instagram for pros

Maybe you’re doing everything right and still not getting more followers on Instagram. Or perhaps you saw a surge and are now stuck for months in limbo. Here are three ways to get your groove back (or elevate it):

11. Experiment with different types of Instagram posts

Instagram is no longer the photo app. The platform has introduced many formats, including Instagram Reels, pinned posts, Story Highlights, and carousel posts.

Which type of post will increase your Instagram engagement? Studies show Instagram carousels have the highest engagement, but it’s more complicated than that. Your audience might prefer Instagram Reels for bite-sized entertaining posts and carousel posts for everything educational.

If you feel your Instagram isn’t growing, experiment with different kinds of posts. It’s best to combine all the varieties, like the skincare brand 100percentpure.

⚡Pro-tip: Also experiment with different kinds of content, like reviving memes to fit your brand, hopping on trending audios, and talking in Reels. Use Instagram’s Trend Report and their creator account to keep a pulse on the Instagram algorithm and the new trends.

12. Talk to your audience in comments and Stories

Engage with your Instagram audience to understand their problems, answer their questions, and get content ideas.

Elise Darma — a pro Instagram educator for business owners — says speaking to your audience is an underutilized strategy to grow on Instagram (even when it’s obvious):

“Don't wait for everyone to come to you. The best hack ever is to proactively engage with other people on Instagram who are the kind of people your business helps. Imagine if you were at a cocktail party and wanted to make friends there. The smartest strategy wouldn't be to wait for everyone to come up to you; if you were to take the initiative to talk to people, introduce yourself, and ask them questions about themselves, you would leave that party with many more friends than if you didn't take that action.”

How do you talk to your audience on Instagram? The basic thing is responding to the comments and messages you receive — especially if it’s a question by a potential customer. The yogurt brand Chobani is a good example. They respond to almost every comment they receive.

Responding to each comment and DM isn’t realistic once you start receiving thousands of them, but do your best to answer all queries. Buffer’s engagement features make it easier — you can respond to comments from your desktop instead of cramping your hand using the mobile app.

Beyond comments and DMs, get active on Instagram Stories. There are so many features that can inspire amazing content ideas — like asking a question, interactive stickers, polls, countdowns, and even adding links. For example, nutrition brand Bulletproof does a weekly Q&A on their Instagram account to answer their audience’s most frequently asked questions about their products.

Don’t have the time or brainpower to whip up Instagram Story Ideas? Many Instagram Stories templates are available to help you save time and create aesthetic designs.

The best part about Stories? You can create a group of them and make Instagram Highlights — these remain in your profile forever instead of disappearing in 24 hours. Use them to create a go-to resource section answering all common customer queries to reduce the hindrance in selling your products on Instagram.

13. Get verified on Instagram

Having the coveted blue checkmark next to your Instagram account is a badge of instant credibility. It helps you stand out in search results, avoids impersonation, and even get higher engagement rates.

If your aim is to increase your Instagram growth rate, getting verified will undoubtedly help. But how do you get verified on Instagram? It’s simple: Buy a subscription through your Instagram profile — but there are certain eligibility requirements you have to meet, like adhering to Meta’s minimum activity requirements.

Getting more followers on Instagram isn’t a one-time affair

With these 13 tips under your belt, you’re certainly more equipped to grow your following on Instagram. But it isn’t a one-and-done deal. Maintaining Instagram growth requires regularly publishing high-quality content and staying on top of your social media strategy.

It’s time-consuming and laborious to manage the planning, posting, engaging, and tracking manually. Having an all-in-one tool — like Buffer — lets you do all of that under one roof. Don’t take just my word for it: Get started for free today and see for yourself.

We’ll break down the Instagram feed for you. We’ll go through the factors that influence the ranking of your content and explain why the Instagram algorithm is actually great for marketers.

You will learn

• The most important ranking factors of the Instagram algorithm
• Answers to Instagram's frequently-asked algorithm questions
• A marketer's approach to sharing content in the IG feed

The Instagram algorithm was introduced to help surface the best, most relevant content to each user every time they check their Instagram feed. The question is — how does Instagram determine which content meets that criteria?

In this post, we’ll dig into the factors that influence the Instagram algorithm and share tips for increasing your chances of getting your content on more people’s Instagram timelines.

How does the Instagram algorithm work? The 6 key ranking factors

If you’re wondering why there always seems to be a new Instagram algorithm, it’s because the algorithm uses machine learning to customize what shows up in each person’s Instagram feed. The Instagram Explore page works in the same way — it looks at the accounts you have interacted with before and uses those interactions to suggest content it thinks you might enjoy.

But the Instagram algorithm considers so much more than that. Instagram revealed there are six factors that determine what you see in your Instagram feed: interest, timeliness, relationship, frequency, following, and usage.

1. Interest: How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post

When the algorithmic timeline was announced, Instagram mentioned that it shows you content that you’re likely to be interested in first:

“The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.”

Instagram looks at your past activity to gauge your potential interest. So, if there’s a certain genre of content that you engage with more frequently (e.g., food), Instagram might rank content in that genre (e.g., food, restaurants, etc.) higher on your feed.

An Instagram spokesperson told Business Insider that ranking of Instagram posts is not a popularity contest. Posts with less engagement that are more relevant to you can still appear right at the top of your feed.

2. Timeliness: How recent the posts are

The next key ingredient in the Instagram algorithm is timeliness. Instagram wants to show you posts that are recent and, consequently, more relevant.

According to a talk from Instagram’s Thomas Dimson, the Instagram algorithm re-orders only the new posts between your current visit and your last visit. For example, if you scroll through your Instagram timeline at 11 pm and then check it again at 9 am the next morning, Instagram would only sort the posts created in between your check-ins.

3. Relationship: The accounts you regularly interact with

Instagram doesn’t want you to miss important posts from your friends and family, such as a post about your friend’s engagement. This implies that content from your “best friends” likely rank higher on your feed.

To determine who your best friends are, Instagram’s algorithm studies your past interactions to see which accounts you engage with most often.

An Instagram spokesperson also told Business Insider that profile searches are a signal Instagram looks at when ranking posts in your feed.

4. Frequency: How often a user opens Instagram

Every time a user opens up the app, the Instagram algorithm tries to show the best posts since their last visit.

If you open Instagram once daily, you see the posts that Instagram’s algorithm feels are the most relevant for that day. However, if you open Instagram hourly, the app tries to show you the most relevant content you haven’t seen before.

5. Following: Content from all accounts a user follows

If you follow thousands of accounts on Instagram, the algorithm must sort through more content in order to decide what to show you each time you open up the app. This means users who follow large numbers of people might see less from each individual account, whereas users who follow just a few select accounts are likely to see more from their closest friends or favorite accounts.

6. Usage: How long a user spends on Instagram

Whether a user tends to browse Instagram in short bursts or longer sessions can also affect what the algorithm shows. If a user prefers short visits on Instagram, the algorithm ensures it shows the most relevant posts first, whereas, for users who prefer longer browsing sessions, it may provide a deeper catalog of fresh content to browse.

Why the Instagram algorithm is a good thing

Social media managers often try to figure out how to beat the Instagram algorithm when they should be leaning into it. Instead of sharing Instagram algorithm hacks that don’t help you in the long-term, let’s talk about why the Instagram algorithm is actually great for users and marketers alike.

When social media platforms move away from a chronological feed, there’s always a public outcry. But chronological feeds aren’t as great as you think. The Instagram creators account reports that “since switching to a ranked feed, the average post is now seen by 50% more followers than it did with the chronological model.”

The Instagram algorithm change to a ranked feed is a win-win. With the help of machine learning, the algorithm ensures that users see content they’re most likely to be interested in, and that means business accounts get more targeted audiences.

As long as you are creating engaging, relevant, and timely content, the Instagram algorithm is actually an advantage to you. It helps to get your great content in front of more people than when posts were arranged reverse-chronologically.

Instagram algorithm FAQs

Are photos or videos preferred by the Instagram algorithm?

In short, no. Instagram doesn’t give extra weight to either videos or photos within its feed. However, if the data shows that a certain user prefers to engage with videos over photos, then that specific user may see more video content in their feed.

Does posting too frequently impact ranking?

Instagram accounts aren’t down-ranked for posting content frequently. Though Christina d’Avignon, a product designer for Instagram feed, did tell The Verge: “we do make sure your feed feels diverse so we may break up posts.”

Are business and personal accounts treated differently by the algorithm?

As reported by Techcrunch: “Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.”

Will posting Stories or Live videos affect ranking?

Creating Instagram Stories or live broadcasting with Instagram won’t affect how your content ranks within the feed.

5 Ways to make the Instagram algorithm work for you

Instead of telling you how to beat the Instagram algorithm, below we'll explain how to lean into it and use it to your advantage.

1. Embrace the latest features

Driving the adoption of new features is important for Instagram, so it makes newer features more prominent in the app. It’s important to note that this does not mean that the Instagram algorithm automatically favors any specific post type. It does, however, give new features a prime location, such as putting Instagram Stories at the very top of the screen or, more recently, moving the Instagram Reels icon to the center of your menu bar.

2. Vary your post types

Using a variety of post types — single image, carousel posts, IGTV, Reels, Stories, and Lives — is key to successfully navigating the Instagram algorithm.

It’s a common misconception that the Instagram algorithm favors video over photos. In reality, the algorithm will favor whatever each individual user interacts with the most. For example, if someone tends to like and comment on Instagram Reels more often than on other post types, Instagram’s algorithm will favor Reels for that person.

It’s a common misconception that Instagram favors video over photos. In reality, the algorithm will favor whatever individual user interacts with the most.

Sharing your content in different forms helps you reach a wider range of people. Plus, it’s a great way to repurpose your content. Not everyone watches a video, so you can turn your video content into a carousel post. Or you can appeal to Instagram Stories lovers by re-sharing feeds posts in your Stories.

Below you can see how we've been making an effort to diversify the post types we use on Buffer's Instagram account:

3. Post at the best times for your business

Timeliness is one of the key algorithm ranking factors. But there's no one-size-fits-all best time to post on Instagram.

To find your best time to post, you need to consider two things:

1. When your greatest number of followers are active on the platform
2. When your brand is most relevant for them.

This two-pronged approach is something Emma Ward, marketing manager for the New England smoothie bar The Juicery, has down to a tee.

Emma will post about promotions, or news when most of its followers are online and she'll post about The Juicery's products first thing in the morning (around 7.30-8 a.m.) when they are most relevant to its followers’ daily schedules.

If you're looking to uncover the best time to post specifically for your business, Buffer's Answers feature gives you three posting time suggestions so that you can schedule your Instagram posts and maximize your reach.

This is one of Emma's favorite Buffer features, “The predictive ‘best time to post’ feature in Buffer's analytics is a game-changer," she says. "Especially for my smaller accounts, I really look to this tool to see suggested times based on when our followers are online and when they’re engaged.”

4. Create a hashtag strategy

Because users can search for and even follow hashtags, adding them to each post increases your chances of reaching a wider audience. Plus, studies show that posts with hashtags receive higher engagement than those without.

Save time with Buffer Hashtag Manager, which allows you to save groups of hashtags to easily add to posts later with the Instagram first comment feature. With our Hashtag Manager, you can create unique groups of hashtags for themes you use often. For instance, a shoe company like Luna Sneakers might have separate hashtag groups for their running shoes versus their fashion sneakers.

Branded hashtags — like #lovemylunas and #lunarunning — are a great way to keep your company on people’s minds. Branded hashtags not only help with brand awareness, but they also make it easy for you to find customer-produced content.

4. Focus on authentic engagement

Instagram’s algorithm rewards engagement. So, instead of wasting energy on Instagram algorithm hacks that only give you short-term results, focus on the connections you build with your audience.

Make sure you reply to direct messages and comments on your posts. The more you interact with your fans, the better.

But it’s really easy to miss new comments among the likes, follows, and mention notifications on Instagram. To help, Buffer has engagement features that surface any unanswered comments on your Instagram posts and help you to quickly reply to as many comments as possible.

Another simple way to encourage engagement is to use interactive stickers, such as polls, questions, and sliding scale rankings, on your Instagram Stories. And don’t forget about user-generated content. People love seeing their own photos or videos shared on brand pages.

Snack company Pipcorn lets customers sing their praises by re-sharing customer content in their Instagram Stories.

5. Use analytics to see what's working

As we mentioned above, Instagram has shared: “The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content."

And one of the best ways to understand what your audience enjoys seeing and is interested in is to dig into your Instagram analytics data.

Using Instagram Insights you can check out which of your posts have had the most interactions. You can also sort posts by most comments, likes and saves too if you'd like to dig into more specific engagement metrics.

Buffer's analytics will also help you to uncover your highest-engagement posts in just a few clicks:

Once you have a list of your most engaging Instagram posts you can start to identify what commonalities they might have. For example:

• What types of posts are they?
• What's the style of the creative?
• How is the caption structured?

With this data, you can begin to reverse engineer what your audience is most likely to engage with and build a strategy to help get the most out of Instagram's algorithm.

Instagram’s algorithm is all about providing the best experience

If you focus on building connections with your audience and producing great content, you don’t need to worry about Instagram updates and Instagram algorithm changes.

“Authenticity and transparency are key to building sustainable engagement on Instagram,” says the Instagram Creators account, “Trying to game the system may provide a short-term benefit, but it is not a recipe for success long term...Make sure that you are creating content that is keeping your followers and community engaged and constantly coming back for more!”

Ready to level up your Instagram marketing? Get started with a free Buffer account.

A version of this post was originally published in April 2017 and updated in 2019. This version has been updated to reflect Instagram updates in 2021.

Isaac Newton discovered gravity. I discovered what a four-finger swipe does on my Macbook.

The discoveries will not go down the same in history, but I have to admit: I was pretty stoked to find mine.

Little epiphanies like these are hugely satisfying when I’m trying to squeeze just a little more time out of each and every day. A second or two here becomes a minute or two there. It’s an awesome feeling to sense that you’re working just as fast as possible.

We’re always looking to work smarter, not harder, here at Buffer, and we often hunt for keyboard shortcuts in our favorite apps, tools, and services. We thought it might be useful to share some of our discoveries (and favorites) with you.

With the shortcuts you see below, I’ve listed most with their Mac keyboard names and shortcuts. If you’re using a Windows keyboard, in most cases you can replace the Command on a Mac with  Control on a PC.

Common keyboard shortcuts

Before we get in too deep, I wanted to quickly review a handful of common shortcuts that are helpful to know in a variety of different apps and services. You might already be familiar with these, but just in case:

<Command>+c = copy

<Command>+x = cut

<Command>+v = paste

<Command>+q = quit

<Command>+w = close window

<Command>+n = open new

<Command>+s = save

<Command>+p = print

Keyboard shortcuts for Gmail

We’ve built quite the system for the way that we use Gmail at Buffer. As a distributed team, it’s imperative that we stay in touch as often as possible and make connections on as many different points as can be. Email can get deep and wide pretty fast. Here’s how we combat it:

e = archive email and return to inbox

] = archive email and go to next email (returns to inbox if you’re at the last email)

g then i = go to inbox

<Shift>+u = mark unread

c = compose a new email

r = reply to sender

a = reply-all

<Command>+<Shift>+c = add cc recipients

<Command>+<Shift>+b = add bcc recipients

To see the full list of Gmail shortcuts, simply type a question mark from anywhere inside Gmail.

Note: If keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to be working, check your Gmail settings for the on/off switch.

Keyboard shortcuts for Twitter

As part of our Twitter tips series, we mentioned how you can supercharge your Twitter experience with shortcuts. Twitter makes it as simple as possible by using up key real estate in their drop down menu to link to their full list of shortcuts. Here are a few favorites:

g + i = Takes me directly to my Twitter lists

j = next Tweet

k = previous Tweet

Enter = open Tweet details

You can view the full list of shortcuts by clicking on More > Settings and Support > and selecting Keyboard Shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts for Facebook

Facebook keyboard shortcuts differ by operating system and browser. For Mac, all of Facebook’s navigational shortcuts in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome start with Control and Option and followed by a number.

Here are where each of the 10 numbers takes you:

0 – Help

1 – Home

2 – Timeline/Feed

3 – Friends

4 – Inbox

5 – Notifications

6 – Settings

7 – Activity Log

8 – About

9 – Terms

In addition, there are a few regular shortcuts that can make browsing Facebook even faster.

j/k = scroll up/down between News Feed stories

l = like or unlike a post

c = comment on a post

s = share a post

p = post a new status update

/ = search

Typing a question mark will open the full list of Facebook shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts for Mastodon

Mastodon is a new social media platform that aims to be more decentralized and user-friendly than other mainstream options. It's based on a federated system of servers, which means users can join different communities or "instances" that have their own rules and moderation. Mastodon has extensive keyboard shortcuts, which allow users to navigate the platform more efficiently and quickly. These shortcuts include everything from composing new posts to searching for specific content or users. To see a full list of keyboard shortcuts, simply type ? anywhere on Mastodon.

R = reply to post

M = mention author

F = favorite post

B = boost post

O = open post

G+H = open home timeline

G+L = open local timeline

G+F = open federated timeline

Keyboard shortcuts for YouTube

Are you a fan of YouTube? We’ve started building more videos ourselves here at Buffer, so we’re excited to learn more about how everything works. We also love watching cool vids! Here are some ways we’ve found to watch even faster.

1 = jump ahead to 10% through a video

5 = jump ahead to 50%

Any other single digit = jump ahead to a certain percentage through a video (e.g., 3 = 30%, 4  = 40%)

0 = starts the video over from the beginning

<Spacebar> = pauses/unpauses the video

Here are even more shortcuts for YouTube, courtesy of Hong Kiat.

Keyboard shortcuts for WordPress

We use WordPress every day for composing our blog posts here at Buffer, so we’ve picked up a few tricks along the way. If you ever want to view the full list of keyboard shortcuts inside your WordPress editor, click on the question mark icon from the editor menu.

Here are a few of my personal favorites:

<Command>+ 2, 3, or 4 = Heading 2, 3, or 4 wherever your cursor currently is

<Alt>+<Shift>+a = add a link

<Alt>+<Shift>+m = insert an image

(I use distraction-free writing mode when I’m composing in WordPress, and there’s a neat shortcut that lets you resize the width of the distraction-free editor. Press <Control>+plus/minus to change the width.)

To see the full list of WordPress shortcuts, you can click the question mark icon in the menu bar of your post editor, or use the shortcut <Alt>+<Shift>+h.

Keyboard shortcuts for Pocket

I’ve found Pocket to be an ideal part of my researching and reading habit, and it’s great to learn new ways to make this tool even more useful. Here are a couple.

<Command>+1 = go to homepage (View Menu)

<Command>+2 = go to favorites (View Menu)

<Command>+3 = go to archive (View Menu)

a = Archive (Item Menu)

f = Favorite (Item Menu)

The complete list of keyboard shortcuts can be found here.

Keyboard shortcuts for Mac

We are pretty big Apple fans at Buffer and we’ve learned some pretty nifty tricks to fly through our workflows just as fast as possible. Here are a few of our favorite tips:

<Command>+<Spacebar> = opens Spotlight search so you can search your Mac for anything (files, apps, etc.)

<Command>+up/down = scroll to top/bottom of a page or document

<Command>+h = hides the active window

<Command>+<Tab> = switches between open applications

<Command>+d = functions as the delete key

<Command>+<Shift>+4, then <Spacebar> = the first part of this shortcut lets you take a screenshot of anything you see. Just press the hotkeys then click and drag the crosshair cursor over the area you want to grab. If you’d like to take a screenshot of an entire window, press spacebar once the crosshair cursor appears.

Here is a huge list of even more shortcuts for Mac.

Mac accessibility shortcuts

<Command>+F5 = turn VoiceOver on or off

Option+<Command>+8 = turn zoom on or off

Option+<Command>+Plus sign (+) = zoom in

Option+<Command>+Minus sign (-) = zoom out

Control+Option+Command+8 = invert colors

Control+Option+<Command>+Comma (,) = reduce contrast

Control+Option+<Command>+Period (.) = increase contrast

Keyboard shortcuts for Windows

Before joining Buffer, I worked at a company that exclusively used PCs, so I learned a number of different ways to work quickly in Windows. I get the sense that a lot of you might be on a PC too, so if I overlooked any of your favorite shortcuts , please add them to the comments!

<Alt>+home/end = scrolls to the top/bottom of a window/page

<Alt>+<Tab> = switch between open windows

<Windows>+d = show desktop

F2 = rename a selected file or folder

<Windows>+<Print Screen> = take a screenshot ands save it to a “screenshots” folder in your pictures

<Windows>+m = minimize all windows

<Control>+scroll = in windows explorer, this cycles through viewing options and changes folder sizes

There are tons more Windows keyboard shortcuts, too.

Keyboard shortcuts for Google Docs

When I’m not writing in WordPress, I’m writing in Google Docs. A lot of the most useful keyboard shortcuts in Docs are similar to the common ones you use in a lot of other places: copy, cut, paste, etc. That being said, here are three unique ones that save me a bit of time.

<Command>+k = insert link

<Command>+<Shift>+c = word count

<Command>+<Option>+m = insert a comment

Here is the full list of Google Docs keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts for browsers

Most browsers can be sped up the same way with similar shortcuts across each. You’re likely familiar with a few of these. Did I miss any of your favorites?

<Command>+n = opens a new window

<Command>+t = opens a new tab

<Command>+w = closes the current tab

<Command>+<Shift>+t = opens the most recently closed tab(s)

<Command>+<Shift>+n = opens a new Incognito window (great for seeing how someone else might experience a page if they’re not logged in as you)

<Command>+l = places your cursor in the address bar

<Command>+plus/minus = increases/decreases the zoom on the page (<Command>+zero resets everything to default)

Keyboard shortcuts for Dropbox

Dropbox has been a huge help for me to digitize parts of my life that used to take up boxes and boxes in my office. Now that there’s a whole bunch of files there, it’s been fun to figure out how to surf them even faster. Here are a few tips:

/ = search

left = go up a folder

right = open a selected folder

<Enter> = download or open a file

F2 = rename a selected file

You can access the full list of Dropbox keyboard shortcuts by typing a question mark within Dropbox.

Keyboard shortcuts for Feedly

Feedly is a favorite integration for many of us who use Buffer, and it’s one of the most popular RSS readers out there. The keyboard shortcuts are really unique and interesting, too. These only require keying in a letter or series of letters. No Command, Control, Alt, or Shift needed!

Gt = today

ga = view all

gg = jump to

gl = read later

m = mark as read

s = save for later

b = add to Buffer

The complete list of Feedly shortcuts can be viewed at any time by typing a question mark.

Keyboard shortcuts for Notion

Notion is a powerful all-in-one workspace that allows users to organize their tasks, projects, and notes in one place. Its flexibility and customization options make it a great tool for individuals and teams to stay productive and organized. Here are some popular shortcuts:

<Command> +<Option> +B = create a new page

<Command>+<Shift>+L = toggle the left-hand sidebar

<Command>+<Shift>+D = duplicate a page or block

<Command>+<Shift> P = toggle the page settings menu

<Command>+[ = go back one page

<Command>+] = move forward one page

And don’t forget the all of the handy slash commands available! Typing / in Notion brings up a menu of content blocks you can choose to insert. You can shortcut this further by pressing / and then typing what you want. Here are a few examples of some basic slash commands:

/text or /plain = creates a new text block.

/page = creates a new page (and will open it automatically when you press enter).

/bullet = creates a bulleted list.

/num = creates a numbered list.

/todo = creates a to-do list with checkboxes.

/toggle = creates a toggle list.

/div = creates a light gray divider.

/quote = creates a quote block of larger text.

You can check out the full list of shortcuts here.

Screenshot courtesy of the r/Notion Reddit community.

Keyboard shortcuts for Todoist

Todoist is a simple and intuitive task management app that helps you stay organized and productive by allowing you to easily create and manage tasks, set reminders, and collaborate with others. Here’s a few of our favorite shortcuts that allow us to be even more productive:

Q = quick add

/ or F = quick search

G then T = go to Today

G then U = go to Upcoming

G then P = go to Projects

A = add a new task to the bottom of the list

<Shift>+A = add a new task to the top of the list

<Command>+E = edit task

C = comment

<Command>+K = command menu

You can see more shortcuts here or type ? while Todoist is open to view all keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts for Evernote

You might use Evernote for your curation or saving strategy. It makes clipping and saving from just about anywhere—browser, phone, photos, handwritten notes—super easy and useful. A number of us on the Buffer team use it regularly. Here are some top shortcuts:

<Command>+n = create a new note

<Command>+<Shift>+n = create a new notebook

<Control>+<Command>+n = create new tag (Windows users try <Control>+<Shift>+t)

Here are even more Evernote shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts for Spotify

Do you listen to music while you work? Turns out there are a number of neat benefits in regards to music and the brain, so connecting with services like Spotify could help you work a little faster. Here are some quick tips:

<Command>+up/down = volume up/down

<Command>+left/right = next/previous track

<Spacebar> = pause/unpause

<Enter> = play selected row

Keyboard shortcuts for Soundcloud

Soundcloud is another source of great music to optimize your brain for creativity; plus Soundcloud hosts a number of podcasts and unique audio tracks that are uploaded from users. Here are some ways to work with Soundcloud even faster:

<Shift>+up/down = increase/decrease volume

<Spacebar> = pause/unpause

<Shift>+left/right = play next/previous track

arrow left/right = seek

l = like the playing track

r = repost the playing track

You can see the full list of Soundcloud shortcuts by pressing H from inside Soundcloud.

Keyboard shortcuts for the Tumblr dashboard

If you’re into Tumblr for visual content, memes, or laughs, you can browse through your dashboard lightning fast with these shortcuts.

j/k = move forward/backward through your posts

l = like the current post

n = view notes for the current post

arrow right/left = go to the next/previous page

<Alt>+r = reblog the current post

Even more Tumblr keyboard shortcuts and fun tips can be found here.

What are your favorite keyboard shortcuts?

I’m sure you’ve got some neat ways that you’ve found to hack your way to a quicker workflow. What keyboard shortcuts do you use? Are there some favorite apps with some favorite hacks?

I’d love to hear any tips you might have in the comments. I’m always on the look out for more ways to work smarter!

P.S. If you liked this post, you might also like The Beginner’s Guide to Putting the Internet to Work for You: How to Easily Save 60 Minutes Every Day and The Big List of IFTTT Recipes: 34 Hacks for Hardcore Social Media Productivity.

Instagram has become a standard platform for creators looking to cultivate a following. However, growing an audience is not always easy since you compete with many other creators, businesses, and brands for eyeballs.

Sharing photos and Reels at optimal times is a great way to get around this hurdle – if your content immediately makes it to your audience’s feed while they have time to engage with it, it’s more likely to succeed.

There are multiple factors when figuring out the most ideal times to share content on the platform, and this guide will provide insights into best practices when posting on Instagram.

Is there a best time to post on Instagram?

Many platforms have researched the best time to post on Instagram, and a common consensus is that there are many factors to consider. Your audience size, level of engagement, location, and especially the algorithm can impact whether audiences see your content or not.

Figuring out exactly when you should schedule your content may seem a bit confusing at first, but research by Influencer Marketing Hub shows that these are the most ideal times (in EST):

What are the ideal times to post on Instagram (in EST)?

According to the data, the below times will help get your videos the most engagement.

• Monday: 6 AM, 10 AM, 10 PM
• Tuesday: 2 AM, 4 AM, 9 AM
• Wednesday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 9 AM
• Thursday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM
• Friday: 5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
• Saturday: 11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM
• Sunday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM

However, we recommend that you focus on this data only if you’re just starting to grow a following. Once you’ve garnered a large enough following, you’ll need to use Instagram’s proprietary data to discover what times your followers engage with your content and apply that to your content strategy.

5 important considerations to find the best times to post on Instagram

Whatever reason you create content, you’re likely putting a lot of work into growing your following. It can be discouraging to share content that isn’t seen by anyone or doesn’t get engagement. And if you’re posting on Instagram as a source of income, this may hit even harder as you miss out on connecting with your audience.

Some factors to consider when thinking about when to post on Instagram:

• Day of the week: You may find that workdays have very early recommended posting times or that times when certain activities might be happening (just after waking, during lunch). This is in contrast to weekends when your audience may spend more time on social media and start consuming content earlier. Keep this in mind when scheduling content for different days of the week.
• Your timezone and location: Location also influences your best time to post on Instagram. Audiences differ from country to country, and the more widespread your audience, the less you’ll need to focus on the best time to post. However, if you’re a local business or have a local audience, consider the best times to post for the region you find yourself in.
• Your primary audience: Every audience is unique – different sectors and creators will see differing levels of engagement. Some accounts will always get likes, comments, and shares no matter what they post, while others will get high engagement half the time – and that’s okay.
• Your CTA: The most important thing is understanding who your primary audience is and what the most important action you want them to take is – is it a like? Replying to the question in your caption? Clicking through to your link in bio? Prioritize your primary audience in deciding when to post so that they take the actions that matter most to you.

Consistency and quality are also vital elements in improving your engagement. Some accounts will see engagement with little effort, but if you’re just starting out, this is likely not the case for you. You need to post regularly to grow your account – this can be as much as one to three posts per day.

However, delivering quality content should always be your primary focus – don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. If you’re running out of content ideas, check out how other businesses and creators have utilized Instagram Reels or Stories.

Determine the best time to post for your Instagram

Ultimately, the best time for you to post on Instagram may differ from someone else’s. Consider the factors we’ve mentioned when deciding when to post and don’t be afraid to experiment. To understand your best time to post on Instagram, check your Instagram Insights. You can also create a spreadsheet to track which posts perform best at what times.

If you’d rather not think too hard about the best time to post on your Instagram account, Buffer has a great feature that allows you to “set and forget” several ideal posting times for your Instagram based on your data. You can find it in your Settings within the Buffer app and website.

What have you found most helpful when determining your best time to post on Instagram? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!

You’ve probably spotted the magnifying glass on Instagram before — that’s Instagram’s Explore Page. The feature allows users to discover new content and accounts to follow. Instagram uses this space to curate content including photos, videos, Reels, and Stories based on a person’s activity on Instagram. Instagram uses an algorithm that goes through accounts people follow, what kinds of posts they like, and their search history to make the Instagram Explore Page as custom and exciting as possible for each person who lands there.

Whether you’re a small business owner, influencer, or just someone who wants to share their creative vision with the world, appearing on the Explore Page can help you increase your reach on Instagram and achieve your goals on the platform.

However, appearing on the Instagram Explore Page requires much more than just creating content. The algorithm that drives the Instagram Explore feed is complex and constantly changing. According to Instagram, so far, posts are selected to appear in the Explore page based on several factors:

• Instagram accounts a user follows: Content created by these accounts is more likely to appear in the same user’s Instagram Explore page.
• The photos or videos a user likes: Content the user likes is more likely to appear in their Instagram Explore page.
• The accounts a user is connected to on Instagram: The content of accounts similar to the accounts a user follows is more likely to appear in that user’s Instagram Explore page.

Then there are other things to consider, too. For instance, the more engagement a post has, the higher the chances it can appear in the Instagram Explore page. Videos are also more likely to appear in the Instagram Explore page than image posts.

That said, here are some things you can do to increase your chances of appearing in the Instagram Explore page:

1. Optimize your Instagram profile

Make sure your Instagram profile is complete. This will help the social network understand the kinds of content you produce. It will also make it easier for users to discover you and follow you when they look for specific accounts or content in the search bar.

Begin with choosing the right name for your profile and the proper handle to go with it. Make sure to use a keyword that best describes your niche. For example, if your account is based around baking, include a keyword like “bakery,” “pastry,” “cake,” “sweet,” or something similar.

You should also add keywords to your bio to further describe your profile and what your target audience can find there. Blue Star Donuts, for instance, uses the keywords “donuts” and “coffee” in its Instagram bio.

Like Blue Star Donuts, add other relevant information like you website, blog, or online store, a location where you’re based, or contact details.

Your post description should also include relevant keywords. The keywords used in the post descriptions could be more specific than the ones in your bio or profile name.

It seems like a simple step, but if your profile isn’t optimized you’re less likely to land on the Explore Page.

2. Use hashtags

Adding relevant hashtags is essential as they tip off the Instagram Explore Page algorithm about what your content is about. People can search by hashtag or topic on the Explore page. So, by adding relevant tags, you can also significantly extend your content’s reach.

On Instagram, you can share up to 30 hashtags. To choose relevant ones, think about keywords that best describe the content.

You can also search for hashtags others use. For example, if your account is focused on travel, just search for the #travel hashtag. You’ll get a list of posts you can each check for hashtags:

Don’t forget to check the hashtags that similar accounts use as inspiration. You can also find the hashtags your followers use with tools like BrandMentions or Keyhole or you can use a hashtag generator tool.

3. Post content consistently

The Instagram algorithm is ultimately what suggests relevant posts to appear on the Explore Page. Algorithms learn based on our routines and don’t work well with randomized data.

That’s why it’s essential to be consistent with how you use Instagram. Here are a few ways you can be consistent:

Post consistently at the right time. When there are peaks in engagement right after you publish a post, Instagram's Explore algorithm concludes your content is worth sharing with a wider audience.

But how do you know when the right time to post is? If you have an Instagram business account, look at Instagram Insights. There, you can see when your followers are the most active. You can even schedule your Instagram posts for the optimal time according to Instagram.

In different countries, the best posting times are based on how people use social media there. So, if you want to increase your reach beyond your current audience, you can also use industry research to schedule Instagram posts at these times.

Be consistent in your Instagram post topics as well. Topical relevance should be emphasized in your Instagram marketing strategy since it will also help the Instagram algorithm know what your account is about.

If you stay on topic, you’re more likely to boost engagement, too. This is because you attract specific people interested in that topic and encourage them to come back. This, again, becomes a positive sign for the Instagram Explore page algorithm to introduce you to a broader group of users who have similar interests.

However, don’t just aim for topical relevance. When publishing Instagram content, make sure you still classify posts according to their subtopics, too.

Think about it, when you organize your website posts into content hubs, you make it easy for users to navigate your site. The same goes for your Instagram account. When you organize your content on Instagram, you make it easy for your audience to explore it. The result? These users are more likely to engage with your posts.

4. Make use of Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are short videos available to watch only 24 hours after publication. Instagram Explore Page didn’t use to include Stories. People mainly used them for behind-the-scenes content.

Instagram Stories are eligible to show up on the Explore Page, giving creators another way to get discovered. Since now users can also like Instagram Stories, the algorithm bases a user’s Instagram Explore content on the Stories content they liked before.

Bottom line, if you want to increase your chances of appearing in users’ Instagram Explore pages, create content based on their preferences. Do your research. Does your audience like quizzes on Instagram Stories? Or maybe they prefer content on product launches?

For instance, Minimalist Baker creates Stories on its recipes. It then includes the ingredient list for a recipe as a Swipe Up:

5. Leverage Instagram Live

As the name suggests, Instagram Live is a live transmission. It appears in the form of an Instagram Story which users can save after the broadcast has ended.

Instagram Live appears on the Explore Page based on similar accounts people might follow. These videos can also appear in users’ Instagram Explore feed if these users liked those videos in the first place.

So, the important thing is to create Instagram Live videos users will engage with.

A great thing about Instagram Live is that people can comment on it in real-time and ask questions. Like Sephora in the example above, you can set up a Q&A session related to your niche and boost your audience engagement.

6. Engage with influencers or celebrities

Collaborating with influencers or celebrities is a great way to increase your reach and gain new audiences. The more people interact with your post, the higher the chances you’ll appear in the Instagram Explore page of other users who don’t necessarily follow you.

There are several ways you can leverage networking in your content creation process, but the most popular is to use Instagram Collab. It’s a feature that lets two users share the same Instagram feed posts or Reels. You can see it on the top of the post, where your handle is. You’ll share views, likes, and comments — allowing you to leverage and engage with each other’s communities.

You can see below how Apple and Rhianna, collaborated on this Instagram post, leveraging their communities to boost engagement.

You can create Instagram Live videos with other content creators, too. Check out the example below:

The point is, collaborations give you the benefit of exposure to a bigger audience.

Ultimately, appearing on the Instagram Explore Page can significantly benefit your brand, increasing your visibility and attracting more followers. To increase your chances of appearing on the page, focus on posting quality content regularly, using the right hashtags, engaging with other users, optimizing your profile for search, and utilizing the Instagram Stories feature.

Remember that the algorithm is constantly changing, so it’s crucial to stay up-to-date on best practices.

Be true to yourself and your brand and focus on creating content that resonates with your audience. You’ll reap the best results. Good luck!