This article describes our quest for the best time to post on Instagram. If there is the best time to post, how should we find it? Which data do we have available to make our analysis? Also, check out our additional article our the best time to post on Instagram.

Dataset

We’ve analyzed 554,492 posts on Instagram, all were posted in 2016 by a group of 7,855 Instagram accounts. For each post, we’ve been given the engagement (=likes + comments), the filter used, the exact date and time (GMT) it was posted, the caption, tags and type of post.

We do not know the exact geographic distribution of the accounts, but we do see that all continents are represented. 11.8% of all posts contain location information. Figure 1 is a histogram showing the average distribution of these posts per hour.