In today’s social media era, Instagram is the new website homepage.

When a potential client first discovers / hears about you, they will more-often-than-not pull out their phone and look at your Instagram profile. They’ll assess your grid aesthetic, number of followers, type of posts, and how strong your bio game is all within 2.2 seconds, max.

Garnering a follow, let alone nurturing this new follower by providing quality content, and ensuring this content shows up in their newsfeed, can leave you asking, “How often should I post on Instagram!?”.. or at least feeling like the meme with the swirling equations.

This comes down to the algorithm. Since its inception, the algorithm has made it tough for brands to nail posting frequency. A non-chronological feed basically means that no one can predict when their posts will be seen by their followers.

But there is a solution! You can beat this by upping your post’s engagement.

Engagement is correlated to your reach and your audience, and it’s a direct reflection of how your followers are responding to your content. The more engaged your audience, the more relevant Instagram considers your posts, and the higher in the newsfeed it will place your content.

So now that you’re showing up in your audience’s feeds, how often should you post on Instagram?

It comes down to data.

A study of 1,300 Instagram accounts was performed over the course of six months. These account posted between one and five times a day. Each was analyzed by reach to see if posting frequency correlated. Here’s what was discovered-

“If you post once a day, that asset is likely to have a +3.39% individual improvement over your average reach, but it decreases from there. If you post twice a day, both assets risk having -3.12% of the reach that an average post would have gotten. If you post three times a day, it goes down to -6.17% of the average reach, and so on.”

The answer is YES – How much you post affects the reach.

The more you publish, the less reach each individual post receives.

BUT, your overall reach (across all posts) will be higher, when combined, due to sheer frequency.

The question becomes – Would you rather have one post a day that receives the most reach, or 2-3 posts a day that receive less individual reach but higher overall reach?

Six of one, half a dozen of the other? To-may-to, To-mah-to? You do you, boo.

My suggestion: Play around with both strategies and see which one is best for your personal brand. Give each test a couple of weeks before you make an assessment.

How often do you post on Instagram currently? What is the engagement like?

Drop a comment below with your Instagram handle so I can check you out!