How many Instagram posts a week is enough to grow your account?
If you are running your business on social media, you’ve probably asked yourself this question at one point or another.
To discover the answer, we analyzed tons of feed posts (excluding Reels and IGTV videos). Here’s what we found:
How Many Instagram Posts per Week?
We analyzed and realized that the more you post on Instagram weekly, the greater your overall reach will be. Similarly, posting more typically leads to getting more likes and comments in total.
However, the rate of reach and engagement per individual post varies as more posts are published. And this changes, even more, depending on the number of followers an account has.
- Under 1K followers account: publish 14 posts a week delivers the highest reach and engagement rates per post.
- 1K-250K followers account: publish 14 or 20 posts per week leads to the highest reach rate per post while posting once a week delivers the highest engagement rate per post.
- 250K+ followers account: publishing only one post per week delivers the highest reach and engagement rates per post.
Reach rate is a valuable indicator for brand exposure, while engagement rate shows how well your content is resonating with your community.
In a perfect world, you expect that your reach and engagement rates to be as high as possible for each post you share, while still publishing frequently enough to make an effect.
How The Number of Followers and Posting-Frequency Impacts Post Performance
When we look over the data, reach and engagement rates per post are optimal when 14 posts are shared every week.
However, when we segment the data by the number of followers, some seriously interesting trends arise.
For accounts with less than 1K followers, the more posts you can publish on Instagram per week, the better it is.
Both reach and engagement rates per post increase as publishing frequency increases per week. The average engagement rate going up from 3.1% at one post a week, to 4.9% at 20 posts a week.
To put this into perspective, if an account has 500 followers, the number of engagements will increase from 15 (at one post a week) to 500 (at 20 posts a week). That’s quite a significant increase.
This is likely because these micro accounts don’t have a huge community of followers as their primary source of engagement. They’re depending on new audiences to comment and like their posts via hashtags. And the reach rate increases with each additional post shared.
For accounts with between 1K-250K followers, the reach rate of every post still increases as more posts are shared, but engagement rates see a significant decrease.
This could be due to audience fatigue, a drop in the quality of content as the number goes up, or the fact that the Instagram algorithm typically only promotes your most recent post to your followers.
For accounts with over 250K followers, both reach and engagement rates of every post decrease significantly as more posts are shared per week.
This decrease in reach rate could be due to the fact that these mega accounts are less likely to depend on hashtags as their primary source of reach.
Instead, they base on their existing community to engage with their content and drive virality. And for this group, publishing more per week leads to a major drop in engagement rate per post.
It could also be that accounts of this size are more concentrated on using Instagram Stories to engage with their community. Stories are informal and compelling, making them perfect for everyday interactions and building relationships.
How Number of Posts Shared Per Week Affects The Number of Followers
Based on Later’s analysis of over 917K unique accounts, users that post more times weekly typically gain more followers.
There’s a clear correlation between the number of posts and the average number of followers an account gets.
However, it’s worth noting though that this could be due to the kind of accounts that are publishing more frequently.
For example, a professional influencer or famous brand is likely to publish more posts weekly than an everyday user. It needs to be a full-time profession, rather than a part-time side hustle.
So, How Many Instagram Posts Per Week is Enough?
The answer? It all depends on your goals.
If your goal is to reach new audiences, publishing more frequently on Instagram, paired with an effective hashtag strategy, is always a great idea — especially if you have under 250K followers.
For the best reach rate per post, you should publish:
- 14 posts a week if your account has under 1K followers
- 14 or 20 posts a week if your account gets 1K-250K followers
- 1 post a week if your account has over 250K followers
If your goal is to grow your engagement rate, you should publish:
- 14 posts per week if your account has under 1K followers
- 1 time per week if your account has over 1K followers
Whatever your purposes are, creating quality posts that drive real value for your audience should always usurp quantity.