Hot take: my best week on Instagram came from ignoring all the 'best time to post' advice

Last Tuesday I was fed up with the algorithm so I just started posting random stuff at 2am on a Thursday. I put up a dumb video of my cat knocking over a plant at 2:15am and it got 12k views by morning. That was way better than my usual posts at 11am on Tuesday which get maybe 200 views. The whole week I just posted whenever I felt like it and my engagement went up 40% compared to the week before. I tried the same thing the next week posting at the 'optimal times' and it flopped again. So did I just get lucky or is the timing advice actually overrated? Anyone else have a random weird time that worked for no reason?

3 comments

3 Comments

amy_west26d ago

Did you ever consider that the algorithm might actually penalize people for following the herd? Think about it. If everyone on Instagram is posting at the same "optimal times" like 11am Tuesday, then your content is drowning in a sea of other posts. But at 2am you're basically the only person posting in your niche. There's no competition for attention. Instagram's algorithm probably pushed your cat video harder because there was nothing else to show people in the wee hours. The timing advice works if you're a big brand with millions of followers. But for a regular person, going against the grain might actually be the smarter play since you're creating your own little window of visibility.

ray_williams26d ago

The whole point about competing against fewer people at 2am really clicked for me. In my experience, social media platforms love showing content that gets any kind of interaction quickly, and if you're the only game in town at that hour, even a single like or comment can look like a big deal to the algorithm. Take this with a grain of salt, but I've noticed that my posts late on Sunday night, like around 11pm, also do way better than my Tuesday morning stuff. That 40% bump you saw is probably real because you found a pocket of time where your niche audience is actually awake and scrolling, like night shift workers or people in different countries. Your mileage may vary, but I bet if you kept testing different odd hours you'd find your own sweet spot that nobody else in your feed is using.

the_susan26d ago

That's actually a really smart point about the algorithm penalizing people for following the herd. It makes so much sense when you think about it. The whole idea of "optimal times" came from when Instagram was smaller and everyone had a fair shot. Now you've got thousands of posts hitting the feed at the exact same moment so even if your content is good it just gets buried in the noise. Posting at 2am is like having the whole playground to yourself. The algorithm sees someone engaging with your cat video at 3am and probably thinks "oh, this user really likes this content at this time" so it keeps showing it to more night owls. Then it starts recommending your stuff to people in different time zones where 2am is actually prime evening hours. It creates this snowball effect that regular posting times just can't compete with. Maybe the real secret is finding your own weird time slot that nobody else is fighting for.