Best Practices for Instagram – January 2024

Last updated November 2023

Instagram Grid Posts

Instagram in general, but especially the performance of grid posts have been causing a lot of frustration among business owners and social media managers alike. Optimize your content (and get more eyeballs on your brand) with best practices. 

Content Size

To grab your community’s attention and improve the reach of your posts, use a larger size image (portrait size!) that takes up more space on the feed. 

Portrait size is 1080 x 1350.

For comparison, the original square size is 1080 x 1080.

Instagram is testing a larger post size that takes up even more space, but it’s not in effect for all users yet. If or when this becomes more widespread, take advantage of this extra screen space and ensure your images fit the larger size. This is important info to pass along to your photographer too!

Caption Length

In 2018 social media managers started to notice that longer captions generally receive better engagement. And it makes sense – with a longer caption you’re able to tell a story that can better resonate (and make a stronger impact) with your community rather than a short and quippy phrase. 

While the character limit for Instagram captions is 2,200, since 2019 we’ve seen the highest engagement rates with captions over 1,000 characters (source). To give you an idea of how much that is, that’s about the amount of text you’ve read so far. 

However, you should still experiment with short and long captions. Depending on your community, one might perform better over the other. And never add length just to add length! Always ensure that what you’re writing is useful information.

Hashtags

There is a lot of misinformation about hashtags. Some say they’re useless, some spend hours developing a “hashtag strategy”. Based on the results I’ve seen, I’m somewhere in the middle. 

For accounts with more than 100,000 followers, hashtags are unlikely to make a substantial impact. 

For the rest of us, hashtags are still a valuable tool for increasing your reach and engagement. But you don’t need to spend hours developing a “hashtag strategy”. 

I recommend choosing 30 hashtags, 20 of which are core hashtags that can be used on any of your Instagram posts. They should be relevant to your brand and entire product suite, and something your customer would search for. They should have between 200K-500K posts so you know they’re popular enough to reach new people, but they’re not so popular your content doesn’t have a chance of being seen. 

Once you’ve got those 20, add an additional 10 hashtags that are relevant to each specific post and featured product, following the same guidelines as above. 

Test these hashtags for a month or two and review your results, either post by post under the Impressions section of your post insights, or in Later under the Hashtags Analytics section. 

Alt Text

Alt Text is the text that appears when someone is using a screen reader, usually because of a visual impairment. This feature first and foremost improves the accessibility of your content which has the bonus of increasing your reach. It also helps with SEO because you can use keywords in your alt text.

Alt text should be short and to the point yet provide enough context so a user can understand what’s going on. You should also include relevant keywords and the names of featured brands and products. 

Best Time to Post

I want to stress that every account will experience a different best time to post. It depends on the amount of content you’re posting, your audience, and a variety of factors like the time of year, holidays, and what’s going on in the world. 

Sprout Social’s data science team reviewed findings and trends from more than 30,000 Sprout Social customers to understand the best and worst times to post (source). On Instagram, they found the best times to post were Mondays at 11am, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10am to 1pm, and Thursdays and Fridays from 10am to 11am, with the best days to post being Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the worst day to post being Sunday. 

Start identifying your best time to post with Instagram’s in-app Insights. Identify when your followers are most active and aim to post 1-2 hours beforehand to give your content time to gain traction. Keep in mind that the Instagram in-app Insights are telling you times in PST, so you’ll need to adjust to account for your local time zone. 

Test that time for 3-4 weeks. If you’re seeing good results, continue. If you’re not, adjust your time by 1-2 hours earlier or later, and repeat the process. 

How Often to Post

There is no magic posting schedule that works for everyone, and everyone has different ideas on how much content you should post.

I want to preface my recommendations by saying more is not always better, and that your mental health is always more important than posting.

I also want to say that there are likely areas of your business that are more important than marketing like fulfilling orders, customer service emails, and creating new offerings. You are one person with limited time and energy, so you have to prioritize. Please don’t compare yourself to a content creator whose actual job is creating content all day long. You’re not a content creator, you’re a business owner. 

All that being said, when it comes to the Instagram grid I recommend posting three to five times per week, including reels. 

Pinned Posts

Instagram allows you to pin up to three posts to the top of your feed! This is a great way to capture new follower’s attention with three posts that communicate who you are, what you do, and how you can help them.

Pin posts about your brand story & why you started your business, posts that encompass your entire product suite, and a post that did really well that brings value: maybe it’s an educational graphic or a breakdown of your ingredients, or a huge business milestone like a celebrity mention (hey, we can dream!). 

You can also temporarily pin posts related to new launches so they get the visibility they deserve. 

Instagram Stories

A go-to feature for building community, gathering feedback, and selling, Instagram stories continue to be a way to authentically connect with your customers. 

Content Size

Instagram stories should always be 1080×1920. 

Engagement Stickers

One of the simplest ways to increase engagement & reach on your stories is to include Instagram’s engagement stickers. These are the poll, question box, quiz, and slider stickers that allow your community to quickly and effortlessly engage with your content. Try to include one on the first slide of the day, and throughout your content where it makes sense. 

Content: Videos or Photos?

Both videos and photos can perform well on Instagram stories, but I’ve seen better results on my own account and client account with photos. 

If you want to hop on stories to share some news, make sure to include closed captioning to improve accessibility and reach. 

Why You Should Show Your Face

Showing your face on grid posts and reels can be intimidating, especially if you hate public speaking or get social anxiety (same). Stories can be a great way to ease into showing up on Instagram. There’s less pressure to be ~perfect~ because the content only lasts 24 hours. 

I tell everyone to give it a try because customers want to engage with YOU.

They want to connect with you, a real life human, instead of just your products.

We forget that social media wasn’t created to be a marketing platform, it was created for people to connect with other people. Showing your face, the behind the scenes of your business, and what makes YOU unique are ways to connect with your customers on a much deeper and more impactful level than your products. 

Best Time to Post

See this section above, under Instagram Grid Posts.

How Much to Post

I recommend showing up on stories with valuable content at least five times per week, ideally 3-5 slides per day. 

Instagram Reels

A key feature for improving your brand’s reach, impressions, and therefore overall brand awareness, reels can help you reach new customers and grow your community. 

Content Size

Instagram reels should always be 1080×1920. 

Borders

Most of your views will come from the reels section in the Instagram app, but some will come from the home feed. When someone watches your reel from the home feed, they won’t see the entire video: the top and bottom will be cut off.

To ensure your subject is clear and all text is visible regardless of where the video is being watched, center the subject of the video and keep text minimal and close to the subject.

Trending Music

While it’s not necessary, trending music can help you have fun with reels, create entertaining content, and increase your reach. 

You’ll know if a sound is trending because of the arrow on the left of the audio’s name. Check out the image to the right if you’re unsure of what I’m talking about. 

You can find trending audio by scrolling through the reels section of your Instagram app. Anytime you see the arrow, you’ll know it’s trending. 

Aim to use trending audio with 3,000-9,000 videos because they’re still in the early stage of trending so you have a better chance of “taking off” if you post a reel with that audio. 

Hashtags

See this section above, under Instagram Grid Posts.

Best Time to Post

See this section above, under Instagram Grid Posts.

How Much to Post

This depends on your goals and how much you like filming reels. 

For product-based businesses who want to grow as efficiently as possible, I recommend most of your posts be reels. If you’re posting 5 times a week, at least 3 of those posts should be reels. 

If you’re less focused on growth and more focused on building community, aim for 1-2 reels per week. 

Community Management

Posting and ghosting is a thing, and it’s not going to help you build an engaged community, no matter how good your content is.

Ignoring your customer’s comments and DMs is the easiest way to turn them away. Think about it this way – if you take the time to engage with someone, to start a conversation with them, and they ignore you, you probably won’t come back for more, right? 

The same applies to managing and engaging with your social media community. 

But I understand that community management (and engagement) can quickly take up all your time and energy. That’s why I recommend business owners batch schedule their in-app tasks like community management. 

Pick a time of day that works best for you, Monday through Friday. It should be the same time everyday so you don’t miss anything, especially Instagram stories which are only live for 24 hours. 

Spend as much time as you need responding to your comments and DMs, and then add 10-20 minutes of active community engagement with brands, influencers, and retailers in your industry. 

Think about this active engagement as a way to build relationships and network – not as a way to grow followers. Genuinely engage with accounts: respond to their CTAs, ask questions about their products, encourage and support their content that you genuinely resonate with. Imagine you’re having a conversation with them in public and respond accordingly.

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Learn more about how to use Instagram to grow your business here. Got any Instagram questions? Ask them in the comments or send me an email at hi@sarahprice.co!