Whether you're an individual looking to build a personal brand or a business aiming to reach new customers with your social media marketing, TikTok offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth. Its algorithm is designed to give even the smallest accounts a chance at viral fame, making it a democratic platform for those looking to make an impact.

While a large number of followers doesn’t equate with success as a creator, a follower count is a currency and can determine many things, like how much you can charge for brand deals and the TikTok audience you can reach.

In this article, we'll provide actionable tips and strategies to help you grow your TikTok following. So whether you're a TikTok newbie or looking to take your account to the next level, read on for insights to help you achieve your TikTok goals and reach potential followers.

Why follower growth on TikTok is important

While it's not everything, a strong following on TikTok opens up more opportunities for creators looking to grow on the platform.

Thankfully, it's achievable thanks to TikTok's unique algorithm that levels the playing field, allowing even small accounts the potential to go viral.

Here’s why growing your TikTok followers is essential:

1. Increased visibility and reach: With a larger follower base, your content is more likely to be shared and recommended by TikTok’s algorithm, reaching a broader audience. This visibility is vital for brand recognition and expanding your influence.
2. Enhanced credibility and authority: A significant follower count can enhance your credibility. It signals to new viewers that your content is valuable and worth following, helping you establish authority in your niche.
3. Monetization opportunities: Follower count directly impacts your earning potential on TikTok. Brands are more likely to collaborate with influencers who have a substantial following, as it guarantees a wider reach for their products or services. Higher follower counts can lead to lucrative sponsorships, brand deals, and other monetization opportunities.
4. Community building: Growing your followers helps in building a loyal community. Engaged followers are more likely to interact with your content, provide feedback, and become advocates for your brand. This community can be a valuable asset for sustained growth and support.
5. Data and insights: A larger following provides more comprehensive analytics. Analyzing your audience’s demographics, behaviors, and preferences can help tailor your content strategy more effectively, ensuring higher engagement and growth.
6. Competitive edge: In the competitive world of social media, having a substantial follower base gives you an edge over others in your field. It can open doors to exclusive events, collaborations, and opportunities that smaller accounts might not access.

Finally, a large following on TikTok can boost your presence on other social media platforms. Cross-promotion becomes more effective, allowing you to grow your audience across different channels and solidify your online presence.

1. Know your target audience and create for them

TikTok is a melting pot of cultures, age groups, and interests, with over a billion active users. From Gen Z to Baby Boomers, the platform has something for everyone. But if you're looking to grow your followers, it's crucial to understand who you're creating content for.

Creating generic content and hoping it sticks is like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Knowing your audience allows you to make your content more engaging.

• Start by diving into your TikTok analytics. Look for patterns in the age, gender, and location of your followers. Are they mostly teenagers interested in fashion? Are they millennials who love travel? Once you've identified your audience, think about what they would like to see and how they would like to be engaged.
• Create content that speaks to them. Once you know your audience, the next step is identifying your niche. For example, if your followers are into fitness, a video about your workout routine would be more impactful than a random dance video. Always ask yourself, "Would my target audience find this valuable or entertaining?"
• Don't be afraid to experiment. Test different types of content to determine what gets more engagement; this is a strategy many TikTok influencers have succeeded with. For instance, if you're unsure whether your audience prefers comedy skits or how-to videos, try posting both and see which one gets more likes, shares, and comments.

Knowing your target audience is not just a one-time activity – it's an ongoing process. People's preferences change, and the TikTok algorithm evolves. Keep an eye on your analytics, listen to your audience, and be ready to pivot your content strategy when needed.

2. Watch and participate in trends

Trends are the lifeblood of TikTok – they come and go like the tide, but when they're in, they're in. Participating in trending challenges or using trending sounds can catapult your video onto the For You page (FYP), TikTok's main feed and recommendation algorithm, exponentially increasing your reach.

TikTok trends are more than just viral moments; they're opportunities to showcase your creativity, reach a wider audience, and even go viral. But remember, trends are time-sensitive. The earlier you jump in, the better.

Keeping an eye on the FYP is a good start, but don't stop there. Follow popular creators and influencers, check out trending hashtags in your niche, and pay attention to the sounds that are being used repeatedly.

Not every trend will align with your brand or interests, and that's okay. The key is to adapt trends to fit naturally with your content. For example, if you're a fitness influencer, you could turn a popular dance trend into a workout routine.

While it's tempting to jump on every trend, it's important to maintain your brand's authenticity. Ask yourself, "Does participating in this trend align with my brand's values and aesthetics?" If the answer is yes, go for it. If not, it might be best to sit this one out.

Trends are a double-edged sword. There's always a chance your take on a trend could flop or, worse, backfire. However, the potential rewards – increased visibility, more followers, and higher engagement – often outweigh the risks.

The key is to use them wisely – participate only if they’re relevant to your content. Keep your finger on the pulse of what's trending, but never lose sight of who you are and what your brand stands for.

3. Cross-promote with other TikTok creators

Collaborating and cross-promoting with other creators can introduce your content to a new audience, doubling your reach with a single video. But it's not just about the numbers – it's about community building and creative exchange.

TikTok offers unique features like duets and stitches that make collaboration easy and fun. A duet allows you to create a side-by-side video with another creator, while a stitch lets you clip and integrate scenes from someone else's video into your own. These features offer a seamless way to engage with other creators and their audiences.

Not all collaborations are made equal. Partnering with influencers or creators who share your target audience and values is important. Do your research, check their engagement rates, and reach out with a well-thought-out proposal. Some other dos and don'ts of collaboration include:

• Do have a clear agreement on the content and message of the collaboration.
• Don't collaborate with someone whose brand conflicts with yours.
• Do give credit where credit is due.
• Don't force a collaboration; it should feel natural and authentic to both parties

A successful collaboration can be the start of an ongoing relationship. Consider creating a content series or challenge together or cross-promoting each other's merchandise or upcoming events. Cross-promotion is a win-win situation when done right. It can help you break out of your follower bubble, enrich your content, and even lead to incredible friendships. So go ahead and reach out to that creator you admire – you never know where it might lead.

4. Start a content series

While one-off videos can be fun and engaging, there's something to be said for the long game. Starting a content series on TikTok can offer a sense of continuity that keeps your audience returning for more. It's storytelling at its finest, a strategy that can pay off in spades.

A content series is a popular format on social media platforms and is essentially a string of interconnected videos that revolve around a central theme or narrative. It could be as simple as a "Tip of the Day" series or as complex as a serialized story. The key is consistency in the theme, tone, and posting schedule of your content.

Steps to creating a winning content series

1. Define your plan: The first step in creating a content series is planning. What's the overarching theme? How many videos will it include? What's the call to action? Sketch out a rough outline and start filling in the details. Remember, the content should be engaging and intriguing enough to make viewers want to see the next installment.
2. Figure out the hook: Every good series has a hook or a reason for viewers to tune in to the next episode. This could be a cliffhanger, a question left unanswered, or a challenge posed to the audience. Use this hook to keep viewers engaged and coming back for more.
3. Post consistently: Once you've started your series, stick to a consistent posting schedule. Whether daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, consistency helps build anticipation and keeps your audience engaged.
4. Don't be afraid to pivot if something isn't working: Use audience feedback and analytics to make data-driven decisions. Maybe your series needs a new angle, or perhaps it's time to wrap it up and start something new. Be flexible and willing to adapt.

Starting a content series is a commitment, but it's one that can offer significant rewards. It can help you build a loyal following, boost engagement, and provide a structured framework that makes content creation a breeze. So go ahead, start that series, and take your TikTok game to the next level.

5. Use hashtags and create captions related to your niche and audience

Hashtags aren't just a trendy add-on – they're a powerful tool for discoverability on TikTok. Using the right hashtags makes it easier for your target audience to find your content, thereby increasing your chances of gaining new followers and boosting engagement.

Selecting the right hashtags is a balancing act. The recommended number of hashtags is three to five hashtags per post. You'll want to include a mix of general, niche-specific, and trending hashtags. General (but relevant) hashtags cast a wide net, niche-specific ones attract a targeted audience, and trending hashtags can give you a shot at viral fame.

In addition, if you've built a significant following or want to establish stronger brand awareness, consider creating a branded hashtag. This can serve as a rallying point for your community and make tracking user-generated content related to your brand easier.

Some tips for using TikTok hashtags include:

• Use relevant hashtags that align with your content. Check TikTok’s Creative Center for potential hashtags to use in your content.
• Keep an eye on trending hashtags and participate when relevant.
• Don't spam your captions with irrelevant or overly general hashtags.
• Don't use the same set of hashtags for every video – mix it up for different kinds of content and to reach different audiences.

Hashtags and captions are more than just afterthoughts on any social media platform and they're integral to your TikTok strategy. You can significantly boost your reach, engagement, and follower growth by being thoughtful and strategic in using hashtags and captions. So go ahead, hashtag away, but do it wisely.

6. Add closed captions to your videos

Closed captions might seem like a small detail, but they can make a world of difference in how your TikTok videos are received. Not only do they make your content more accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, but they also offer SEO benefits and can increase viewer engagement.

More than 1.5 billion people worldwide are currently affected by hearing loss in at least one ear, and about 430 million people worldwide require rehabilitation for disabling hearing loss. Adding closed captions to your videos helps make your content accessible to a broader audience.

TikTok's algorithm is a bit of a mystery, but what we do know is that it values engagement. Closed captions can increase the time people spend watching your video, which in turn can boost its visibility on the platform. Plus, captions make your content more searchable, boosting your TikTok SEO.

Adding closed captions to your TikTok videos is straightforward. You can either manually type them in as you edit your video or use third-party apps that generate captions for you. The key is to ensure they're accurate and sync well with the video.

Tips for effective closed captioning on TikTok

• Keep it short and sweet: TikTok videos are short, so your captions should be too. Aim for concise, clear language.
• Timing is everything: Make sure your captions are well-timed to match the video's audio or action.
• Be mindful of readability: Use a font and background that make the text easy to read. Avoid fancy fonts or colors that clash with the video.

Adding closed captions to your TikTok videos is a small effort that can yield big results. It enhances accessibility, boosts engagement, and even improves your video's discoverability. So the next time you post a video, don't forget the captions—it's a win-win for everyone involved.

7. Publish your videos at the right times

You've worked to create a great TikTok video, but when should you hit that "Post" button? Believe it or not, timing can be a crucial factor in how well your video performs. Publishing your TikToks at the right times can help your video reach a wider audience and increase its chances of going viral.

To maximize your video's reach, aim to post during the hours when your target audience is most active on TikTok. This usually means between four and five PM mid-week, but it can vary depending on your specific audience demographics.

If you have a global following, time zones can complicate things. You might need to experiment with posting at different times to see when you get the best engagement. Some creators even repost videos at different times to reach audiences in various time zones.

While the TikTok algorithm is not fully understood, it's believed that videos that get quick engagement are more likely to be pushed to a broader audience. Posting when your followers are most active can give your video the initial boost it needs.

How to find your ideal posting time

• Analyze past performance: Look at your TikTok analytics to see when your past videos have received the most engagement.
• Conduct A/B tests: Experiment by posting similar videos at different times and days to see which performs better.
• Monitor real-time analytics: After posting, keep an eye on how quickly your video gains views and engagement. This can offer immediate insights into whether you've hit a sweet spot.
• Consistency over perfection: While timing is important, consistency is key. If you can't always post at the ideal time, don't sweat it. What's more important is maintaining a consistent posting schedule that your audience can rely on.

Publishing your videos at the right times can give them the extra push they need to reach a wider audience and rack up those views. It's a simple yet effective strategy that can make a significant difference in your TikTok success. So go ahead, set that alarm, and get ready to hit "Post" when the time is just right.

8. Play around with the length of your videos

TikTok allows videos ranging from 15 seconds to 3 minutes, but what's the ideal length for your content? While shorter videos are more consumable, longer, videos provide the space to delve deeper into a topic. The trick is to find the sweet spot that works for you and your audience.

Short, 15 to 30-second videos are the bread and butter of TikTok. They're quick to watch, easy to engage with, and perfect for simple, catchy content. If you want to capture attention fast or if you are a beginner, this is your go-to format.

TikTok's 3 to 10-minute video options allow you to explore topics more deeply. This format is ideal for tutorials, storytelling, or any content that requires more time to unfold. However, longer videos demand stronger storytelling skills to keep viewers engaged.

Sometimes, 15 seconds is too short, and 10 minutes is too long. Videos that fall in the 30- to 60-second range offer a happy medium. They're long enough to convey a complete thought but short enough to keep the viewer's attention.

Don't be afraid to mix it up. Experiment with different video lengths to see what resonates most with your audience. Use TikTok analytics to track metrics like watch time and engagement rates for videos of varying lengths.

Tips for effective video lengths

• Start strong: Regardless of length, your video should grab the viewer's attention in the first few seconds.
• Pacing is key: Make sure the content flows naturally and keeps the viewer engaged throughout.
• End with a bang: Conclude with a strong call-to-action or a memorable moment encouraging likes, shares, or follows.

The length of your TikTok videos isn't a one-size-fits-all scenario. It's an element you should tailor to your content type, audience preferences, and the message you're trying to convey. By playing around with different video lengths and analyzing the results, you can optimize your content for maximum impact.

9. Use trending music and sounds

One of the unique features of TikTok is its extensive library of music and sounds that creators can use. Using trending music and sounds can not only make your videos more engaging but also increase their chances of going viral.

Trending music often comes with its own set of trending challenges or dances. By using a popular track, you're essentially hopping on a trend that already has a built-in audience and increasing your video's visibility.

TikTok's algorithm tends to favor videos that use trending music. This is because these videos are more likely to be engaged with, shared, and saved, all of which the algorithm considers metrics when deciding what to show on the 'For You' page.

How to find trending songs and sounds

• Explore the 'For You' page: This is where you'll find videos that are currently trending, complete with the music they use.
• Use TikTok's music discovery feature: This tool within the app helps you find popular tracks in different genres.
• Follow popular creators and influencers: Keep an eye on what music popular TikTokers are using; chances are, those tracks are trending.

Tips for using music effectively

• Match the mood: The music should complement the content of your video. A mismatch between music and what people expect from your original content or tiktok profile can be jarring and reduce engagement.
• Volume control: Make sure the music doesn't overpower your voice if you're speaking in the video.
• Legal considerations: Always consider and respect copyright laws. TikTok's library is generally safe to use, but if you're sourcing music externally, make sure you have the rights to use it.

Music and sound are more than just an auditory experience on TikTok; they're a strategic tool that can significantly impact your video's performance. By tapping into trending music and sounds instead of posting original sounds, you're giving your content a leg up in the TikTok algorithm and increasing its potential reach and engagement.

10. Share user-generated content to your TikTok account

User-generated content (UGC) is a goldmine for content creators looking to build a more engaged and loyal community. It adds a layer of authenticity to your TikTok account and encourages more interaction from your audience.

When you share content created by your followers or other TikTok users, you give them a shoutout. This can increase engagement, as people are likelier to interact with a creator who appreciates and highlights their community. If someone has said something positive about your brand or content, why not share it?

However, before you use anyone’s content, make sure to always get consent from and give credit to the original creator. You should also prioritize quality over quantity – choose UGC that aligns with your brand and content quality standards. Additionally,

• Make sure your shared UGC fits seamlessly with your existing content strategy.
• Use UGC as an opportunity to engage with your community. Ask questions, seek opinions, and encourage more users to share their content with you.
• Monitor metrics like engagement and follower growth to gauge the effectiveness of sharing UGC.

Sharing user-generated content is not just a strategy – it's a way to build a community around your TikTok presence. It adds a layer of authenticity and engagement that can set you apart from other creators. So go ahead, start sharing, and start engaging!

11. Cross-post your videos to other social media platforms

Creating engaging content takes time and effort, so why limit its reach to just one platform? Cross-posting your TikTok videos to other social media platforms that prioritize short-form videos, like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, can maximize your content's exposure and draw a broader audience.

Different platforms have different user demographics, and you tap into multiple audiences by cross-posting. Besides, you've already worked to create a great TikTok video – sharing it on other platforms is a quick way to get more mileage out of your original content. More engagement across different social media platforms can signal to algorithms that your content is worth promoting, increasing its visibility.

Remember that each platform has its own set of guidelines and best practices that decide what might be a popular video. Make sure to adapt your video accordingly. Consider the peak activity times for each platform to maximize engagement and customize platform-specific features like hashtags and captions to fit each platform.

In addition to Reels and Shorts, you should consider cross-sharing on Twitter and LinkedIn. While not designed for short-form video, these platforms can still be useful for sharing standout TikTok content.

Cross-posting is more than just a time-saver; it's a strategy to amplify your content's reach and impact. By sharing your TikTok videos on other platforms, you're not just recycling content; you're repurposing it for broader success.

Improve your TikTok growth with Buffer

As you implement these strategies, remember that what gets measured gets managed. TikTok offers a range of analytics tools that can help you track your growth, engagement rates, and the effectiveness of your content. Regularly monitoring these metrics will show you what's working and provide insights into improvement areas.

Finally, don’t give in to the temptation to buy TikTok followers – it’ll only hurt your account in the long run. Growing your TikTok following is not an overnight endeavor, but with high-quality content, consistent effort, and a strategic approach, you’re more likely to see significant growth. So go ahead, roll up your sleeves, and dive into the TikTok universe. Your future followers are waiting!

There’s no two ways about it: video is the way people prefer to consume content in 2024. Buffer’s data shows that when it comes to social media platforms video outperforms every other type of content by a landslide — and that’s on all platforms.

Whether you’re a social media marketer, content creator, or influencer, video content should be a key part of your growth and marketing strategy.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. Video creation requires a lot more input (though the proof really is in the pudding).

Often, the biggest hurdle to overcome is video editing — but in 2024, there’s really no reason to let this block you.

Thanks to the incredible variety of free video editing software options on the market, editing your videos is now easier than ever. Thanks to templates, transcript editing, AI, and a host of other nifty features, editing your videos can now be — dare I say it? — fun!

With all that in mind, here’s a guide to the best video editing software for creators, marketers, and small business owners.

I've curated separate lists of paid and free video editors, though, in many cases, the tools offer both limited free versions and more feature-rich paid versions. Only the tools with substantial free offerings are included in the free video editing software list.

Many of these tools also come with advanced features that cater to both beginners and professionals, so there's a suitable option here no matter your skill level. Let's dig in.

Best free video editing software

Most of the video editors in this list do have paid plans that come with additional benefits, but they made this list because their free plans are comprehensive and powerful — so you don’t need to spend a cent to use them.

Some of these tools are completely free, offering a full suite of features without any restrictions or watermarks.

1. CapCut

It still breaks my brain a little that most of CapCut’s best features are 100 percent free. With both a powerful app, browser, and desktop version that it’s relatively easy to toggle between, CapCut is a no-brainer if you’re creating videos for social media. In my experience, it’s the best video editing software for beginner to intermediate editors.

The mostly free video editor is especially handy for TikTok. The two apps pair beautifully, thanks to the fact that they’re both owned by ByteDance. You can even add some trending TikTok sounds right in CapCut before exporting or sharing directly to TikTok (you’ll just need to save the audio in TikTok and log into CapCut with your TikTok account). As far as I know, it's the only free video editor that allows this.

When it comes to editing itself, CapCut is intuitive and easy to learn. It offers an eye-popping variety of fonts, effects, stickers, and transitions to choose from, along with a superb caption auto generator.

More advanced users will love CapCut, too, thanks to some really in-depth editing options like voice isolation and enhancements, color adjustments, and more. Note that some of these features are only available on the paid plan, but at $7.99 per month, it’s still one of the more affordable options out there.

Pro tip: I find video editing a little easier to do on my computer than on my phone, but if you go that route, do go the extra mile and download the desktop version of CapCut to access all the best features. CapCut’s online video editor isn’t quite as powerful and user-friendly.

Price: Free, with paid plans starting at $7.99 per month

2. Clipchamp Create

Clipchamp Create, which replaced Windows Movie Maker, is one of the most generous free online video editing tools I’ve found in my research.

If you have a Windows PC, you’ll find the free video editing software pre-downloaded on your computer. If you’re a Mac user, fear not — you can use it in your browser.

The free plan lets you create unlimited video projects, gives you access to all basic editing tools, and allows you to export your videos in 480p output resolution without a watermark. (A watermark will be present if you use stock footage, though.)

You could upgrade to Premium or higher to gain access to its stock library and download your videos at better resolutions. If you’re recording voiceovers or filming yourself, Clipchamp’s Speaker Coach is a unique plus. It’ll help you track your pace, pitch, and filler words and offer tips and tricks to improve your presentation skills.

Price: Free, with paid plans starting at $9 per month.

3. Canva

For simple edits, Canva is one of the best free video editing software options out there. What the video editor lacks in editing capabilities, it makes up for in beautiful, ready-made video templates.

The clip editing itself in Canva is basic — you can trip, cut, and rearrange videos, but not layer things over each other (if, say, you wanted to split the audio from your video track and use it as a voiceover).

Still, there’s probably a template ready and waiting in their vast template library that will be a good fit for your project. Adding your own photos or clips is as simple as dragging and dropping them into the editor.

This tool is great, a fuss-free option for beginner video editors, and is particularly handy if you’re looking to turn some photos into a video.

Price: Free plan, with paid options starting at $15 per user per month.

4. DaVinci Resolve

If you’re looking for a tool to create great TikToks, Shorts, or Reels, DaVinci Resolve is probably not for you. But if you’re looking to create super slick, high-production videos for YouTube or even create your own documentary (why not?), DaVinci Resolve is tough to beat.

There’s a reason this free video editor is a favorite of both professional YouTubers and Hollywood producers — or rather, many reasons: it combines editing, color correction, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production in a single tool.

While this particular free video editing software is not as easy to learn as, say, Canva, DaVinci Resolve is relatively user-friendly. If you’re a marketer or creator looking to add ‘professional video editing’ to your skillset, a couple of hours playing around with Resolve will be time well spent.

And yes, I did say free. Some DaVinci Resolve features are exclusive to their paid ‘Studio’ plan, though most will only be necessary for entire production teams. Also, you’ll only be able to export videos in Ultra HD for free. Still, that means a whopping 3840 x 2610 — much higher than most of the free video editors on this list.

That said, DaVinci Resolve is a hefty program and will require a decent computer to run. For Windows, that means at least Windows 10, 16GB of memory, and an integrated GPU. On Mac, that’s MacOS 11 or higher, 8GB system memory, and an integrated GPU.

Price: Free. The more advanced paid version, Davinci Resolve Studio, costs $295.

5. Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) provides multiple storyboards, layouts, and themes to help you create amazing videos. The largely free video editor is a powerful Canva alternative (and it pairs well with one of my favorite free AI image generators, Adobe Firefly, which is a point in its favor).

Like Canva, templates are the name of the game here, and video layering options are limited. However, the template options are varied and unique and won’t have that tell-tale “I made this in Canva” feel some folks will know all too well. 

Some premium templates, stock photos, and videos will only be available on the paid plan (though you can use them if you don’t mind exporting with a watermark). 

Price: Free, with paid plans starting at $11.99 monthly. 

6. Descript 

Descript is the video editing tool that works like a text editor (seriously, if you hate editing videos, give this one a bash.)

Descript was one of the first video editing software options to market with transcript-based editing. In a nutshell, this means Descript auto-generates a transcript for your video, which you can then edit as if you were working on a text document. Whatever text you delete, trim, or move around reflects in the video file, too. Neat, right?

It can take a bit of practice to get right, but it’s great when it comes to editing chatter-heavy videos and audio files, this can be a huge time-saver. In my opinion, Descript is one of the best video editing software for podcasts.

Technically, you can use some of Descript’s best features for free. With its $0 per month starter plan, you can edit up to 60 minutes of content and remove filler words, but you’ll only be able to export one video without a watermark per month.

Price: Limited free plan, with paid options starting at $19 per month.

7. iMovie

iMovie is Apple’s native video editor, available for free on Macs, iPhones, and iPads. It’s a great entry-level option, and what it lacks in advanced editing capabilities, it makes up for with pure ease of use. 

‘Storyboards’ mode offers a selection of templates with styles based on your use case — think things like “Gaming,” Makeover,” or “Q&A”  — and even a Magic Movie mode, which will automatically turn your photos into a movie in seconds. 

If you’re a complete beginner and a bit intimidated by video editing tools, it might be worthwhile to play around with iMovie before moving on to one of the more robust options on this list. 

Price: Free on Mac and iOS.

Best paid video editing software

Once again, you'll find some options on this list that do have free plans, though I found their paid options worth paying for.

1. CapCut Pro

Capcut again? Sorry, I just had to. Capcut's Pro plan makes it one of the best video editing software options.

The paid version of the video editor grants users access to an expanded library of fonts, animations, and other effects, plus handy features like retouching effects (helpful if you don’t fancy applying a full face of makeup to look put-together in your videos), enhanced background removal tools, and vocal enhancements.

Price: Paid plans start at $7.99 per month.

2. Veed.io

Veed is a fast and easy online video editor that boasts the power of templates and some robust video editing tools. It’s also brilliant for auto-generating captions and has a handy library of sound effects and music to help you add a little extra pizazz to your work. 

Veed's features set it apart from other similar video editors on this list, including in-app screen and webcam recording and (rather terrifyingly) realistic AI avatars that will read your script for you. 

There is a free plan available, but once again you’ll only be able to export videos with a Veed watermark. 

Price: Paid plans start at $18 per month.

3. Capsule

Capsule is one of the newer video editors on the block, and offers similar tools to the likes of Veed and Kapwing. Its USP, however, is making it easy for marketing teams — even those without pro video editing skills — to collaborate and stick to brand guidelines.

The online video editor features all the bells and whistles of other popular tools, with things like transcript-based editing, auto-resizing, and lightweight animations. There’s also an AI co-producer that will create auto-jump cuts, clean up dialogue, and more. 

That said, it’s on the pricier end at $99 per month. There is a free plan you can use to put it to the test, which will allow you to use pretty much all the tools in their professional plan, though you’re limited to three videos (in total, not per month).

Price: Paid plans start at $99 per month. 

4. InShot

InShot is an app that allows you to trim, speed up, or add music, filters, and fun effects to video.

The mobile app is pretty simple and features are limited, but seriously easy to use. It also allows users to edit videos, photos, and create image collages.

If you’re creating videos exclusively for social and mostly just want to string clips together and make them look fun and interesting, InShot is a solid option. You can do neat things like create video collages, remove backgrounds, add doodles, and loads more.

One could technically count InShot among the free video editing apps, as you can download and use it to edit videos without paying. However, your videos will be exported with a watermark. Perhaps more frustrating in the free version, though, is the unskippable ads.

Price: Limited free plan with paid plans starting at $3.99 per month.

5. Kapwing

Kapwing is another simple drag-and-drop video editor that offers much of the same thing already mentioned above — templates, transcript editing, filler word remover, AI, more. It’s perhaps best described as a leveled-up version of Canva or a slicker version of CapCut. 

One notable feature is a content repurposing tool that automatically finds key moments in long-form videos and repurposes them into highlight clips. There’s also the ability to work together on a project with your teammates in real-time, a bit like you can in design tool Figma. 

Almost all of Kapwing’s best features are available for free, but you can only export watermarked videos. 

Pricing: Free with watermarks, with plans starting at $24 per month. 

6. Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premier Pro is one of the video editor heavyweights, boasting the kind of feature set that will help you edit everything from TV series to documentaries (should you feel so inclined). 

Available for Windows and Mac users, Premier Pro comes with a steep learning curve and is not for the casual creator. It’s more regularly updated and integration-friendly than its Mac-only counterpart, FinalCut Pro (below). 

Price: $22.99 per month, though there are bundle options available with other Adobe products that may give you more bang for your buck.

7. Adobe FinalCut Pro

Adobe FinalCut Pro is another professional tool, once lauded as the gold standard of video editors. 

It’s likely the tool used to edit your favorite blockbuster movies, thanks to its special effects features and faster rendering times. It comes with a caveat, though — it’s exclusive Mac video editing software, and only available to users in the Apple ecosystem. 

Price: $299.99 to own.

8. FilmoraGo

Wondershare FilmoraGo is one of the OG simple video editing tools. It’s been around for years, but has kept pace with new tech and trends to make it a strong contender on this list. 

Besides the usual features such as themes, text, and transitions, it also offers a range of video editing features — trim/split, ratio/crop, speed control, reverse, voice-over, audio mixer, and picture-in-picture. 

The AI tools are fun to play around with, too — there’s an AI image generator, AI text-based editing, and an AI Copilot to guide you as you edit video, among others. 

Another handy point in Filmora’s favor is that it’s easy to work on projects both on your computer and phone — the online video editor, app, and desktop versions make it easy to toggle between the two.

You can use some of the video editor features for free, but you can only export videos with a watermark. 

Price: Starts at $29.99 quarterly, though there is a limited free version. 

Maximize your video reach

No matter how simple the video editor is, creating and editing social media videos takes a lot of time and effort — which is why it makes sense to ensure they have the highest impact possible.

Buffer makes it easy to work smarter, not harder with your videos, helping you easily cross-post them to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and more. Here's how →

If we missed your favorite free video editor, let us know on all major social platforms @buffer!

If YouTube was the Starship Enterprise to the creator’s Captain Kirk, then YouTube Studio is Spock and the bridge all rolled into one.

Nerd analogies aside, YouTube Studio is the creator’s control room, where you can manage and monitor your videos.

It’s an incredibly powerful tool and something content creators must get to grips with if they’re looking to get the most out of their YouTube channel. Monitoring and improving a channel's performance is crucial, and YouTube Studio provides the insights needed to achieve this. But you’re just getting started and finding all the options available to you a little overwhelming, I get it: there’s a lot going on.

Luckily, the tool is pretty easy to use once you have the lay of the land. There are multiple ways to navigate to almost any action — so a bit of clicking around is all you really need to do to find the right system for you. Or, you could read this guide below.

Here, I’ll walk you through absolutely everything you need to know about YouTube Studio, including how to edit a video or Short and analyze its performance — both essential for growing a healthy YouTube subscriber base.

What is YouTube Studio?

YouTube Studio, formerly known as YouTube Creator Studio, is a YouTube tool and app that allows creators to upload, edit, and analyze their videos, as well as respond to comments from their viewers.

YouTube Studio offers support to creators by providing access to specific metrics and reports related to user activity and revenue.

YouTube Studio is a free tool, and you don’t need a certain number of subscribers to use it — all you need is a YouTube Channel.

It’s worth noting that a YouTube Channel and a YouTube account (read: Google account) are not one and the same. If you just use YouTube to watch videos, a YouTube/Google account will do just fine. If, on the other hand, you want to create and upload your own content, you need a YouTube Channel.

Not sure if you have a channel? Head over to studio.youtube.com. If you don’t yet have your own channel, the prompt below will pop up. If you do, you’ll be able to access YouTube Studio.

There are multiple ways to access YouTube Studio, both on your computer and on your phone or tablet.

On your computer, the quickest route is to navigate over to studio.youtube.com in your browser of choice. If you’re already on YouTube on your computer, click on your profile picture on the top right of your screen, then select YouTube Studio from the drop-down menu.

There is also a YouTube Studio mobile app you can download on your device. Not to be confused with the regular YouTube app, it must be downloaded separately.

• Here’s the YouTube Studio download link for Android
• Here’s the YouTube Studio download link for iPhone

While it may be easier to manage your videos in the browser/desktop version of YouTube Studio, it’s worthwhile downloading the app and turning on notifications to get updates about comments and stay engaged with your subscribers.

What can you do in YouTube Studio?

Perhaps the better question is, ‘What can't you do?' The best way to explain that is to give you the lay of the land, so I'll walk you through the various sections of the tool and what you can do within each.

You'll find all the sections I highlight below on the left-hand side of your screen on your desktop. On the YouTube Studio app, the tabs are at the bottom of your phone screen. In this guide, I'll be referring to the desktop version of YouTube Studio, but the processes for the app are nearly identical.

I asked Buffer's Social Media Manager, Mitra Mehvar, which sections might be worth getting to grips with first. “I'm always finding myself in the Content and Analytics sections,” she told me.

“From the Content section I can get an overview of everything I have scheduled or have posted, and can get a quick glimpse into the analytics for my most recently shared videos.”

Dashboard

The YouTube Studio Dashboard is effectively your studio homepage. Here, you’ll get a high-level overview of your latest video’s performance and all the new activity on your channel, latest comments, and new subscribers.

You’ll also find updates and new features from YouTube that might be helpful to you, plus some ideas to help you build or keep momentum on the platform.

Content

The Content tab is where you'll find everything you've uploaded. Full-length videos, Shortslive streams, and playlists all live here — so you'll likely spend a lot of time in this part of the studio as a YouTube Creator.

Clicking on the videos and posts will take you over to a page like the one below, where you'll be able to change pretty much anything about the upload.

A new set of tabs will appear on the left, giving you access to analytics for that specific video and even a basic video editor, where you can trim and make other tweaks to the clips.

Analytics

In the Analytics section, you can dive into the performance of your channel overall, the performance of each content type (videos, Shorts, lives, and posts), plus some handy information about your audience, their demographics, and how they interact with your content.

Much like the rest of the sections in YouTube Studio, Comments does exactly what it says on the tin. Here, you can view and reply to comments on your videos. It's also where you'll find mentions from other YouTubers.

Subtitles

Subtitles, like the Content tab, will also take you to a list of your videos, ordered from latest to oldest. Clicking on the specific videos will take you to a page much like what you'll find under Content, but straight to the subtitles section, where you can add or edit the captions of all your videos.

Copyright

Under the Copyright section, you'll find all the copyright challenges to your videos. You can also use the button on the top right corner, ‘New removal request', to make a challenge of your own.

Earn

Earn is an important part of YouTube Studio for creators in the YouTube Partner Program — it’s where you can track your eligibility and manage your monetization settings.

YouTube Studio also supports creators by providing detailed revenue metrics and reports.

Customization

Under Customization, you can tweak your channel's layout, branding, and basic info. You'll find a handy guide to YouTube channel optimization here, which unpacks how to approach all these fields for best results.

Audio Library

Audio Library is another tab worth familiarizing yourself with. Here, you’ll find free music and sound effects to use in your videos. You can listen to them and, if you like, save them for later by clicking the star icon next to their name.

You’ll find your saved audio under the Starred tab. YouTube Studio also integrates with YouTube Music for managing podcast content, where a podcast show functions as a playlist and episodes are presented as videos.

How to use YouTube Studio

Now that you know your way around YouTube Studio, it won't be hard to figure out how to perform various tasks within the platform. I'll walk you through some of the essential ones below.

How to upload a new video

To upload a shiny new video or Short to your YouTube Channel, hit the Create button on the top right of your screen (it’s visible in almost every section of YouTube Studio). The process is exactly the same for longer YouTube videos and YouTube Shorts — videos 60 seconds or under will be automatically tagged as the latter.

From there:

• From the Create drop-down menu, choose ‘Upload videos’.
• Drag and drop the video files to upload into the window that pops up.
• While the video uploads, you can get to work by choosing a video title, entering a description, uploading a thumbnail, selecting or creating a playlist, and choosing the appropriate audience.
• Once you’re done with the first window, click ‘Video elements’ at the top of the window. There, you can add subtitles, as well as cards and an end screen to show viewers related videos, websites, and calls to action.
• From there, click on ‘Checks’ at the top of the window. Here, you’ll find results from YouTube’s standard check for copyright and other issues.
• Next, head over to ‘Visibility’ at the top of the window to choose whether your video will be public, private, or unlisted (only available to someone with the direct link) and schedule a time for your video to go live.

It’s worth noting that if you want to make changes to the file itself — like trimming the clip — you’ll need to use the process I’ve laid out below under ‘How to edit a video in YouTube Studio’.

How to edit videos in YouTube Studio

YouTube Studio is incredibly versatile when it comes to editing. Almost every aspect of a video or Short can be tweaked, whether you've already made it public or not (incredibly handy when you've spotted a typo in your caption!).

To edit a video you've already uploaded:

• Click on the Content tab on the left-hand side of your screen.
• Click on the video you'd like to edit. You can use the search bar at the top of the screen to find it if it's not near the top of the list.
• Under the video details tab on the right, you can change the video title, the description, the thumbnail, add it to or remove it from a playlist, or change the audience. Using the list on the right, you can change the video's visibility and subtitles and add or remove your end screen or cards.

• To change the video itself, click on the Editor tab. Here, you'll find YouTube Studio's lightweight editor. You can cut or trim the footage and add a blur, music or sounds, an end screen, and info cards.

How to delete a video from YouTube

Deleting a video in YouTube Studio is pretty straightforward. Again, you'll start in the Content tab.

• From your list of videos in the Content section, select the one you want to delete.
• Choose ‘More actions' from the black bar that appears above the video list and choose ‘Delete forever'
• A pop-up will appear, reminding you that once gone, there's no way to retrieve it. If you're sure, tick the box and click ‘Delete forever.'

How to analyze a video in YouTube Studio

As a creator, your YouTube analytics are worth paying attention to. Analyzing video performance is crucial for improving channel's performance overall, as it can give you an indication of where best to focus your efforts.

This section, too, can be a little overwhelming — there’s a lot of data in there! Here’s how Mitra uses them.

“The number one thing I look at in Analytics is how many views we have,” she says. “I also love the graph within the Overview section, so you can see if there were any spikes in views and if they correlate with certain videos you’ve posted — it’s super helpful.

“From there, I like to check out the Content and Audience sections in Analytics to get a deeper view into how/why our videos performed the way they did,” she adds. “It’s incredible all of the data that you can get from YouTube Analytics!”

To access metrics for your videos in YouTube Studio, click on the Analyze tab on the left-hand side of the screen to head over to Channel Analytics.

You’ll be greeted by the analytics overview I mentioned above. I’m a huge fan of YouTube Analytics, because they direct your attention where it needs to go.

Under Content > Videos, for example, you’ll find a selection of videos to help you assess key moments for audience retention, with a list of videos with above-average and below-average intros (where viewers stuck with or stopped watching your videos after 30 seconds, respectively) to help you spot interesting patterns.

Similarly, by heading over to Content > Shorts, you’ll find insight into how users find your Shorts, your top-performing ones, and which ones are remixed the most.

To analyze a specific video or Short, I’ve found it’s easiest to actually head over to the Content tab and choose the video from the list of uploads available there. Once you’ve selected the video you want to check out, choose the Analytics tab on the left-hand side.

This will give you access to the views, reach, engagement, watchtime, and a host of other metrics to dig into. There’s even a real-time performance view that can be great to watch for an exciting launch or time-sensitive video uploads.

These are some of the most common processes creators need to get to grips with for YouTube success.

Once you’ve nailed these foundations, using YouTube Studio will become second nature, and you can get stuck into the real work required to grow your subscriber base and, if you want to, monetize your channel — creating stand-out video content

You already know your Facebook insights are crucial for nudging your Facebook marketing strategy in the right direction. Facebook analytics give you the performance numbers you need to:

• Optimize your ad spend
• Improve the reach of your organic posts
• Give statistics you can report to stakeholders
• …And more

But Facebook bid adios to its native Facebook analytics tool (and the Facebook audience insights tool) in 2021. How do you get your Facebook analytics now? This article will tell you everything you need to know to measure your Facebook performance and get valuable insights.

⚠️ Note: You need to have a Facebook Business Page for your small business or a Facebook profile in professional mode to access Facebook analytics and insights. Personal Facebook accounts don’t serve the marketing function and thus have little to no insights data available.

What’s the difference between Facebook analytics and Facebook insights?

First things first: What’s the difference between Facebook analytics and Facebook insights?

• Facebook analytics refer to the raw numbers, data, and performance statistics
• Facebook insights refer to the learnings you derive from the above analytics

For example, let’s say you collate all your best-performing Facebook posts by finding all the content with the most engagement and reach. Here, you’re using Facebook analytics (likes, comments, shares, impressions, etc.) to determine which posts qualify as ‘best-performing’. After this collection, suppose you spot a pattern where most top performing posts were user-generated content. This is a Facebook insight you derived from your analytics.

Facebook offers raw analytics and some insights via its native tools. But you can also use third-party social media analysis tools to take a deeper dive into your performance metrics.

How to derive Facebook insights from 4 native Meta tools

Meta sunsetted its Facebook analytics tool to consolidate data from its other networks (like Instagram) all in one place. Now, you can view your Facebook Page performance in four ways inside Meta:

1. Professional dashboard

2. Meta business suite (only for Facebook Pages)

3. Meta ads manager (only if you run Facebook ads)

4. Facebook group insights (if you have a Facebook group)

1: Professional dashboard

The Professional dashboard is available for creators with professional mode on their Facebook profiles turned on and for Facebook Page insights. It contains simple surface-level Facebook analytics. If you’re looking for some quick insight into how your Facebook marketing is going, this is the best place to look at.

Inside the “Professional dashboard,” you’ll find an “Insight” tab containing four tabs:

1. Home: This section is a basic performance overview of your Page or profile for the past 28 days. You can see key metrics like overall page posts, total reach, page views, engagement, new followers, new page likes, recent content, and some basic info about your audience.

2. Your Page/Profile: Insights under this tab contain post reach, engagement, new followers, unfollows, and total interactions (likes, comments, shares, views, clicks) for the past 28 days.

3. Content: This page contains the public posts you’ve shared in the past 90 days (or you can filter for the past 7, 28, or 60 days) and how they’re performing individually.

4. Audience: Here, you can see fundamental demographic data (gender, age, and location) about the audience interacting with your Facebook Page or profile.

The professional dashboard is excellent if you simply want to do a quick flip-through of your Facebook posts’ performance. It’s not the most in-depth source of information, but it can get the ball rolling and is handy when you’re short on time.

It’s best to visit the professional dashboard regularly to stay in the loop on how your posts are performing and what audience demographics are interacting with your Page/profile.

2: Meta business suite

Meta business suite replaced Facebook analytics to become the source of native Facebook page insights. Facebook profiles with professional mode turned on don’t work inside Meta business suite at the time of writing this article.

The Meta business suite helps with many things (like unifying your inbox, scheduling content on Facebook and Instagram, etc.) including extracting in-depth Facebook analytics and insights into your organic and paid content on the platform.

As soon as you log in to your Meta business suite, you’ll find an “Insights” section on the left menu. Within insights, eight tabs contain extensive and in-depth info on your Facebook performance:

1. Overview: This subsection contains the basic info on your Facebook Page insights. It includes daily and cumulative insights into how much reach you’ve gotten from your Facebook posts. The same tab also breaks down the reach numbers into 3-minute views, 1-minute views, minutes viewed, and content interactions on the X-axis and from followers & non-followers on the Y-axis.

2. Plan: Here, Facebook helps you set goals and complete basic tasks it recommends to set yourself up for success — like the number of times you should post, setting up admins, etc. It’s a good tab to monitor in the beginning to understand Meta’s expectations and the features it offers.

3. Results: This section helps you understand Facebook reach, Page views, follows, and ad performance over your selected timeline. It’s excellent for monitoring whether your Facebook analytics are increasing or decreasing over time. You can also come here to export these graphs for reporting to stakeholders.

4. Audience: When Meta shut down Facebook Audience Insights, it didn’t eradicate it completely. Instead, Meta merged it into the business suite so you can continue to extract the granular details about your followers on Facebook. This tab contains:

• Trends: This tab shows metrics such as how your followers are increasing or decreasing, returning viewers, engaged followers over the timeline you’ve set. It also shows when you should post on Facebook by displaying the your audience’s most active times.
• Segments: Your target audience is divided into people who engage, follow, and message your Facebook Page. You can get insights into all these individual segments.
• Demographics: This is where you can see a breakdown of your audience’s demographic data — their age, gender, and location.
• Potential audience: Here, you can add filters on who your ideal customer already is (where do they live? What’s their age? and more) and understand the number of people you can reach via your Facebook Page.

⚠️ Note: The number of people Facebook shares within the potential audience umbrella is an estimate. Don’t take it at face value.

5. Messaging: If you practice any form of customer service via your Facebook Page, this section is a goldmine. You can see how many people contacted you via direct messages (DMs), admins data, number of people who were returning contacts, your response time, and how many of your Facebook conversations converted into booked appointments (if you use that feature).

6. Benchmarking: This is the place where you can compare your Facebook performance to businesses that look like yours. You can either add your industry and evaluate insights like your comparative social media frequency to other companies in the same niche, your total followers & engagement vs. theirs, etc. This is in the “Business comparison” header.

Or, you can also add specific competitors and their Facebook Page(s) to compare your Facebook analytics to theirs. This is in the “Businesses to watch” header.

7. Overview (under “Content”): In this section, you can draw minute insights into every single Facebook post — from Facebook Reels to Facebook Stories. You can see your top content formats, audience retention, and also breakdown this data to compare organic vs. paid or followers vs. non-followers.

8. Content: Here, you can build customized performance charts by filtering for posts or Stories or both, media types, and marketing channels (organic or paid) on one side. 

(If you’re also running an Instagram marketing strategy, you can add that to the graph to get a cumulative performance chart.)

For the other side, you can choose from a plethora of Facebook analytics like impressions, reach, replies, sticker taps, etc.

Meta business suite is an excellent place for Facebook analytics, but it can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. Converting these analytics to actionable Facebook insights also requires some work and practice.

3: Meta ads manager

If you’ve created ads on Facebook, you need insight into how they’re performing to calculate and improve your return on investment (ROI). The Meta ads manager helps you do just that.

Note: Facebook ads manager and Meta ads manager are the same thing.

After you’ve run your ad campaigns on Facebook, the Meta ads manager can give you extensive statistics into how they’re received in the wild. There are two tabs in the Facebook ad manager:

1. The overview tab gives you basic metrics of reach, impressions, link clicks, cost per thousand impressions (CPM), click through rates, etc., for all your ad campaigns in a table format right next to your campaign name. You can add filters using the drop-down menu to customize this data and find exactly what you’re looking for.

2. The ad reporting dashboard enables you to do the exact same thing. You can apply various filters to customize rows and columns — except here, you can also export them as a CSV file or a shareable link. You can also make this a recurring report by duplicating the analytics and switching the timeline.

4: Facebook groups

If building a community is a part of your social media strategy, Facebook groups are an excellent place to start.

Once you’ve been at it for a while, Facebook gives you valuable group insights. You can learn:

1. Individual post insights

2. Top contributors to explore partnership opportunities or a reward system 

3. Engagement trends — at what time and day do your posts get maximum engagement

Where are these insights? Enter your Facebook group and click on “Insights” in the menu on the left menu.

⚠️ Note: Facebook group insights are only relevant for your Facebook community. What hits on the group might not necessarily perform well on your Facebook page. Use group insights to dictate what you post on your Facebook group, how you interact with members, and gather feedback.

How to acquire Facebook analytics using Buffer (and why you should)

Third-party tools — like Buffer — also offer Facebook analytics. But why should you use them if you know the ins and outs of the Meta world?

1. Buffer is a social media marketing tool — so, it also helps you do related social media management activities like schedule content, cross-post it across social media sites in a few clicks, and use AI to assist caption-writing (among a host of other things). All this and more in just one tab.

2. You can gather cumulative insights data across social media platforms in one place and filter them however you like. That’s a lot of flexibility!

3. Buffer is way easier to use than any of the Meta tools. You can convert analytics to insights, fast (without scratching your head to find what you need). There’s minimal to no learning to curve to Buffer. Meta tools take a while to master.

4. You can build campaigns in Buffer and analyze their performance separately from your out-of-campaign posts.

In Buffer, you get all the basics like impressions, follower growth, reach, link clicks, yada yada. But you can also directly find the answers to questions like:

• Which type of posts get me the highest engagement on Facebook?
• How are my organic posts faring compared to my paid ads?
• What is the best time to post on Facebook for my Page?
• What is the best frequency for me on Facebook?
• What are my audience demographics?

The cherry on top? You can use Buffer to get insights into your Facebook Page and your Facebook Group.

Try it for $0 today.

Which are the Facebook analytics that truly matter?

Once you dip your toe into Facebook analytics, you realize the numbers in this universe are endless. You can examine every single post, run campaigns and measure how they did, create ads & groups, and see their performance…it’s a lot of data.

How do you make sense of the noise?

1. Start simple. First, focus on finding your ideal posting frequency, the best time to post, and the best days to post. Make these your key metrics. This will take a while because you’ll need consistency to get accurate data.

2. Then, go deeper and find which types of posts perform the best for you. Spot a pattern. Are all the posts that get the most engagement videos? Or are they text-based posts? Do customer reviews get more link clicks than product tutorials? All these insights data will help you learn where to double down your efforts.

Keep going by reviewing your analytics every so often. Create reports to see the insight in the analytics. If you keep showing up, you’ll see patterns emerge and understand the numbers that truly make a difference.

LinkedIn has evolved beyond a simple job and networking website to become a bustling social media platform. In fact, Microsoft revealed LinkedIn saw “record levels in engagement” in 2024, with the platform becoming a more and more popular choice for creators and brands looking to grow their audiences.

If you’ve scrolled through your LinkedIn feed recently, you've probably seen some interesting discourse about work but also a variety of other topics, broadening the scope of the platform. Still, LinkedIn’s unique focus on career growth makes it a brilliant place to boost the reach of your business and your personal brand as a professional by creating content.

That said, as the platform becomes more and more crowded, creating content that stands out is becoming tougher — which is where LinkedIn analytics come in.

There's no better way to understand what kind of content resonates the most with your target audience, and in turn, what to create more of (or less of) in the hope of growing your LinkedIn following.

In this article, we'll explore how to uncover this essential data in LinkedIn analytics and which important LinkedIn metrics you should be paying the most attention to.

Here’s an overview of how to use LinkedIn analytics to build brand awareness, grow your following, and shape your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

What are LinkedIn analytics?

LinkedIn analytics are native social media metrics that you can use to better understand how your page and content are performing. LinkedIn analytics include engagement rates on your posts, information about your followers, data on who visits your page, and a whole lot more.  

It's important to note that there are two different types of LinkedIn analytics, and what you have available to you will depend on the kind of profile you have: a LinkedIn page or a LinkedIn personal profile.

LinkedIn is a little different from platforms like Instagram in that you can't really pick and choose what kind of account you want, depending on your needs. People have LinkedIn Profiles, while businesses have LinkedIn Pages.

If you're a business owner or a marketer managing a business page, you'll have access to both the page LinkedIn analytics and personal profile analytics within a single account. LinkedIn personal accounts are tied to brand accounts in the same way that Facebook pages are. In other words, no need to log in and out to toggle between them.

If you don't manage a business page, you'll have access to LinkedIn's analytics tools for personal profiles (which is all you'll need). Previously, you'd have had to turn on LinkedIn Creator Mode in order to activate these and a few more features. Now, the platform has phased this mode out and made creator features available to all personal profiles.

Why LinkedIn analytics matter

Tracking LinkedIn analytics is essential to building an effective content strategy and ensuring you’re getting the most out of the social media site.

If you don’t monitor these LinkedIn metrics closely, you’re doing yourself and your personal brand-building or marketing efforts a massive disservice. Flying by the seat of your pants might have worked on LinkedIn several years back when only a handful of brands and creators were leveraging the platform, but now you need to get strategic about the platform if you want your hard work to pay off.

By understanding your post and page performance — and who exactly your primary audience is — you can create content that your audience loves. The more your content resonates with them, the more they'll engage with it (comment, like, or reshare it to their own network).

Engagement like this is a strong signal to the LinkedIn algorithm that your content is valuable, and it increases your chances of appearing in the LinkedIn feed of non-followers.

The greater your reach, the faster your following will grow, and hopefully, more opportunities will come your way on LinkedIn — whether that is more customers for your business or exciting new job offers.

Using native LinkedIn analytics (or LinkedIn analytics tools) is the best way to figure out what content is working and boost your efficiency on the platform. I'll explain exactly how to do this below.

LinkedIn Page analytics

On your LinkedIn analytics dashboard for your business page, you'll find detailed metrics on:

• Content
• Visitors
• Followers
• Leads
• Newsletters
• Competitors
• Employee Advocacy

While all of these metrics can be useful, it can be pretty overwhelming to track all of these numbers all the time — which is why I’ll highlight the three most important ones below.

How to access LinkedIn Page analytics

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what exactly LinkedIn analytics are for your business page, let’s go over how you can access them.

You must be a page admin or be assigned an “analyst” role to see these metrics.

1. Log in to your LinkedIn account

2. Click on the Me icon at the top right of the page

3. Select Manage and then select Company. You will then be taken to your business page

5.  Click on the “Analytics” tab on the left side menu

Content analytics

LinkedIn content analytics allows you to gauge how well your LinkedIn posts are performing with your followers and visitors. Here are the various post analytics under this category.

Highlights

To begin, on your dashboard, you will see a highlights section that provides you with a roundup of the total number of reactions, comments, and reposts you received in the last 30 days.

This is a great way to quickly gauge the success of your LinkedIn posts.  

Metrics

Beneath highlights, you'll find the metrics section. Here, you’ll see a graph of the performance of both your organic and sponsored content on LinkedIn over time. You can also filter specific time ranges you want to view data for.

You’ll be able to select several data points to view on the graph, including:

• Impressions: the number of times each post is visible
• Unique views: the number of times your posts were shown to signed-in members
• Clicks: the number of clicks on your content, company name, or logo by a signed-in member
• Reactions: the number of reactions your post received
• Comments: the number of comments on your post
• Reposts: the number of times your content was reposted
• Engagement rate: your engagement rate is the number of interactions you’ve received, along with the number of clicks and followers gained, divided by the number of impressions

Content engagement

While the metrics section gives you an overview of all of your LinkedIn content performance, the content engagement tab breaks down the performance of each individual post and can also be filtered by dates.

Here is the data that you can see for every post:

• Post title: The first few words of your post
• Post author: Who created the post
• Post type: Whether the post was an image, video, or text
• Audience: Who your post is visible to
• Impressions: The number of times a post is visible
• Views: The number of times the post was viewed for at least 3 seconds
• Clicks: The number of times the post was clicked
• CTR (clickthrough rate): The number of clicks divided by impressions the post received
• Reactions: The number of reactions your post received
• Comments: How many comments the post received
• Reposts: How many times the post was reposted
• Follows: How many follow clicks your post received (Only sponsored posts include follow buttons)
• Engagement rate: The total number of clicks, likes, comments, reposts, and follows divided by impressions

You'll be able to measure just how well your LinkedIn content is performing using these metrics.

Follower analytics

With follower analytics, you can get a better sense of who is already following your page. This will give you an idea of who is interested in your company and who resonates with your content.

On the flip side, if you find that you’re not reaching your targeted audience, you can strategize how to create content that is more compelling to that demographic.

Let's go over the various metrics you’ll see in this section.

Follower highlights and trends

Here, you’ll see your total number of followers along with the number of followers you gained and the percentage change of your followers in a given time range.

Follower metrics

In follower metrics, you’ll see a graph depicting how your number of followers has changed over time. You can also see the difference between organic followers versus sponsored followers.

Follower demographics

Follower demographics provide demographic data to give you a detailed look into who exactly is following your business page on LinkedIn. Here are the details you can view:

• Job function
• Company size
• Industry
• Location
• Seniority

All followers

This section provides a list of everyone who is following your page listed in order of recency, their current place of employment, and the month they followed you.

Visitor analytics

Similar to follower analytics, visitor analytics provides a deep dive into LinkedIn users who have visited your business page but have not yet become followers.

Here’s an overview of the analytics you’ll see in this section.

Visitor highlights

This section will showcase the number of total page views, unique visitors, and custom button clicks in the last 30 days. You will also see the percentage of change in your followers over the last month.

Visitor metrics

Visitor metrics show two key metrics: page views and unique visitors. You can also filter the data by specific page sections and time ranges.

Visitor demographics

Here you’ll get a breakdown of the users who have visited your LinkedIn page and view this data:

• Job function
• Company size
• Industry
• Location
• Seniority

With this information, you'll have a better idea of who is interested in your page, and figure out how you can convert these viewers into actual followers.

LinkedIn Profile analytics

LinkedIn Profiles have access to slightly less metrics that pages, though they're still incredibly helpful.

How to access LinkedIn analytics for your personal profile

Accessing LinkedIn analytics for your personal page is simple.

1. Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn Homepage

2. Click View Profile

3. Scroll until you find “Analytics”

Once there, you will see basic data for your page, including:

• Profile views: how often your profile was viewed in the previous 90 days
• Post impressions: the overall number of impressions you’ve received on all of your posts
• Search appearances: how often your profile appeared in search results for the previous seven days

How to find LinkedIn Analytics for your individual posts

LinkedIn also provides analytics for each of your individual posts.

1. Log in to your LinkedIn account

2. Click on the Me icon at the top right of the page

3. Select Manage and then Posts & Activity

4. Click the Posts tab

Here, you’ll be able to see a detailed breakdown of each one of your posts' performance. Let’s take this post I created on my LinkedIn account, sharing my weekly social media tip.

You’ll see the post impressions above the comments (if your post is a video, it will show video views instead), and you’ll find the full breakdown of your post once you click “View analytics.”

Clicking this provides a few additional metrics, including:

• Discovery: shows the total number of impressions of a post
• Engagements: shows engagement metrics like how many reactions, comments, and reposts your post received
• Top demographics of people reached: you can see the company size, job titles, locations, companies, and industries,of the individuals who viewed your post.

Not only can these metrics help you gauge the performance of your content, but they also give you some valuable insight into who is interacting most with your posts.

Using Buffer to supercharge your LinkedIn analytics tracking

While LinkedIn does have helpful native tracking, leveraging LinkedIn analytics tools can be game-changing when it comes to keeping tabs on and (most importantly) making sense of all the data. This is especially true if LinkedIn isn't the only social media platform you're active on.

Along with the ability to schedule and cross-post your content, LinkedIn analytics tools are baked right into Buffer.

Not only does this take the headache out of tracking all your social media analytics across platforms, but — and this is the best part — it will also interpret that data for you.

For LinkedIn Pages, you'll be given recommendations on a number of things, including which content type tends to perform best, the best time to post on LinkedIn

To top that off, you can also create LinkedIn analytics reports to help prove the value of your marketing efforts.

On LinkedIn posts from personal profiles, Buffer offers an at-a-glance overview of your post performance, including all the engagements your post received, impressions, and more.

Here’s a quick rundown of the LinkedIn analytics tools in Buffer:

LinkedIn Page Analytics in Buffer

To access analytics for your LinkedIn Page in Buffer, log into your account and click on the Analyze tab at the top. From there, choose LinkedIn from the channels list on the left.

Overview

Within the Overview tab, you will be shown key metrics that help to assess how your LinkedIn content is performing. These metrics can be filtered by specific time ranges, including weekly or monthly.

• Performance: In the performance tab, you will see the following data points: total followers, new followers, posts, impressions, clicks, and engagement rate.
• Average performance: In this section, you can see a bar graph with the following metrics: Total followers, clicks, comments, engagements, engagement rate, and impressions.
• Metric insights: Metric insights are charts that show the following data: Total followers, clicks, comments, engagements, engagement rate, and impressions per post.

Posts

The posts tab looks specifically at important metrics on your posts in a specific time range.

• Post summary: Posts summary looks at the total number of posts in a given time period and provides a rundown of key metrics.
• Hashtag performance: Buffer’s hashtag performance section ranks the performance of hashtags used in your LinkedIn posts and provides the average impressions and engagement rate of each one.
• Post insights: Post insights provides the following data for individual posts: impressions, likes, comments, clicks, and engagement rate. You can sort by whichever metric is the most important to you, whether it’s likes, impressions, clicks, or engagement rate.

Answers

The answers tab is a super helpful section that analyzes your LinkedIn content to provide suggestions to help elevate your LinkedIn performance.

You’ll receive suggestions on the best days to post, the best type of content to post, and how frequently you should post. In this dashboard, you'll also find data showing how your posts perform at other times and days.

LinkedIn post analytics in Buffer

On all your sent posts for your personal LinkedIn profile in Buffer, you'll find a host of helpful stats at a glance.

To find them, navigate to your queue by clicking on the 'Publish' tab at the top of the screen, then choose LinkedIn from the channels list on the left-hand side.

From there, click 'Sent' just above your lists of posts to filter them by the posts that have already been published.

Beneath each post you'll find a host of helpful metrics to measure the success of that piece of content including likes, comments, impressions, shares, and engagement rate.

More LinkedIn resources

I hope this guide has helped you get a better understanding of how exactly to leverage LinkedIn analytics.

If you’re looking for more on creating a LinkedIn strategy, check out these resources to level up:

• The Quick Guide to LinkedIn Marketing Strategy: 9 Best Practices for 2024
• Why LinkedIn Groups Can Be Great for Businesses (and How to Create a Successful One)
• What You Need to Know About LinkedIn Newsletters
• The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn to Boost Your Following + Engagement in 2024

Unless you’ve been living under a rock since the pandemic, you know what Instagram Reels are — the Meta’s version of short-form videos. They could only be up to 15 seconds initially, but now the Instagram Reel length can be up to 15 minutes.

The problem? There’s a lot of discourse surrounding Instagram Reels. How much should you post them vs. carousels? Should you or should you not use trending sounds? How can you get on your target audience’s Explore feed? How often should you post Instagram Reels? How can you scale short-form video production?

There are so many questions. It can feel like boating without a paddle. In this article, I’ll unpack why you should care about Instagram Reels, how to create them, and share some actionable best practices for the content type. Let’s go!

Why care about Instagram Reels?

Wondering what type of content works best on Instagram? Instagram Reels are the app's bread and butter. At Buffer, we analyzed 12 million posts (😲) to find that Instagram Reels get the most engagement.

What’s more: Instagram Reels make up 58 percent of an Instagram user’s feed, according to HubSpot’s recent report.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you, Laura Calhoun did an experiment where she posted Instagram Reels every day for a month and saw:

• A 1,500 follower count increase
• Nearly double Instagram Story views
• A 2000 percent jump in Instagram reach
• 3-4 times more likes than regular image posts

⚠️ Note: That experiment might be a few years old (when Instagram Reels was still new), so you might not get the same level of push as Laura. But regardless, relevant short-form videos can give your Instagram account a huge uplift.

So, if you want to grow on Instagram, Instagram Reels need to be a non-negotiable part of your strategy.

How to create Instagram Reels?

Posting Instagram Reels is simple. Follow the three steps below.

Step 1: Pre-record a video or use the Instagram camera to film your video

If you pre-record a video, it can be up to 15 minutes long. If you use the Instagram app to film or edit your short-form video, however, it can only be 90 seconds long.

Step 2: Edit your Instagram Reel

Add audio, stickers, text, and special effects to your Instagram Reel. These are the native video editing options within the app, but you can also use third-party software.

Step 3: Write your caption and share your Instagram Reel

The last step is filling in the blanks. You can add a caption, poll, and up to three topics related to your Instagram Reel. You can also tag people if you’re doing a creator collaboration, add a partnership label for influencer marketing, rename your audio, etc.

Uploading a video on the Instagram app is the easy bit. What’s difficult is creating, editing, and distributing your Instagram Reels. The following sections contains advice for each stage of the Instagram Reel publishing process.

5 pro tips for creating Instagram Reels

Creating is the bit where you brainstorm topic ideas and shoot the video. Here are five tips to  create an Instagram Reel with high return on investment (ROI).

1: Choose topics that are DM-worthy

One of the most important signals the Instagram Reels algorithm uses to rank content is sends per reach, according to Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

In short, shareable content is where the gold is. Think: How many people in my target audience would send this Instagram Reel to a friend?

If you’re a creator focusing on skincare, for example, create Instagram Reels of product recommendations, time-saving hacks, and relatable memes. Align your Reel’s content to things people want to share with a friend.

Elise Darmanin, a creator and online education business owner, says she’s been creating DM-worthy Instagram Reels by focusing on creating short videos (around five seconds long), using background roll with text on top — like this one.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Elise Darmanin (@elisedarma)

She added:

“The real magic lies in the copy and the text overlay. Start with a really engaging hook or headline and place this text over the b-roll footage. This is designed to immediately grab someone’s attention. In the caption, write another hook or headline as the first line to draw further interest. However, don’t provide the answer or complete the thought in the caption itself. Instead, encourage viewers to DM me a specific keyword. Using ManyChat automation, then send them a direct message with the answer or the information they were curious about. This method not only increases engagement but also drives meaningful interactions through direct messages.”

Another great example of a company that posts DM-worthy Reels is tl;dv. They sell an AI meeting recorder and create funny, relatable, and entertaining skits on Instagram about common communication occurrences in the workplace.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by tldv.io - AI Meeting Recorder (@tldv.io)

The above Reel has over 5,000 shares. tl;dv’s videos would make their target audience chuckle and think, “This just happened to me yesterday! I’ll share it with my friend,” which prompts sharing and thus increasing their sends-to-reach ratio.

2: Create a mix of trending and evergreen content

Instagram Reels have a short shelf life, mostly. Reels rely heavily on what’s trending and rank that on the top.

But the Instagram Reels algorithm isn’t so straightforward. Older content can also resurface on Instagram — especially if it’s still providing value to people.

So, while creating your social media strategy for Instagram, focus on creating a healthy mix of trending and evergreen content. For example, you can create educational content (like tutorials) with a voiceover and original audio that’d help your audience for a long time.

But creating trending content is no cakewalk either. Jade Beason, creator and social media consultant, says:

“Instagram has introduced a lot of different features to make it easier for people to find what’s trending. But I don’t think people use it enough.”

How do you find what’s trending on Instagram? Here are four resources:

• Read their Reels Trends Report
• View Instagram’s trending templates
• Follow the @creators account on the app
• Find trending audios on Instagram in the Instagram music library or with the upwards ↗️arrow

A great example of someone who balances the trends with evergreen content is beauty creator Safi Rooney. She often uses trending audio in her Instagram Reels to boost her posts.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Safi Rooney (@safi_rooney)

But she also balances it with evergreen tips and hacks that you’d find useful at any point in time.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Safi Rooney (@safi_rooney)

What’s worth noting is trends aren’t native to Instagram. There might be popular conversations going on within your niche that aren’t specific “trends” on the Instagram app. To create a wholesome social media marketing strategy, you need to practice social listening and also stay aware of what’s trending in your niche and community.

3: Focus on creating original, story-driven content

Adam Mosseri recently shared that they’re going to start rewarding original content on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

This means “aggregators,” aka people who repost or reshare other people’s content, will go down in recommendations. If you want your videos to pop up on the Instagram Reels tab, you need to double down on fresh, original, and creative content.

But don’t mistake this update for never commenting on any other creator’s video or resharing user-generated content. Instead, use features like Remix and green screen effects to put your own spin on someone else’s content.

Instagram also loves stories and authenticity. Take your audience behind the scenes using Instagram Reels like Brooki bakehouse does.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by BROOKI (@brookibakehouse)

Think: What would be a refreshing perspective in my niche that I can share? What’s an original story that can help my audience? What’s a step-by-step process I can show to feel more connected to my followers?

Instagram is all about building a community and getting up close and personal with your audience. 

4: Publish at least 10 Instagram Reels every month

Instagram recently shared that their internal research found that creators with the highest follower growth rate post more than 10 Reels monthly.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

Consistency is the name of the game when it comes to growing on Instagram via Reels. Create engaging videos consistently to boost your follower count faster and maintain your reach.

5: Spend extra time on crafting an attention-grabbing hook

Creating excellent, high-quality, and valuable Instagram Reels without working on your hook is like trying to light a match in a waterfall.

A hook is what stops the scroll and draws your audience in. You need to ensure it’s meaty enough to make someone pause.

Some examples of outstanding hooks you can make your own:

• Did you know [an astonishing fact in your niche]
• How you can solve [a problem your audience struggles with]
• I did [some astounding experiment] and here’s what I learned
• One of the most common questions about [something in your niche] is
• I bet you didn’t know this about [something your audience cares about]
• Here’s something no one tells you/you didn’t know about [a hard-to-swallow-fact in your niche]
• How I achieve [something your followers want to accomplish] without [something your audience finds hard]

A creator whose hooks I always adore is Akanksha Monga. She always comes up with fresh, unique, and engaging hooks that reel you in (see what I did there?) and complement the copy with excellent editing.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aakanksha Monga (@aakanksha.monga)

Scroll on the Instagram Reels tab everyday a little bit yourself to find hooks inspiration and learn what makes people tick, stay, and share.

5 recommendations for editing your Instagram Reels

It’s crucial to not only create engaging, short-form videos, but also edit them to perfection so you don’t lose your audience midway. But what do you do after you’ve aligned your videos to the right aspect ratio? Here are five more recommendations to level up your Instagram Reels video.

1: Add subtitles/captions to your videos

The easiest thing you can do while editing Reels is add captions to your video content. Subtitles not only make your Instagram Reels more accessible but also ensure people who are scrolling without sound can still understand your video.

Jade Beason agrees: 

“Instagram is a sound-off platform. There’s going to be many times when people will be consuming your content with sound off. So, you gotta make sure your videos have captions for your audience to consume them properly.”

If you shoot natively within Instagram, the app has an option to auto-generate captions. However, these might not be 100 percent accurate, so it’s best to add text manually while editing your Instagram Reels.

The best example of this is Beason’s video content. She adds a caption to every section of her video in every Instagram Reel she uploads.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jade | Creator & Social Media Consultant (@jadebeason)

In addition to adding subtitles, try to keep the captions native instead of reposting them from TikTok or with an editing app’s watermark. There’s a possibility that watermarks from other apps might reduce your reach on Instagram.

2: Upload your videos at their highest quality

Quality matters on Instagram — not just in the content you produce, but in how it appears. Here are the camera settings you should check on your phone to create high-quality videos before you post Reels.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

Another thing you should do is allow Instagram to upload higher resolution videos from your camera roll.

1. Go to “Settings and Privacy” from the three dots on your Instagram profile

2. Search for “Media quality”

3. Turn on the “Upload at highest quality” toggle button

A crisp film ensures people stay interested in watching your videos and get the maximum entertainment out of it.

3: Use in-app Reels templates to improve your efficiency

Instagram has introduced Reels templates within its app to help you edit videos faster and emulate the style of creators and videos you already love.

1. Click on the bottom right corner to go to your profile

2. Go to the “+” icon on your profile

3. Select “Reels”

4. Click on “Templates”

5. Browse the various templates — recommended for you, trending, and more

6. Embed your video clips into these templates and voila! Your Instagram Reel is ready

You can also find the option to “Use template” in some videos when you scroll on the Instagram Reel tab.

Templates are an excellent way to find out what’s trending and create more videos without doing the legwork of editing yourself.

4: Kill your (video) darlings – edit every second ruthlessly

Every second in your video should count. While an amazing hook is essential, you need to hold your audience’s attention throughout the whole video. This will increase your engagement and make your videos pop better than the ones that drag on.

Keep one goal at the center of every Instagram Reel you create: Your target audience should not swipe away from your video at any point.

To do this, avoid sloppy editing like the plague. Use video editing tools like CapCut or InShot to refine your video and make every transition and jump count.

A creator who does this really well is Bibi-Jane Angelica. Her videos have smooth transitions, soft cuts, and soothing colors that urge you to keep watching until the end.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by BIBI-JANE ANGELICA (@bibijaneangelica)

Remember, though, that you have to ruthlessly prune not just the visuals but also your video script. Your copy should be crystal clear, fast-paced, and match the video. All these elements must come together to make an engaging Instagram Reel.

5: Use Instagram’s new features (like timer, countdown, trending filters, and polls) to keep your audience excited and engaged

Whenever Instagram releases a new feature, they’ll likely push the accounts of creators who are using it. Keep an eye out for new options and releases and grab that first-mover advantage.

Despite that, many features within Instagram go unnoticed and underused, which can help boost the engagement on your Instagram Reels video. For example, you can respond to a comment on one of your videos with another Instagram Reel.

This is an excellent way to help your audience, answer their questions, and even brainstorm ideas. There are plenty of other features like using trending filters, adding polls in your Instagram Reel caption, adding stickers, etc. Play around within the app to see which features can make your content more interactive and experiment with them! 

5 best practices for distributing Instagram Reels

The last step is the cherry on top that makes all the difference — distributing your Instagram Reel. Sure, you can post and forget, because what else can you do? Here are five ideas.

1: Engage with your post’s comments

Adam Mosseri encourages creators and businesses to respond to comments on their posts within a few hours of publishing — unless the comments violate Instagram’s community guidelines.

We love the communities that creators have built on Instagram. 😊❤️

That’s why we’re excited to launch Reels Visual Replies, a new feature to interact with your audience. You can now reply to comments with Reels and the comment will pop up as a sticker. pic.twitter.com/dA3qj1lAwE

— Instagram (@instagram) December 10, 2021

It’s a no-brainer: When you respond to comments from your audience, they get the answers to their questions, feel valued, and the interactions boost your engagement on Instagram. Win-win, all over.

You can learn from the skincare brand Hibiscus Monkey. They respond to as many comments as they can on their Reels, especially in the immediate window after posting. Whether it’s questions, compliments, or constructive criticism, the brand responds to every comment it receives with an open mind.

Mark time in your calendar to not only create, edit, and publish your Instagram Reels, but also respond to the comments and DMs you receive.

2: Monitor your engagement even after a few months of posting

Mosseri recently released an Instagram Reel sharing that you should monitor the analytics of your Instagram Reels and reply to comments even a few months after your post has gone live.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

This is because some posts might get pushed by Instagram a few months after they’re published or simply because some content is evergreen.

Depending on your capacity, block time once a week or once a month to eyeball your analytics, see if any old posts are witnessing new engagement, and what kind of posts are your audience loving.

3: Keep your Instagram Reel under 90 seconds

Can you upload longer videos on Instagram? Yes. Should you? No.

Instagram has said that it doesn’t prefer recommending videos that are longer than 90 seconds.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

And this isn’t going to change. The reason? Mosseri says longer videos aren’t as shareable as long-form videos. It goes back to what we discussed in the creation section: Instagram wants to see videos that people would share with each other on DMs. According to them, long-form videos don’t serve that purpose.

If you create long-form videos, you can easily repurpose them by breaking them down into shorter videos. Creators Colin and Samir often do this with their podcast videos.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Colin and Samir (@colinandsamir)

They break down the key moments of that video, chop it further for the short-form attention span, and encourage their audience to watch the full version on YouTube.

4: Collaborate with other creators and influencers to widen your reach

The easiest way to reach new audiences is by partnering with creators in the same niche. If you’re a business, this means finding relevant influencers and practicing influencer marketing with them.

The company Aavia often does with health influencers like Mali.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mali (@healthwithmali)

The video pushes the company’s page, and the creator builds an audience while talking about their product.

Find relevant creators in the same space and pitch ideas to work together with them. Collaborating on Instagram Reels means you pool your followers to widen the net of your Instagram reach.

5: Use up to five relevant hashtags and relevant keywords in your Instagram Reel caption

One side to distributing your Instagram Reels is making them appear in the recommendations on the Explore page and someone’s Instagram Reel tab. This relies on someone from your target audience finding your content organically.

But people are also using Instagram to proactively search for stuff — whether that’s via hashtags or keywords.

To make the most out of hashtags, use fewer, but more relevant ones. Instagram puts the sweet spot at around five hashtags.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

Instagram is also constantly upping its search engine optimization (SEO) game, so use keywords related to your post in your Instagram Reel and the caption.

Skincare brand Sol De Janerio often uses keywords in their posts. They don’t use hashtags, but they often rely on relevant keywords that people might be searching for.

Don’t stuff keywords and hashtags in your post. Instead, write the language that your audience uses and all the necessary keywords will fit in without trying.

Consistency is the foundation of growth

The above 15 principles are great, but they work under the assumption that you’re posting regularly on Instagram — at least ten videos a month.

If you want to get started with regular posting, begin by creating batch content and schedule it throughout the week or month. You can do this for free in Buffer. And since it’s a social media management tool and not just a scheduler, you can also view juicy analytics like the best time to post on Instagram (for you), best type of post (for you), and performance metrics — without doing the math yourself.

Sign up for a free trial today.

Summary

Take a deep dive into Instagram's algorithms. We’ll go through the latest factors that influence the ranking of your content and how to make them work for you.

You will learn

• The most important ranking factors in all the various parts of the app
• Answers to Instagram's frequently asked algorithm questions
• A marketer's approach to sharing content on Instagram

In June 2024, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri appeared on YouTubers’ Colin and Samir’s podcast, where he revealed some fascinating tidbits about the strongest signals in the Instagram algorithm. 

Yes, likes, comments, and shares matter — but the most powerful factor in boosting reach (of Instagram Reels in particular) is shares.

That’s private shares in DMs specifically, not sharing publicly via Instagram Stories (though those shares are good, too). 

In other words, when users share your posts privately, your reach could skyrocket. 

“We find that over and over again that it [shares in DMs] seems to be the healthiest thing to value in ranking models. One of the most important things to look at is ‘sends per reach,’” Adam shared. “Out of the people who saw it, how many sent it to a friend?”

Of course, this is not the only way brands and creators find success on the platform — there are thousands of ranking factors, or ‘signals,’ that the algorithm takes into account.

These signals are weighted differently in different parts of the Instagram app. Because, contrary to popular belief, there is no one algorithm to rule them all when it comes to Instagram.

In fact, according to a blog post shared by the Meta-owned platform, there are “a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose” to make sure IG users see the content that most interests them.

“We want to make the most of people’s time, and we believe that using technology to personalize everyone’s experience is the best way to do that,” Mosseri wrote in the update.

Now, a “variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes” may sound a little confusing, but fear not — it’s not quite as intimidating as it sounds.

In this article, I’ll break down exactly how the platform ranks content and share tips for increasing your chances of getting your Instagram content in front of more people. In short: everything you need to know about the Instagram algorithm/s.

Different parts of Instagram are ranked by different algorithms

You’ll find a lot of opinions about how certain types of content are ranked higher on the platform than others.

A popular one: “Instagram Reels perform better than feed posts.” While that may be true in some cases (I’ll unpack why down below), statements like that give the impression that new posts and reels are weighed against each other by a single algorithm, and reels are given a leg-up — which is not true.

Instead, reels and the feed (and Instagram Stories and Explore) are all controlled by a different algorithm. Why? People’s behavior tends to differ in different areas of the app. “People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, use Explore to discover new content and creators, and be entertained in reels,” Mosseri explains.

With that in mind: here’s how it works.

Instagram Feed algorithm

When people talk about how the Instagram algorithm works, it’s usually this area of the app they’re referring to: it’s the first feed most people will see when they open the app.

The Feed is a combination of videos, photos, and carousels (multi-photo posts) posted by anyone you follow, peppered with posts by other accounts Instagram users may be interested in, and sponsored posts tailored to them.

Instagram takes a staggering number of ranking factors into account when organizing feeds. “We call these ‘signals,’ and there are thousands of them,” Mosseri says. Here is a breakdown of the most important signals, in order of importance.

• Activity. Posts the user has liked, shared, saved, or commented on.
• Information about the post. How popular a post is (how many people have liked it and how quickly people are liking, commenting, sharing, and saving a post) and more information about the content itself (when it was posted, and what location, if any, was attached to it).
• Information about the person who posted. “This helps us get a sense for how interesting the person might be to [the user], and includes signals like how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks,” Mosseri says.
• The user’s history of interacting with someone. This is pretty straightforward, and ties in with some of the above points — whether or not the user has engaged with this poster before, and how.

With all that information, Instagram makes a series of “educated guesses” about how likely a user is to interact with a post, Mosseri says.

“In Feed, the five interactions we look at most closely are how likely you are to spend a few seconds on a post, comment on it, like it, share it, and tap on the profile photo. The more likely you are to take an action, and the more heavily we weigh that action, the higher up in Feed you’ll see the post.”

Instagram Stories algorithm

Instagram Stories — photos and videos that disappear 24 hours after posting — offer creators and businesses a way to appear on top of followers’ feeds as soon as they open the app.

As soon as you post a story, your account profile picture will appear right at the top of the app in what IG calls a ‘Stories Tray.’ Arguably, however, it may be even harder for brands to appear in this section of the app, given how IG views this as an area where “people tend to look for their closest friends.”

Here are the signals the platform takes into account for the Instagram Stories algorithm to show users the most relevant content:

• Viewing history. How often a user has viewed an account’s Stories (the more often they view a certain account’s Stories, the more likely they are to appear first).
• Engagement history. How often a user engages with that account’s stories, such as sending a reaction or a response.
• Closeness. The user’s relationship with the author overall and how likely they are to be friends or family.

Again, these signals will be used to “make a series of predictions about stories you’ll find more relevant and valuable,” Mosseri says, “including how likely you are to tap into a story, reply to a story in DMs or move on to the next story — to determine which stories will be shown higher in your Stories Tray.”

Instagram Explore page algorithm

This is where things get interesting for creators and brands users don’t already follow. Explore (accessed by tapping the explore tab magnifying glass at the bottom of the app) was designed to help users find new accounts. 

If you’re a brand or creator, read: help new audiences find you.

This grid-style feed is made up of photos and videos a user is likely to be interested in based on past activity: posts they’ve liked, saved, shared, and commented on.

Here are the signals that play into the Instagram Explore page algorithm.

• Information about the post. Like with Feed, Instagram looks at how popular a post seems to be. “These signals matter much more in Explore than they do in Feed or in Stories,” Mosseri says.
• A user’s activity in Explore. Posts a user has liked, saved, shared, or commented on and how they’ve interacted with posts in Explore in the past. If users have engaged with a specific post found via Explore previously, the algorithm will show them more like that.
• A user's interaction history with the poster. It’s likely the post was shared by someone they don’t know, but if a user has interacted with them previously, it tells IG they’re pretty interested in their content.
• Information about the person who posted. Here IG takes into account how many times people have interacted with you recently across all your content, “to help find compelling content from a wide array of people”.

Here’s an example Instagram uses here, which I found really helpful in making sense of all of the above:

“Let’s say you’ve recently liked a number of photos from San Francisco’s dumpling chef Cathay Bi (@dumplingclubsf). We then look at who else likes Cathay’s photos, and then what other accounts those people are interested in.

Maybe people who like Cathay are also into the SF dim sum spot @dragonbeaux. In that case, the next time you open Explore, we might show you a photo or video from @dragonbeaux.”

Instagram Reels algorithm

The Instagram Reels algorithm works similarly to the Explore page. The reels feed (accessed by tapping the video icon at the bottom of the app) is designed to help users find new brands and creators. 

The signals IG takes into account here are:

• A user’s activity. Things like which reels they’ve liked, saved, reshared, commented on, and engaged with recently.
• A user's interaction history with the poster. As with Explore, it’s likely the reel was shared by someone they don’t know, but if a user has interacted with them previously, it tells IG they’re pretty interested in their videos.
• Information about the reel. These are signals about the content within the video such as the audio track or visuals in the video, as well as popularity.
• Information about the person who posted the reel. “We consider popularity signals such as number of followers or level of engagement to help find compelling content from a wide array of people and give everyone a chance to find their audience,” Mosseri says.

On that first point above: let’s come back to Adam Mosseri’s comments on Colin and Samir. The reels feed is a particularly important area if you’re looking to grow your audience — since it’s all recommended content rather than exclusively people you follow. 

Of all the engagement activities listen above, shares via DMs is the one that carries the most weight. The more your post is shared in this way, the better it will perform. 

“Short-form video is so symbiotic with connecting people with their friends,” Adam told Colin and Samir. “Part of our [Instagram’s] reason to be is to connect people with friends.”

In other words — optimize your content to start conversations. What entices your Instagram followers to share your reel with someone they care about? Is it something relatable? Helpful? Funny? Thought-provoking? No audiences are the same, and it will take some experimenting to figure out what works. 

Recommendation Guidelines on Explore and reels

Instagram wants to minimize the chances they’ll recommend content to someone that they may find offensive. To that end, they’ve published detailed Recommendation Guidelines.

Posts that go against these guidelines may not violate their Community Guidelines and are technically allowed on the platform, but won’t appear on the Explore page.

Some examples of things that go against IG’s Recommendation Guidelines are anything that depicts/discusses self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, or violence; is sexually explicit or suggestive; promotes the use of certain regulated products, like tobacco; or could be considered misinformation.

Why the Instagram algorithms are a good thing

Rather than sharing Instagram algorithm hacks that don’t help you in the long term, let’s talk about why Instagram’s algorithms are actually great for users, creators, and businesses alike.

When social media platforms move away from a chronological feed, there’s always a public outcry. But showing recent posts in chronological order isn’t all that great. The Instagram Creators account reports that since switching to the new feed, “the average post is now seen by 50 percent more followers than it did with the chronological model.”

The Instagram algorithm change to a ranked feed is a win-win. With the help of machine learning, the algorithm ensures that users see content they’re most likely to be interested in, and that means business accounts are more likely to find their target audience (with the right social media marketing strategy).

As long as you are creating engaging, relevant, and timely content, the Instagram algorithm is actually an advantage to you. It helps to get your great content in front of more people than when posts were arranged reverse-chronologically.

Instagram algorithm FAQs

Some frequently asked questions about how to work with the Instagram algorithm and things that might affect your content performance:

Are photos or videos preferred by Instagram’s algorithms?

Technically, no. Instagram doesn’t give extra weight to either videos or photos. However, if the data shows that a certain user prefers to engage with videos over photos, then that specific user may see more video content in their feed.

Another big caveat here: while Instagram doesn’t prioritize video by default, Buffer data shows that videos tend to get more engagement on Instagram than other content types. 

In our analysis of more than 5 million Instagram posts, video came out tops, followed by carousels, then images. 

Does posting too frequently impact ranking?

Instagram accounts aren’t down-ranked for posting content frequently. Though Christina d’Avignon, a product designer for Instagram feed, did tell The Verge: “We do make sure your feed feels diverse so we may break up posts.”

Are business and personal accounts treated differently by the algorithm?

As reported by TechCrunch: “Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.”

Will posting Instagram Stories or Lives videos affect ranking?

Creating Instagram Stories or live broadcasting with Instagram won’t affect how your content ranks within the feed, but experimenting with a wide variety of content — as I’ll dig into below — means it's far more likely that your content will appear in more places on the app.

5 ways to make the Instagram algorithms work for you

Instead of telling you how to ‘beat’ them, below here’s how to lean into it and use Instagram’s algorithms to your advantage in your social media marketing.

1. Embrace the latest features

Driving the adoption of new features is important for Instagram, so it makes newer features more prominent in the app. It’s important to note that this does not mean that the Instagram algorithms automatically favor any specific post type.

It does, however, give new features a prime location, such as putting Instagram Stories at the very top of the screen or moving the Instagram Reels icon to the center of your menu bar.

2. Vary your post types

Using a variety of post types — single images, carousel posts, reels, stories, and lives — is key to successfully navigating Instagram algorithms.

Sharing your content in different forms helps you reach a wider range of people. Plus, it’s a great way to repurpose your content. Not everyone watches a video, so you can turn your video content into a carousel post. Or you can appeal to Instagram Story lovers by re-sharing feed posts in your Stories.

Below you can see how we've been making an effort to diversify the post types we use on Buffer's Instagram account:

At Buffer, we’re really leaning into content repurposing not just within Instagram, but across social platforms as well.

For example, most of our reels can be used on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, too. Here is how our Social Media Manager, Mitra, does it.

3. Post at the best times for you

Our analysis of more than 5 million Instagram posts showed that content shared at certain times tends to perform best. It’s definitely worth testing out these best times to post on Instagram if you’re new to the platform. 

If you’ve been posting regularly to Instagram for some time, Instagram Insights will have some data on the best times for you. Check out your Instagram Insights (found by navigating to your profile, tapping the hamburger menu on the top right, then ‘Insights’, then ‘Total Followers’) to see your audience’s most active times.

4. Create a hashtag strategy

Because users can search for and even follow hashtags, adding them to Instagram captions increases your chances of reaching a wider audience. Plus, studies show that posts with hashtags receive higher engagement than those without.

Save time with Buffer Hashtag Manager, which allows you to save groups of hashtags to easily add to posts later with the Instagram first comment feature. With our Hashtag Manager, you can create unique groups of hashtags for themes you use often.

For instance, a shoe company like Luna Sneakers might have separate hashtag groups for their running shoes versus their fashion sneakers.

Buffer’s Hashtag Manager allows you to create and save groups of hashtags to add to Instagram posts.

Branded hashtags — like #lovemylunas and #lunarunning — are a great way to keep your company on people’s minds. Branded hashtags not only help with brand awareness, but they also make it easy for you to find customer-produced content.

4. Focus on authentic engagement

Instagram’s algorithms reward engagement.

So, instead of wasting energy on Instagram algorithm hacks that only give you short-term results, focus on the connections you build with your audience.

Make sure you reply to direct messages and comments on your posts. The more you interact with your fans, the better. But it’s really easy to miss new comments among the likes, follows, and mention notifications on Instagram. Don’t be afraid to use emojis, either!

To help, Buffer has engagement features that surface any unanswered comments on your Instagram posts and help you to reply to as many comments as quickly as possible.

Another simple way to encourage engagement is to use interactive stickers, such as polls, questions, and sliding scale rankings, on your Instagram Stories. And don’t forget about user-generated content. People love seeing their own photos or videos shared on brand pages.

Snack company Pipcorn lets customers sing their praises by re-sharing customer content in their Instagram Stories.

5. Use analytics to see what's working

One of the best ways to understand what your audience enjoys seeing and is interested in is to dig into your Instagram analytics data.

Using Instagram Insights you can check out which of your posts have had the most interactions. You can also sort posts by most comments, likes and saves too if you'd like to dig into more specific engagement metrics.

Buffer's analytics will also help you uncover your best posts (those with the highest engagement) in just a few clicks:

Recent Instagram posts sorted by Engagement Rate in Buffer

Once you have a list of your most engaging Instagram posts you can start to identify what commonalities they might have. For example:

• What types of posts are they?
• What's the style of the creative?
• How is the caption structured?

With this data, you can begin to reverse engineer what your audience is most likely to engage with and build a strategy to help get the most out of Instagram's algorithm.

Instagram’s algorithms prioritize providing the best experience

If you focus on building connections with your audience and producing engaging content, you don’t need to worry about Instagram updates and Instagram algorithm changes.

“Authenticity and transparency are key to building sustainable engagement on Instagram,” says the Instagram Creators account. “Trying to game the system may provide a short-term benefit, but it is not a recipe for success long-term. Make sure that you are creating content that is keeping your followers and community engaged and constantly coming back for more!

Your tools can make or break productivity when you’re on a fully remote team. Thankfully, here at Buffer, we have the pick of the bunch.

Our suite of tools is extensive, especially on the marketing team, and our curated selection helps us fill our queues, manage social channels, create graphics, and generally stay organized.

In this article, I’ve listed some of the tools we use that make collaboration on social media and content creation a breeze.

At a glance: 9 essential social media collaboration tools for social media teams

1. Buffer
2. Slack
3. Google Drive
4. Dropbox
5. Canva
6. Notion
7. Figma
8. Miro
9. Zoom

1. Buffer

Best for overall social media management tool

I’d be remiss not to mention Buffer as a top social media collaboration tool. That’s right, our tool allows you to do more than just social media management.

We’ve baked collaboration into every aspect of the product, from adding content ideas into the Create space, where anyone with access to a Team account can pop in to view and comment, to the Publishing area, where social posts can go through as many levels of approval as you need. Buffer’s social media collaboration features include, but are not limited to:

• Add unlimited users on the Teams plan: Each user has their own login and permission levels (more on this below), making it easier to keep track of who is working where. 
• Set permission levels for different users: Choose exactly who can post on each of your social media channels. 
• Set up an approval system: With these different permissions, certain users will require or can ask for approvals on their posts before they’re published, so you can always ensure quality and consistency. 
• Collaborate on ideas: Work together on social media content in Create, a dedicated space for all your ideas. 
• Leave notes for team members: Make comments or suggestions for other users on your plan.

2. Slack

Best for asynchronous communication on social media ideas

At its core, Slack is a robust chat room and a team communication tool. And it’s taken on a multi-dimensional role for thousands of teams. 

We use Slack in multiple ways as a remote team:

• We gather material for employee advocacy, coordinating simply over Slack or in combination with another tool
• Teammates can drop fun and interesting links into one of the channels for others to check out. 
• We use it to brainstorm ideas and strategies in public and private channels.

One of my favorite ways we use Slack for social media is when our brilliant social media manager, Mitra, spots opportunities for social media posts to fill our content calendar. And she isn’t the only one – there have been a few brilliant social media posts borne out of our Zoom chats.

3. Google Workspace

Best collaboration tool for end-to-end teamwork

Another favorite of social media teams is Google – especially Google Drive. I highlight Drive specifically because it holds everything from our spreadsheets to presentations to forms. In Google’s vast suite of products, you can collaborate together, live, on the same work with your internal and external team. 

Some popular docs you might choose to share:

• Spreadsheet of your social media metrics
• Social media audit
• Document with your brand’s voice and tone

4. Dropbox

Best collaboration tool for file sharing of all kinds

Dropbox is a great tool for us at Buffer, as we can use it to share everything from images to templates to documentation. Or, in one recent event, we used it to store the videos recorded by different teammates for our new employee onboarding video project. Since everyone was able to easily access the Dropbox folder to upload their videos, the project went along seamlessly. Of course, you don’t have to use it for that purpose, but you can use it for an external project.

5. Notion

Best collaboration tool for overall project management

Notion is one of our superpowers as a marketing team and a top recommendation for successful social media collaboration. Its robust set of features help us achieve many goals from our different locations across the world, including but not limited to:

• Hosting and managing our blog, newsletter, and social media content calendars
• Holding our big-picture project database across different teams
• Clarifying task management and distribution across team members

6. Canva

Best collaboration tool for simple graphic design

Need some advice from your team on social posts you’re creating? With Canva, you can share your in-progress content with anyone on your team, and others can combine forces with you to design the same graphic together.

We work with Canva extensively on the Marketing team and use it to power through design needs so that even the most artistically challenged of us (that’s me, hello) can throw together decent-looking images like the one at the top of this list.

7. Figma

Best collaboration tool for complex graphic design projects

On the other end of the design spectrum is a tool more geared towards professionals – Figma. In Figma, you can create mockups of social media images along with other design-related tasks.

Whenever we have a project that requires a design that we just can’t achieve in Canva, our Marketing Graphic Designer graciously shares mockups and visual content for us on the marketing team to review, approve, and share. 

Even with a tiny learning curve, I personally find Figma an intuitive tool for collaboration that allows the entire team to contribute to the design process, regardless of their skill level.

We also use Figma for brainstorming on the Marketing team, using it to visualize our thoughts and contributions during team meetings.

8. Zoom

Best for video calls and chats

Zoom was a last-minute, but much needed addition to this list. Surprised? Don’t be. As a remote team, synchronous calls where we can collaborate in real-time make up a major part of social media collaboration for us.

One of our major hacks for social media content is taking screenshots, clips and chats from our Zoom calls and repurposing them for social media. There have been a few gems brought out of these, shared across our social media. It helps that we can lean into our culture of transparency and share both the good and the bad.

Quick collaboration tips on sharing to social media as a team

There’s a lot to consider when sharing together as a social media team – whether that be a team of two, 10, or more. There are some factors to consider when sharing as a team – here’s a quick overview:

1. Determine your strategy and structure
2. Establish a consistent voice and tone
3. Know how, where, and what you’ll post
4. Let your audience know who is posting
5. Delegate by shifts or networks
6. Use tools to make collaboration easier
7. Give everyone the right access (contributors vs. managers)

What are your favorite collaboration tools?

What tools do you use to work together on social media marketing?

It’d be great to hear your experience and what you’ve found works best for you. We’re always keen to try out new tools and workflows here at Buffer. Any advice you have for us would be amazing!

While it’s always a good time to watch TikToks — the average viewer streams 24 hours of content a month on the app — figuring out the best time to post a TikTok is a bit more complicated.

And yet, knowing when to post on TikTok can be a game-changer for content creators and small business owners alike. After all, you work hard on your content, so it makes sense to schedule your posts during peak times.

There are plenty of factors to consider when figuring out the optimal times to share in your TikTok marketing plan. This guide will walk you through all the best practices for posting on TikTok for maximum engagement — and, with any luck, land your videos on For You Pages worldwide.

Is there a best time to post on TikTok?

There have been many studies analyzing other social media apps, but because TikTok is a relatively new platform, the numbers are a little more limited. 

This is why we tapped into Buffer’s data — analyzing more than a million TikToks sent through our platform — to pinpoint when to post on TikTok for video views.

But before we dig into that, an important caveat: There is no universal best time to post on TikTok that will work for every video on the app. If only it were that easy! 

The best time to post your TikTok posts depends on your audience and their behaviors — which is why we will walk you through analyzing your own TikTok data to figure out when to post on TikTok for your target audience later in this article. 

That said, the days and times in the charts below offer a handy guide to help you maximize your content potential while growing your following.

Ready to get into the numbers?

The best times to post on TikTok

The best times to post on TikTok are 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 8 a.m. on Friday, and 2 p.m. on Sunday. On most days, reach tends to pick up later, with peaks usually happening in the late morning, afternoon, or early evening.

This graph above breaks down the week into hourly chunks. The darkest purple blocks are the time slots with the highest reach. The light purple to white blocks are the time slots with the lowest reach. (TikTok defines reach as the “total number of unique viewers who viewed the video.” For ease of explanation, we’ll use reach and views interchangeably here.) 

In our best time to post on Instagram data analysis, the weekdays were similar and reasonably predictable, with engagement peaks outside working hours. But with TikTok, things are less cut and dried.

This is likely because TikTok has a younger demographic — 53 percent of TikTok users in the U.S. are under 25, with 20 percent under 18 — with less rigid work schedules. 

The best time to post on TikTok at a glance

• Monday: 10 a.m.
• Tuesday: 4 p.m.
• Wednesday: 4 p.m.
• Thursday: 10 a.m.
• Friday: 8 a.m.
• Saturday: 11 a.m.
• Sunday: 2 p.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Monday

According to Buffer data, the best time slots on Monday for TikTok video views are 10 a.m. and 9 p.m.

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Monday: 10 a.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Tuesday

On Tuesday, the data suggests that 4 p.m. is the best time of day to post on TikTok, with other spikes happening at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. 

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Tuesday: 4 p.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Wednesday

On Wednesdays, the best time to post your TikToks is 4 p.m., closely followed by 2 p.m., then 7 p.m. 

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Wednesday: 4 p.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Thursday

The best posting times on Thursday are 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and 4 p.m., according to Buffer data.

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Thursday: 10 a.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Friday

On Friday, the optimal posting times on TikTok are at 8 a.m., followed by a smaller spike at 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Friday: 8 a.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Saturday

Saturday is a quieter time on TikTok, though there is a good spike in views for videos posted between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., with 11 a.m. being the strongest time. 

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Saturday: 11 a.m.

The best time to post on TikTok on Sunday

The best time to post on TikTok on Sunday is at 2 p.m., one of the best times to post throughout the entire week. Other good times to post on TikTok on Sunday are 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

⏰ When to post on TikTok on Sunday: 2 p.m.

This is where social media scheduling tools like Buffer shine. Experiment by systematically going through the times on the list above, scheduling a TikTok, and tracking its performance to see what works best for your specific audience.

What is the best day of the week to post on TikTok?

Tuesday is the best day of the week to post on TikTok in terms of reach, with Thursday, Monday, and Friday not too far off. 

The worst day of the week to post on TikTok is Saturday, when there’s a notable dip in reach on the app. 

Why it’s important to find the best times to post on TikTok

You’re on TikTok because you want others to engage with your content. Whether you post a behind-the-scenes video of your teammates, a TikTok explaining your latest product launch, or jump on a funny trend, TikToks are meant to be seen by your community. 

If you’re sharing videos that aren’t getting any views, you’re missing out on building stronger connections with your customers and increasing brand awareness.

TikTok videos have the highest engagement rate per post out of any other social platform, meaning you could use TikTok as a key driver of brand awareness and traffic for your brand. Of course, to take advantage of this, you need to post at the right times to give your followers a chance to like, share, and comment on your TikTok content.

Putting some thought into your posting schedule is rewarded by the TikTok algorithm and can yield great results.

How to find your best time to post on TikTok

The conversation surrounding when to post on social media can sometimes feel a bit reductive, especially considering there’s a lot of conflicting data on the topic. And while we hope you find the data from Buffer helpful, the results should be taken as helpful suggestions rather than rigid rules to follow.

For one thing, trends on social media are constantly evolving. Another factor to consider is that no matter how thorough these reports are, they’re based on aggregated data and may not apply to your audience. 

So, understanding your best posting times boils down to understanding your followers’ online habits — an essential part of your overall marketing strategy.

Your community is unique; the best times to post TikToks will depend on their schedule. Remember, TikTok is a global platform, and you’ll likely have a global audience.

Your followers may be scattered across the world, so considering all the different time zones and finding overlap with your community is crucial to successfully planning content.

Explore TikTok analytics

TikTok’s analytics might not be as helpful as Instagram insights when it comes to figuring out your best time to post, but it does offer some useful information to guide you. 

To find it, head over to TikTok Studio. Here’s how.

1. Tap on your profile picture to go to your TikTok account, then TikTok Studio just underneath your bio (you can also download the TikTok Studio app for a more streamlined experience).

2. Here, you’ll find an overview of TikTok’s tools for brands and creators. From there, tap the ‘View all’ link just to the right of the Analytics box.

3. From within the Analytics section, tap the Followers tab at the top of the screen. 

4. Scroll down to ‘Most active times.’

Here, you’ll find a retrospective overview of when your followers were most active on the app over the past few days and times. 

Why does this matter? Well, when you post your TikTok, the algorithm will serve your video to a select group of your followers and non-followers gauge how they react. Do they watch the whole video? Tap through the carousel? Like, it, comment on it, or share it with a friend? 

Actions like these are strong indicators that your content is valuable (while all TikTok engagement helps, watch time is particularly important). It signals to the algorithm that it should serve your video to more people like the ones who watched and engaged. A larger group will find your videos on their FYP, and so the pattern continues. 

While TikTok only shares follower activity, it stands to reason that your non-followers — people you’re hoping to reach and convert — will behave similarly to the people already following you. In turn, they might be scrolling through the app at similar times. 

Posting when your target audience is most active gives your content the best possible chance of success. 

So, it’s worthwhile spending some time noting down their most active times over the past few days. Look for patterns.

Is there a similar spike in activity on weekdays? Or on weekends? Is there one day of the week that stands out. 

These slots will give you a good indication of the best time to post on TikTok for your audience. 

Experiment with different times

After you’ve studied your target audience’s schedule and nailed down a few options for posting, it’s time to put your social media management research into action and see whether these times work. 

Experimentation is a pillar of successful social media marketing — play around with scheduling your TikToks at various periods during the day to see which video performs the best.

If you’re not able to actively post during those hours (perhaps your target audience location is not in the same time zone as yours), no sweat: A social media management tool like Buffer can help schedule posts at the exact moments your audience is most likely to engage.

Think about your own schedule

As a content creator or social media manager, burnout can be very real. While posting consistently is important, you don’t want to do too much at once and exhaust yourself. When thinking about how often you should post and what the best times are, make sure you’re also factoring in whether the workload feels reasonable for you. 

To create good content that is engaging, informative, and thoughtful, you need to feel inspired, so take care of your physical and mental health and take breaks whenever needed.

Implementing a social media calendar into your routine can significantly reduce the stress of planning and posting content. A calendar will provide an organized way to lay out all of your videos and help you be more consistent. 

Once you have a solid overview of your posts and when to schedule them, you can start planning and filming TikTok content in advance and even batch-create content.

Create great content to post on TikTok

This guide focuses primarily on scheduling, but creating high-quality content should always be your priority. Sure, finding the best times to post can get your work in front of more eyes, but you want to make sure you’re always presenting your A-game to customers with engaging and informative material.

TikTok tips

TikTok is inherently a creative space, so there are many different ways to share content successfully with your community. While it’s great to diversify your videos, it’s also helpful to find your niche. Often, users will follow an account for a particular aesthetic or because they share a specific type of content, so figure out your strengths and stick to them.

Still, be open to experimenting with trending content — whether that means trying out a specific challenge or incorporating trending TikTok sounds into your videos. 

Many accounts have gone viral because they engaged with popular content, so be flexible. Whatever you post, use hashtags, engage with your audience, and be consistent.

Emulate your favorites

So many great influencers and small business owners create fun and exciting content on TikTok. Watching their videos is a great way to brainstorm ideas for your brand. You can use their work as a jumping-off point and tailor the content to fit your brand. If you need some inspiration — check out this list of innovative TikTokers.

Hopefully, this guide will help you nail down some of the best times to post on TikTok! Ensuring your videos get seen by as many people as possible is the next step in attracting more customers to your brand and building a stronger online community.

What are your favorite times to post on TikTok? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter or Instagram!

Here at Buffer, we think a lot about visual content — images and carousels are one of the best types of content to post for engagement, after all.

Our social media management tool incorporates image posting because we know how important that element is to engage your followers and fans.

But there’s one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free images that are high quality, fit your brand’s aesthetic, and are cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content?

It’s a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright — a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution, or even create your own image from scratch.

In this post, we’ll share more than 20 different sources and tools for free images, covering searchable image sites, create-your-own-image tools, and more.

Free image terms FAQ

The following terms will come up often as we discuss free image sources. Read over the terms and conditions of each site you try so you know exactly when and what type of attribution is required.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Various types of Creative Commons licenses range from allowing any type of use with no attribution to allowing only certain uses and no changes.

What is the public domain?

Works in the public domain are those whose copyrights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Finding something online does not mean it is in the public domain.

What is royalty-free?

Royalty-free images aren’t necessarily free. In most cases, you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to obtain the rights to use the image. Then you can use it as many times as you like. The “free” in “royalty-free” only means that you do not have to pay royalties to the owner of the image every time you use it. For a comprehensive read on royalty-free images, check out this guide.

Now, on to the list!

22 of the best free image sites

Here's a long list of some of the best places to find free images online. Be sure to check the Ts and Cs of each site before you use them, though!

1. Unsplash

Unsplash has its own license, which essentially lets you use the images for free, in any way you like (except for using them to create a competing website). The site is powered by a community of almost 300,000 photographers, from hobbyists to pros, who ‘gift’ their photos to make them freely available under Unsplash’s “do-whatever-you-want” with the images license.

Unsplash, which is owned by Getty, is particularly great for finding really high-quality images: their team hand-selects every photo and, according to the site, “accept only the best.”

2. Dupe

If you’re looking for some photos that don’t look so much like stock photos and want them to look more like they came straight from your camera roll, Dupe is the perfect source. 

Dupe is a website filled with “relevant royalty-free imagery” submitted by a community of creators which can be used commercially under their own license. 

You can filter through many different types of aesthetics, like “cottagecore” or “southern comfort” to find the right image for your vibe or scroll through current trending images.

3. Burst

Burst is a free stock photo platform for entrepreneurs by Shopify. As is the case with Unsplash, the photos are contributed by photographers “with the expectation that users will be able to download, edit and use them however they see fit.” 

Attribution (giving the photographers credit) is not required but, as Burst puts it, “our photographers always appreciate a shout out.”

4. Pexels

Pexels operates along the same lines as Unsplash and Burst, where images are supplied by the photographers themselves. Pexels also has its own license, which states what you can and cannot do with the images. You can use and modify the images for free for both commercial and personal use without attribution.

5. Pixabay

Images on Pixabay are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you can use them without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist (though it’s always appreciated). 

Pixabay provides a gentle reminder to check that the content depicted in the images doesn’t infringe on any rights. Pixabay also offers more content formats, from illustrations to sound effects.

6. Free Images

Free Images provides over 300,000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses, though it does list several restricted use cases (which are quite common for most free image sites).

7. Kaboompics

Kaboompics uses its own license, which is similar to Creative Commons Zero, except that you cannot redistribute its photos. There are two things that we love about Kaboompics: 1. It allows search by color, and 2. It provides a complementary palette of colors in the photo.

8. Stocksnap.io

Stocksnap uses the Creative Commons CC0 license, so its photos are free to download, edit, and use for commercial and non-commercial projects.

9. Canva

Canva is a non-photographer’s answer to Photoshop. The online graphic design and image editor tool also offers a library of millions of free and premium stock photos, all under their content license agreement. 

One advantage of using Canva is that you can quickly turn an image into a custom graphic to use on social media or your blog.

You can access Canva’s library of images by using the search function in the editor or heading over to Canva Photos.

10. Life of Pix

Life of Pix lists free high-resolution photographs and videos with no copyright restrictions for both personal and commercial use. Life of Pix partners with Adobe Stock for more (paid) stock photographs.

11. Gratisography

If you’re looking for something a little offbeat, Gratisography should be your first port of call. It also has its own free photo license, which lets you do “almost anything you can think of.” 

While they have a rather limited number of images now, they are high-quality and completely different from any photos you’ll find on the other sites on this list.

12. Vecteezy

Vecteezy offers more than 10 million free and royalty-free images, and it’s not only photos you’ll find on the site. It’s also a great place to hunt for things like PSDs, vectors, videos, and templates — particularly useful if you’re looking to design something of your own with a stock image as a base.

The site offers added protection for users by ensuring they only offer images of people and places that come with a signed model by the photographer and the model — and you can sidestep that issue entirely if you opt for one of their AI-generated images.

Vecteezy also has a simple, helpful advanced search function. It will allow you to filter your search by content type (things like PNGs, PSDs, vectors, and videos) — useful if you’re looking to edit the image yourself), license type, and even those generated by (or not generated by) AI. 

13. Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting platform where you can find images that can be used and modified for commercial purposes. This doesn’t apply to all the images on the site, though, so you’ll need to make sure you filter your searches.

To do so, select "Any license" and then “Commercial use allowed” after performing your search. Remember to check the license for each image as they vary.

14. The Jopwell Collection

“It’s hard to be what you can’t see” is a common refrain at Jopwell, a company who have made it their mission to improve workplace diversity.

One of their initiatives is The Jopwell Collection, which they describe as “an album of more than 100 free-to-download stock photos featuring leaders in the Jopwell community – social entrepreneurs, editors, techies, financial analysts, recruiters, marketers, student leaders, and even an Olympian – at work.” 

The images are free to be downloaded and used as long as you visibly attribute Jopwell.

15. WOCinTech

While you’ll find these images on Flickr, which we’ve already mentioned, we thought this particular set deserved a special mention. WOCinTech is an album of photos of women of color in tech, started by the founders of #WOCinTech Chat. 

The images can be used as long as you attribute #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com. (While the team isn’t updating the album with new photos anymore, there are over 500 images to choose from.)

16. PicJumbo

PicJumbo was created in 2013 with a host of images that regular stock photo sites had rejected due to “lack of quality.” 

Fast forward a decade, and the site offers more than 2.5 million images for any kind of use — free of charge with no registration required. 

You can also get new free images by subscribing to their newsletter. (If you have the budget to spare, do check out their premium photo collections, like this one. They even offer vertical images for Instagram Stories content — or new wallpapers for your phone.)

17. VistaCreate

Similar to Canva, VistaCreate is a graphic design tool that has a host of royalty-free images for you to use in your designs (though you’ll have to create an account to download them).

18. Depositphotos

Depositphotos is home to millions of royalty-free images, videos, and music. While they charge a monthly fee for downloads, they do have a selection of free files available for commercial use under an attributed free license agreement.

19. iStock

While iStock, owned by Getty, no longer offers a free membership, their one-month free trial will allow you to continue to use the images you download during that time (you’re allowed 10 downloads from their ‘Essentials’ collection).

20. New Old Stock

New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions. The site is a collection of photos found via institutions participating in the Flickr Commons and the rules of Flickr Commons, according to their ‘Rights & Usage’ page.

However, it’s worth nothing that the New Old Stock adds the caveat that photos are “at the very least available for personal and non-commercial use”. If you’re uncertain about whether a photo can be used commercially, rather opt for another of the options on this list.

21. Morguefile

Morguefile was created back in 1996 to serve as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers. 

According to their about page, not much has changed since then (bar the quality of their images, of course): “We are a community-based free photo site, and all photos found in the Morguefile archive are free for you to download and re-use in your work, be it commercial or not.”

Morguefile’s 400,000+ images are free to be used commercially, but must be attributed, per their license.

22. Google Advanced Image Search

Google Advanced Image Search can also be a helpful resource in the hunt for high-quality photos. Here’s how to find free-to-use images on Google:

1. Head over to Google, type your keywords into the search box, and hit enter.
2. Click the ‘Images’ tab at the top of the screen.
3. Click ‘Tools’ (a little to the right of the Images tab).
4. Choose ‘Usage Rights’ and then ‘Creative Commons’ Licenses

Bonus options for non-commercial use

If you’re looking for images you’ll not be using commercially, there are even more options available when it comes to free image sites. 

Getty Images

This might come as a surprise to you (as it was to us). You can use images from Getty Images on your non-commercial websites for free by embedding them.

Downloading an image and uploading it to your website is still a no-no — you’ve got to embed it. An embed is slightly more intrusive than simply adding a photo to your post – it keeps its own frame, share buttons, and branding. Still, for many blogs, it’s an option worth looking into.

CreateHER Stock

CreateHER Stock’s team has manually curated more than 200 high-quality images of women of color – from top-notch close-ups to artful background images. The only caveat: the photos are for personal use only. (Do check out their license here.) You can also receive new free images every month when you sign up to their newsletter.

Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, and more

You can embed Facebook posts, Instagram feed posts or rReels, tweets, TikTok videos, Pinterest pins, and YouTube videos in your blog post.

Often, readers can engage with embedded posts more deeply than static content by following users, liking, or commenting on the posts — meaning credit for the poster is effectively baked into the embed. 

There are two important things to consider here: First, if the content is removed by the poster, your embedded image will be replaced with an error message.

Second: it’s worth making sure you only embed images from creators and accounts you trust own the rights to the image they’ve posted — it’s not too difficult to pass off someone else’s work as your own on social media these days!

Schedule your images with Buffer

Whenever you share your blog posts or marketing websites with Buffer (either through your dashboard or the browser extension), we will automatically pick up images from those websites and suggest them to you for your social media posts. You just have to click on your favorite image to add it to your social media post.

What about AI images?

AI image generator tools are great for creating customized content, but tread carefully when using them commercially. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, AI-generated content isn't copyright-protected, but this doesn’t mean that copyrighted works haven’t been used to train the various AI models these tools use. 

If you’re planning on using any AI image generators for free images, be sure to take a close look at all of the terms & conditions and fine print that comes with the commercial use of AI-generated art.

Over to you

What free image sites did we miss? What tools do you like the most to find or create images? We’d love to keep the list growing!

P.S. If you are looking for background music for your videos, you might like our collection here.

Instagram Stories are one of the first things I tap on when I open the app. I love seeing the more authentic, in-the-moment content creators and brands post there, rather than the polished Instagram feed. 

Many Instagrammers will spend hours creating beautiful Instagram Reels and photo posts, but ignore their Instagram Stories — and they’re missing a trick here.

The Instagram Stories feed appears right at the top of your followers’ screens when they open the app. And if they’re anything like me, tapping on the lit-up profile pictures is tough not to do. 

There are currently over 500 million people creating and watching Instagram Stories on their mobile devices every day. And one in three people has said they become more interested in brands and products after seeing stories about those brands that feature those products. In short, IG Stories boost your reach and engagement and, in some cases, influence purchasing behavior.

Instagram Stories help you connect and engage with your target audience in an authentic way to build relationships that increase customer loyalty.

In fact, the Instagram Story feature was built to help Instagrammers share quick photos and videos with their followers to highlight what makes them unique. Plus, stories give your audience a small peek into what goes on behind the scenes — and followers love that. 

Whether you’re an e-commerce brand, a content creator, an influencer, or a small business, Instagram Stories is a great medium for you to build brand awareness.

What is an Instagram Story?

An Instagram Story is a feature that allows users to post photos or videos that automatically disappear within 24 hours. They appear in a vertical format and are fast, memorable, and fun by design.

When you post a story, a colorful ring appears around your profile picture, telling your followers they can tap on your profile photo to see what you’ve just posted. Your profile picture with the colorful ring around it also gets added to the top row of your followers’ home screens — making it the first thing they see.

IG stories are a perfect way for creators and brands to experiment with different kinds of content because, unlike your permanent curated feed, stories disappear in 24 hours. 

Small business owners use their stories to post everything from unedited videos of their everyday lives to photos of their new products and short clips of them answering FAQs.

Creators and influencers may want to leverage stories slightly different, by taking followers along for a day in their lives, showing behind-the-scenes, or just chatting to followers about an experience they may relate to.

How to post a story on Instagram

Now that you know what a story is, it's time to get into how you can post your own. Here’s a tutorial to walk you through posting your Instagram Story. 

Step 1: Go to your home page and swipe left from any point on the screen to open the Instagram camera application. You can also access the Instagram camera by tapping the “+” button at the bottom of the screen and then tapping “Story.”

Step 2: Within the camera application, you can choose to either create brand new content for your story by tapping the white circle at the bottom-middle portion of the screen, or upload photo or video content you’ve previously created by tapping the album icon on the lower-left portion of your screen. 

If you choose to upload an existing photo, take note that Instagram Story dimensions are 1080px by 1920px. If you choose to create new content on the spot, you can create different types of stories, as listed below. 

Step 3: Once you’ve created your story, you can add stickers, emojis, and filters to it, draw on it, add text to it, and more. You can even mention or tag people or engage your followers through polls, quizzes, and other fun features (we’ll get into all these options in a moment).

If you want to create stories even faster, you can create your content ahead of time in bulk and schedule those stories with in advance with Buffer’s planning and scheduling application. Buffer's Story tools will show you what your story is going to look like when it's live and let you schedule it ahead of time, too.

Different types of Instagram Stories

Instagram recently axed a couple of its old story-sharing options (R.I.P Photobooth and Hands-free), but there are still five different IG Story types to play with. For more variety, scroll down to our section on stickers.

1. Standard: A regular photo or video, which is the default Instagram Story option. In this mode, you can use Instagram Story filters, which will appear at the bottom of the app. 

2. Create: Text or stickers (we’ll talk about the sticker options below) on a solid background. Instagram has a ton of fun options for the various texts, including different fonts. Accounts usually use text stories to pose a question, tell a story, or create mini-blogs within their Instagram Stories.

3. Boomerang: A really short video that plays forward and backward on a loop.

4. Layout: A collage of different photos.

5. Dual: A feature that uses both your front and back camera to snap a pic, so your followers can see you and what you’re working on. Those familiar with the BeReal app will find this feature very familiar. 

What are IG Story Highlights?

Instagram Story Highlights are collections of Instagram Stories that you curate, and they’re located at the top of your profile in the form of tappable circles. They were introduced in 2017 as a way for users to keep their favorite or most relevant stories around for more than 24 hours.

Story highlights appear directly below your bio, so they are one of the first things your followers see when they go onto your profile. 

For brands, these highlights are a great place to save important information (e.g., restaurant menus, product lists, etc.) upfront. They’re also a good spot for testimonials and case studies — when you re-share customers’ stories about how happy they are with your product or service, instead of letting those testimonials disappear, save them in a story highlight.  

As a creator, you may want to save highlights about important life events, brand partnerships, or affiliate shopping links so your followers can easily find products you love. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your own Instagram Story Highlights:

1. Go to your profile page by tapping your profile photo located at the lower-right corner of your screen.
2. Tap the ‘New’ circle located right underneath your bio to the left.
3. Choose some Instagram Stories from your archive and then tap the ‘Next’ button on the top-right corner of your screen.
4. Give your highlight a name.
5. Optional: Edit your highlight cover by either uploading an image from your device’s camera roll or choosing one of your featured stories.

Once you’re done, your Instagram Highlight will appear as a bubble on your profile. You can have as many highlights as you like, and they will stay on your profile until you remove them. To edit or remove a highlight, just tap and hold that highlight on your profile.

Instagram Story Stickers to boost engagement

Instagram Stories are so powerful because they build loyalty and increase engagement by humanizing your brand.

Your followers probably already love your brand — sharing true, relatable, or interesting stories through a series of Insta Stories will encourage them to keep coming back to your Instagram account and interacting with your content (which eventually leads to more engagement or conversions).

Now, Instagram has made it even easier for creators and brands to harness the power of stories and create engaging content: stickers.

What are Instagram Story Stickers?

Instagram Story Stickers are cartoons, GIFs, or text you can place over your stories to make them more engaging and interactive. You can use stickers to add some text to your videos to tell a story or add a poll to a photo of your new products to ask your followers which ones they're most excited about.

To add stickers to your story, take or upload a photo or video, and then tap the stickers button (a smiley face on the top right of the screen) to find customizable stickers for the weather, the current time, location, and more. 

You can move stickers by dragging them across your screen and resizing them by pinching or expanding them with two fingers.Instagram has also launched new types of stickers — like the shop sticker and saptions sticker — to help Instagrammers with professional and business accounts increase accessibility and engage their story viewers. 

Here are some of my favorites:

1. ‘Add Yours’ sticker

Instagram’s ‘Add Yours’ sticker allows creators to make public threads to connect content with a similar theme. When more users add their Stories to the sticker, it creates a content chain. 

The main goal of the Add Yours sticker is to encourage collaboration between users. It also helps brands become discovered: if you click the sticker in someone’s story, Instagram will show you everyone who has contributed to a thread.

2. Stories captions sticker

Instagram introduced the stories captions sticker to increase the accessibility of their platform. You can add automated text captions to your stories by simply adding this sticker.

Note that this feature is currently only available in some languages and locations.

3. Shopping sticker

If you have Instagram Shopping set up for your business account, you can use the shopping sticker to add clickable product icons to your story

4. Donation sticker

The donation sticker is an interactive sticker Instagrammers use to encourage donations to a specific cause. People who tap the sticker can donate within Instagram to the linked cause.

5. Quiz sticker

The quiz sticker lets you add an interactive, multiple-choice-type question to your Insta Stories so you can ask your followers fun questions and see which ones get the right answer.

6. Questions sticker

The question sticker has a blank that lets your followers answer a question you pose. It can help you gather some insights into what your followers or customers love, what they're interested in, what they'd like to see, and more.

7. Poll sticker

The Poll Sticker allows you to ask your followers a question, giving them four poll options to choose from. All the sections are fully customizable, and you can easily share the results to your story, too. 

8. Countdown sticker

If you want a product launch or event at the forefront of your follower’s minds, include this sticker so they can quickly tap to get a reminder for the date.

Some other fun stickers you can use are:

1. Location sticker: Tag your location
2. Music sticker: Add a song
3. Hashtag sticker: Tap into a trending Intagram hashtag or create your own
4. Time and/or weather sticker: Add to personalize your content
5. GIF sticker: Adds a fun, interactive element
6. Mention sticker: Tag a user account

The Instagram Story link sticker replaces 'swipe up'

You no longer need to have over 10,000 followers to share a link in your Insta Stories! As of 2021, the Instagram Story link sticker officially replaced the swipe-up feature. This sticker makes links highly visible, and they can be placed anywhere on your Story.

The switch from swipe up to a sticker was good news for content marketers and small business owners, since it meant you no longer needed 10k followers to link to a website.

In a statement, Instagram shared their reasoning behind the change:

“We made this decision based on feedback we heard from the community about how impactful it would be for creators and businesses of all sizes to benefit from link sharing to grow in the same way larger accounts do.”

How to add a link to your Instagram Story

1. Go to your Instagram Stories sticker tray and tap the sticker that reads “link.”
2. Paste your link into the link field.
3. If you have a long or unwieldy URL, tap the “Customize sticker text” button to type in any text you’d like.
4. Change the color of your sticker by tapping on it.

Instagram Story Analytics

If you have an Instagram Creator or Business account, you can access Instagram analytics. Your profile analytics and story analytics are different, but both contain important data that can help you create more of the content your followers love.

You can access your IG Story analytics for a specific story by tapping the story, then the ‘Activity’ icon on the lower-left corner of your story post. From there, tap on the bar graph button on the left. 

From your analytics, you will see:

• How many followers and non-followers your story has reached
• How people interacted with your story (i.e., tap next, finish the story, go back, tap a sticker, exit)
• How many Instagram Story views you received
• How many people followed you after viewing that Story

You can find out which pieces of content are the most engaging based on Instagram’s Story analytics. If you need more in-depth information, you can check out Buffer’s Story analytics dashboard.

Instagram Insights

You’ll be able to access all this data and more via Instagram Insights, where all the metrics for your Instagram posts — stories, carousels, reels, and more. Yes, you’ll even find stats for Instagram Stories that have already expired. To get to your insights:

• Tap on your photo on the bottom right of your app to get to your profile
• Tap the ‘Professional dashboard’ button beneath your bio 
• For metrics specific to your Instagram Stories, tap on ‘Content you shared’
• Tap the ‘All’ button on the top left, then tap ‘Stories’
• Your stories will automatically be arranged by reach, from highest to lowest. Tap on a specific story to get more data, such as reach, likes, replies, shares, and more.

A winning Instagram Story strategy

Spontaneously creating Instagram Stories and sharing snippets of your life with your followers is a great way to build engagement and start learning about the feature, but to really grow with IG Stories, you need a solid strategy.On average, social media campaigns on Instagram see about a 20% increase in reach when Instagram Stories are involved. Use the Instagram algorithm to your advantage by using stories to drive interactions with your followers. Little changes, like frequency of posting, using in-app features, and posting at certain times of the day, will help your algorithmic ranking.

1. Post Instagram stories daily

Our Instagram Stories research suggests that posting between one and seven Insta Stories per day will yield the best results. Over 70 percent of accounts who posted within this range had a high stories completion rate. 

Completion rate is determined by calculating the number of times your Stories were watched from the first Story frame all the way to the last Story frame within the given 24-hour time period.This means that if you post between one to seven stories, the chances are 70 percent of your audience will stick around until the end of your last post.

If you post longer stories, the drop-off isn’t too bad. You can still see completion rates above 50 percent for Stories that are made up of more than 20 photos and videos.

2. Post stories consistently and at optimal times

Consistency is key to social media, and the Instagram algorithm agrees. Given that stories only last for 24 hours, you want to maximize the reach of that content. Consider posting your story content a few times in one day and sharing your photos and videos in bite-sized chunks. 

Another factor to consider is posting your story content at the times when your followers are most active on the app.

According to our analysis of the best time to post on Instagram, between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on weekdays is best for engagement, but there are other hotspots to take advantage of during the week, too.

3. Take advantage of creative features and tools

As you'll have seen above, Instagram has tons of fun story features. It's worthwhile to create your stories right on Instagram where possible.

Why? Instagram's algorithm won’t promote content from other apps. For example, in February 2021, Instagram shared that it is de-prioritizing content that features a TikTok watermark. So, if you cross-post a TikTok to IG Reels or Stories, it's going to get less visibility than something created natively in the Instagram app.

If you're keen to schedule your stories in advance, fear not — Buffer's notification publishing will allow you to make a few quick tweaks in Instagram before the story is published (like adding music or a poll, for example).

4. Use Instagram Story Ads to boost reach, engagement, and conversions

Stories created for ad placements help small business owners drive awareness for their brand by sending traffic to a website or an in-app shop.

Story ad placements take up a user's full screen, which means you can eliminate competing distractions like notifications and in-feed content from other brands.

Here are a few ads we’ve recently spotted on Instagram:

To save you time on content creation, make use of existing stories saved in your highlights. If you have an IG shop, you can use product links so users can purchase your products directly through the ad.

Check out our starter guide. It includes ad specs and tips for creating ad creatives. All you need to get started is a Facebook ads account!

6. Use Instagram Story templates to make your story pop

There are perks to tapping into templates to create visually appealing Instagram Stories. For one thing, you can batch create them (making it oh-so-much easier to schedule your stories in advance).

It’s also a great way to maintain brand consistency that you can even carry across your Instagram Reels and carousel posts. Check out these 11 places to find scrollstopping Instagram templates. (Spoiler: Canva is not the only place for great free ones.)

Take your Instagram Stories to the next level with Buffer

Stories have become an incredibly important part of brand awareness and should absolutely be included in your Instagram marketing strategy.

With Buffer, you can plan, preview, and schedule your Instagram Stories ahead of time, so you have everything ready to post with a single push notification.

Get started for free now →

Ever wondered how to increase your reach and engagement and, in turn, grow your following on Instagram? Your Instagram captions could hold the key.

Yes, Instagram is a visual social media platform, but your caption carries more weight in the Instagram algorithm than you think. 

For one thing, your Instagram captions offer important context to the algorithm, which helps it categorize your photo, carousel, or reel and show it to the people most likely to engage with it. Think of it as social media SEO (or search engine optimization).

For another, your caption can be crucial in prompting engagement from your followers. For example, you could use those 3,000 characters to:

• Authentically connect with your followers in a meaningful, vulnerable caption.
• Ask them a question and prompt them to comment to answer.
• Share some helpful information that has them lingering on your post to learn more.
• Have them laugh out loud, encouraging them to like or share.

A strong visual can catch users’ attention, but carefully thought-out Instagram captions can do more heavy lifting when it comes to growing your following on Instagram.

In this article, we’ll cover how to do all that with expert guidance, along with some prompts to use in Buffer’s AI Social Media Assistant to turn it into your own personal Instagram captions generator, plus share some ready-made Instagram caption ideas for you to use on your next post.

AI Instagram caption generator 

Buffer’s AI Assistant is social media smart, meaning our specialist engineers have trained it to understand the nuances of each platform. 

So, with the right prompting from you, it can help you generate the perfect Instagram captions for your target audience. 

If you’re a Buffer user, you’ll find the AI Assistant ready and waiting to help in the post composer window. To find it, just tap the + New Post button, then Use the AI Assistant. A window will open to the left of the composer where you can prompt the AI.

Not a user? No sweat. You can use Buffer’s AI Social Media Post Creator to help you write your Instagram captions without signing up. 

Whichever route you choose, be sure to get specific about a) the subject of your Instagram post and b) who your target audience is when prompting an AI tool to help you write captions for Instagram.

Don’t be afraid to include more details! The more specific you are, the better your AI-generated Instagram captions will be. You can ask for the caption to be in a specific tone, a certain number of characters, and even include target keywords or hashtags. 

Here’s a prompt to get you started: 

For example: Write a [tone] Instagram caption for [target audience] related to [topic]. The caption should be at least [number] words long and include the keywords or hashtags [target words]. 

10 AI Instagram caption prompts

Need more inspiration? Here are some more caption prompts to get you started. Remember, copying and pasting these will only get you so far. The better you prompt the assistant, the better your Instagram captions will be. 

1. Write an Instagram caption that includes a list of [number] tips for [target audience] on [topic].
2. Write an Instagram caption that showcases [number] ways to [achieve a specific goal related to the topic].
3. Take this [other social media] post and transform it into a caption for Instagram: [paste the text from the old post]
4. Write an Instagram caption that debunks common myths about [topic] for [target audience].
5. Write a funny Instagram caption for [target audience] that will help them feel better about [specific challenge]
6. Write an Instagram caption that promotes our new product/service [description of product or service] that includes a call-to-action to encourage [taget audience] to [take specific action]. 
7. Write an Instagram caption that breaks down [complex topic] into simple steps for [target audience].
8. Write an Instagram caption that shares [number] interesting facts about [topic] for [target audience].
9. Write an Instagram caption that breaks down the benefits of using our product or service for [target audience]. Some of the benefits are [list benefits here].
10. Write an Instagram caption that contains a motivational message that encourages [target audience] to do [specific action].

95+ Instagram caption ideas

Maybe you don’t have an overarching social media marketing goal or social media strategy right now — you may just be looking for something simple and clever to accompany your next post. 

If that’s the case, this is the section for you. Here are a host of different Instagram captions to steal for your next selfie or photo dump carousel, whether you’re after funny Instagram captions, one-word Instagram captions, beach Instagram captions, and more. 

15 short Instagram captions

Good Instagram captions don't have to be essays. Let your reels or pics speak for themselves with these short Instagram caption ideas.

1. “Grateful”
2. “Chasing sunsets.”
3. “Thanks for the memories.”
4. “Core memories”
5. “In my happy place”
6. “Baby steps.”
7. “Dreaming.”
8. “Proof of life.”
9. "Limitless."
10. “OOO.”
11. “Courage.”
12. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
13. "Making my own sunshine."
14. "Life is better when you're laughing."
15. “The best life experiences are free.”

10 funny Instagram captions

Funny captions often make for the most memorable Instagram posts. Many Instagram users want to be entertained, after all! Here are some of the best Instagram captions I've seen for inspiring a laugh from your followers.

1. “I’m just here for the food.”
2. "If I had a dollar for every time I got distracted, I wish I had a puppy."
3. "My favorite exercise is a cross between a lunge and a crunch... I call it lunch."
4. "I'm not lazy, I'm on energy-saving mode."
5. "I'm not arguing, I'm just explaining why I'm right."
6. "Building an empire... one typo at a time."
7. "Is it too late to be a morning person?"
8. "Putting the ‘pro’ in procrastination."
9. "I like big books, and I cannot lie."
10. "I need six months of vacation, twice a year."

10 birthday Instagram captions

These birthday captions for Instagram can be used on your own birthday (a very happy birthday if it is!) or tweaked to use as a message to someone else. I've included some that will work for a business birthday, too.

1. "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling [insert age]."
2. "Aging like a fine wine."
3. "HBD to the MVP!"
4. "Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway."
5. "Happy cake day!"
6. "Your life is a beautiful story. Here’s to writing your next chapter."
7. "Growing up is optional, growing old is mandatory."
8. "Another year closer to those senior citizen discounts!"
9. "Level unlocked."
10. "Growing stronger each year, thanks to our customers!"

10 motivational Instagram captions

Sometimes, the image is so aesthetic that it requires something moving to accompany it. Here are some options for your next Instagram post. (Bonus: these could make for some great text over Instagram reels, too.)

1. "Create the things you wish existed."
2. "Turning can't into can and dreams into plans."
3. "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success."
4. “You didn’t come this far to only come this far.”
5. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
6. "When nothing goes right, go left."
7. The best view comes after the hardest climb."
8. "The sky is not the limit. Your mind is."
9. "The harder you work, the luckier you get."
10. "The secret to getting ahead is getting started."

10 Instagram captions for small businesses

It can be tricky to create fun captions for Instagram but still strike an appropriate tone and maintain your brand voice as a small business. Here are some clever Instagram captions to get you started:

1. "Who needs therapy when you can go shopping here?"
2.  "Shopping here is a form of self-care."
3. "Laughter is the best medicine, but our products are a close second."
4. "Behind every small business is a dream, hard work, and dedication."
5. "Big dreams, tiny team."
6. "Every order makes us do a happy dance!"
7. "Making cool stuff since [year]."
8. "Thanks for supporting our dream."
9. "Doing what we love for people who love what we do."
10. “Dream big, shop small.”

20 quotes for Instagram captions

Sometimes, someone else said it better. From Taylor Swift to Han Solo to William Shakespeare, here are some quotes that could make for the perfect Instagram caption.

1. "I don't even have a 'pla.'" — Phoebe Buffay, Friends
2. "Never tell me the odds." — Han Solo, Star Wars
3. "Love is the most common miracle."  — John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
4. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet
5. “People like me are gone forever when you say goodbye.” — Taylor Swift, All You Had To Do Was Stay
6. "Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” — John D. Rockefeller
7. "Isn't that just kick-you-in-the-crotch, spit-on-your-neck fantastic?" — Rachel Green, Friends
8. "Exit, pursued by a bear." — William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale
9. “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.” — Taylor Swift, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
10. “It's not that diamonds are a girl's best friend, but it's your best friends who are your diamonds.” — Gina Barreca
11. "You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." – C.S. Lewis
12. "The purpose of our lives is to be happy." – Dalai Lama
13. "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." – Vincent Van Gogh
14. “Not all those who wander are lost.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
15. "I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." – Oscar Wilde
16. "You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it." – Robin Williams
17. "The new me is really still the real me." — Drake, In My Feelings
18. “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.” — Michael Scott, The Office
19. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
20. “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” — Mark Twain

10 beach Instagram captions

Even if you're not a travel creator, you can be forgiven for flooding your feed with seaside Instagram posts on a beach holiday. Here are some poignant, clever, and cool Instagram captions for your beachy snaps and clips.

1. “My job is just… beach.” — Ken, The Barbie Movie
2. "I’m looking for a man in flip-flops. Sun-kissed. Seaside. Good vibes.”
3. “Life’s a beach.”
4. "Gone to the beach, be back never."
5. "Life is better in flip flops."
6. "The tans will fade, but the memories will last forever."
7. "Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home." — Sylvia Earle
8. "Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
9. "The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea." — Karen Blixen
10. "Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away." — Sarah Kay

10 Instagram captions for selfies

Here are some witty, funny, and moving Instagram captions for selfies.

1. "Be the reason someone smiles today."
2. “Confidence level: Insta selfie.”
3. "Self-love is the best love."
4. "Just another day being awesome."
5. "Won't delete later."
6. “You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." John Lennon, Imagine
7. “Always be a first-rate version of yourself and not a second-rate version of someone else.”― Judy Garland
8. “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” ― Mae West
9. “It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” ― Lewis Carroll
10. "Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are." — Brené Brown

What makes a good Instagram caption?

A strong Instagram caption supports your photo or video, offers a window into who you are, educates, prompts your followers to engage, or all of the above.

How does it fit into your creator or marketing goals for Instagram? Is it prompting follows, creating awareness, encouraging engagement, or sales?

Does it come across as authentic to your brand identity? Not every brand is witty, and not every brand is super serious.

Closely tied to authenticity is brand consistency in voice and tone. Your audience stays for the type of content you’re known for publishing, so a good caption should reflect who you are.

Does it encourage user engagement? Engagement is the bread and butter of any social media platform — your likes, retweets, shares, and more, show that your account resonates with your audience. It’s a great idea to focus on getting users to engage with your post in your Instagram captions.

Ultimately, however, your Instagram captions should be relevant to your images. Is there an object you want to highlight? Is there a theme you can run with? Stephanie Gutierrez, a Senior Social Media Strategist at Online Optimism recommends using playful puns to keep your caption light or clear and concise CTAs to drive your desired results.

How to write a great Instagram caption (according to experts)

A good caption can create more engagement, which improves how Instagram’s algorithm highlights your content on the feed.

Decide on what goals you want your Instagram captions to achieve

Once you know your goals: to sell, engage customers, or otherwise, you can better understand how to craft the copy of your caption.

“When coming up with Instagram captions, there are two things [to keep] mind,” says Mireia Boronat, a Senior Content Marketing Executive at The Social Shepherd. “The goal of that piece of content (awareness, engagement, or conversions) as well as the type of creative (entertaining, inspiring, promotion, or educational). These two factors will dictate how sales-y or creative we should be."

You also need to keep your audience and the circumstances of each of your Instagram posts in mind. A silly caption on a post about your brand’s giving-back initiative might not go down well. Alternatively, if you bury the main point too far in your caption, you may not achieve the goals you set for that post.

Determine the length and content of your caption

Not every caption needs to be short and sweet, but not every caption must be an essay. Some brands have super-engaged audiences who will read every word of their caption, while others are there for something else, like a new sale or product announcement.

As Mireia shares, “There's nothing better than knowing your audience to write something that will be relevant to them, and that is the right tone of voice.” Each post should have a purpose and intention, so lead each one with its specific goal and let that goal dictate the call to action. What do you want followers to do?

Several experts also recommend short Instagram captions. "People spend less time on each creative and scroll down to the next piece of content pretty quickly," Mireia says. "That's why keeping things short and sweet has more chances of performing better and referencing any pop culture or current trends.”

That said, there may be occasions when you want to lean into microblogging in your Instagram captions. This is a tactic often used by creators, who will grab their audience's attention with a short Instagram Reel — something that contains only enough text to intrigue — then follow up with the real value in their caption. This could be something like a how-to guide, tutorial, or personal story.

When users linger over a caption on a reel, the video will continue to loop in the background. That time spent on an Instagram post is also an important signal to the algorithm that your content is valuable, and may help increase your reach. 

Grab the reader’s attention immediately

Instagram’s format means that an attention-grabbing strategy is not always necessary, but it could be the difference between a user staying a few seconds longer on your post or scrolling past.

There are different ways to grab a viewer’s attention with your Instagram captions – the most effective is to include the most important details first. After a couple of lines of text, Instagram hides the rest of your caption behind a “more” link, so say the most important bit first. Only about the first sentence will be seen in a user’s Instagram feed, so make sure it’s compelling or asks a question.

Elizabeth Kraus, the marketing expert and content producer at Fit Small Business, recommends that you also experiment with emojis and text to get users to look twice at your post. 

“A couple of easy ways to do this are through using bold or italic or 𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝓅𝓉 or even really extended •.,¸¸,.•´¯   𝓊𝓃𝓊𝓈𝓊𝒶𝓁  ¯´•.,¸¸,.• 𝕧𝕚𝕤𝕦𝕒𝕝 text, which you can get painlessly through cut-and-paste functionality on a site like LingoJam. The second is to add emojis to break up the text. Emojipedia has one of the easiest search engines for finding just the right icon for your Instagram posts.”

Once you’ve got the reader's attention, make sure your Instagram captions evoke some type of emotion. Elizabeth highlights a study cited in the book Brand Immortality that shows that emotional content is twice as effective as content that appeals to an instinctive part of the brain versus content that requires more cognitive processing.

Some other ways to grab attention are asking a question, directing people to your link in bio for more details, or using a clear call to action.

Examples of accounts with great Instagram captions

Some of the best Instagram caption ideas come from Instagram itself. I love scrolling through my Instagram feed to see what clever captions other brands and creators have come up with.

With that in mind, here are some of the best Instagram captions I've seen on the app lately:

Tessa Hughs: The 'reel' value is in the caption

I mentioned above how including the real value from your Instagram post in your caption rather than giving it all away in the video could boost reach.

Tessa Hughs (@spatialawareness____) does it masterfully in the video below. Two bonuses for this strategy: 

1. Your audience doesn’t need to tap and hold your reel to review advice they may have missed. 
2. A short reel than contains only the ‘hook’ of your post will be much easier to film and edit!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tessa Hughes (@spatialawareness____)

National Park Service: Longer Instagram captions with great engagement

We first discovered the wonder of the National Park Service’s Instagram account when it was featured in Link in Bio, a newsletter about social media. Their account often defies the convention of keeping Instagram captions between 150-300 characters with long, humorous, and engaging captions.

The account often starts Instagram posts with a funny sentence (as seen in the post below) or a CTA that encourages readers to continue reading the post, which follows through on the engaging introduction.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by National Park Service (@nationalparkservice)

We’re Not Really Strangers: Connecting to your audience through short but engaging Instagram captions

The Instagram account for the We’re Not Really Strangers card game has great engagement — over 5.6%, which is a lot for its audience of 5 million followers.

The Instagram captions on the posts tend to be short, but in tandem with the post, they always encourage conversation in the comments. In the post below, the brand's audience shares their "little things that aren't little" in the comments.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by we’re not really strangers (@werenotreallystrangers)

Jeannette Aranda: Mixing long and short Instagram captions as the post calls for

Jeanette Ogden, who runs @shutthekaleup, is an Instagram influencer who posts a lot about motherhood, fitness, and food on her account.

She mixes caption length up depending on the post and sees a lot of engagement from her audience. People seem to resonate with her and enjoy it when she goes more into detail.

Jeanette’s account is a great example of understanding your audience and knowing when to go in-depth.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jeannette Aranda (@shutthekaleup)

Less is more when it comes to Instagram captions

Treat your Instagram captions like you would a press release, and look for ways to remove anything unnecessary. “Less is more” doesn’t just refer to the length of the post but also to the number of hashtags or emojis you include. Or, instead of tagging someone in the caption, use Instagram’s tagging feature instead.

You have up to 3,000 characters for every caption, though you don’t have to fill that space. But this doesn’t mean your Instagram captions can’t be long, either. It means you’re communicating the most important information and not adding filler.

Also, using a character counter can help ensure your social media captions stay within platform-specific character limits.

We analyzed more than 5.5 million Instagram posts sent through Buffer to pinpoint the best time, day, and post format for maximum engagement.

You will learn

• Which days and hours are generally the best posting times.
• The post format that gets the most engagement.
• How to use analytics to figure out the best time to reach your specific audience.

There are many factors to consider when it comes to posting on Instagram — but the one that often feels like a make-or-break decision is what time to post your content.

It's a fair concern — the last thing you want is to spend the time and resources needed to create a showstopper piece of content only to post it in a social media dead zone that results in… crickets.

Sharing Instagram Stories, reels, feed posts, and carousels at optimal times for engagement is an important consideration in your social media strategy. If your content immediately makes it to your target audience's feed while they're around to engage with it, it's more likely to succeed.

That's why we combed through the median engagement rate of over 5.5 million Instagram posts sent through Buffer: to uncover which days and times are more likely to yield engagement (along with which post formats get the most likes, comments, and shares).

In other words, the best times to post on Instagram, backed by data.

With all that in mind, let's dig into everything you need to know about when you should be posting on Instagram — including how to figure out the best time for your audience, whether you're a marketer, creator, influencer, or casual Instagrammer.

Is there a best time to post on Instagram?

Let's get this out of the way before we begin: There's no universal best time to post on Instagram for guaranteed success — if only it were that easy. However, our analysis showed us that there are certain days and times that tend to yield more engagement than others.

Before we dig into those numbers, let's discuss why engagement matters.

Each section of the app (the main Instagram feed, Stories, Instagram Reels, and the Explore page) is governed by a separate algorithm. One of the most important “signals” for the various Instagram algorithms is engagement.

Engagement — likes, comments, shares, and saves — on your content tells the app that your content is resonating with people. In turn, Instagram will show your content to more people like those who have already engaged.

This is particularly true in the public discovery pages, Explore and Reels. And getting your content in those spaces is often a fast track to Instagram growth.

So, while Instagram timing, or post recency, is not as crucial as it once was (R.I.P. chronological feed), it's still important to consider when developing your social media marketing strategy and determining when to post content.

Ready to dig into the numbers?

The best times to post on Instagram

The best time to post on Instagram is generally between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on weekdays. After analyzing more than 5 million Instagram posts, we found that posts shared at these times tended to get the most engagement.

This is likely because Instagram users wake up and check their phones before starting their day or scroll through the app while on their morning commute.

As you'll see from the heatmap graph above, Instagram audience behavior is pretty predictable, depending on the day of the week. The darkest green slots represent the time slots with the highest engagement — indicating the best time to post on Instagram.

The light green to white blocks are the time slots with the lowest engagement, showing the times that are best avoided.

On weekdays, the best time to post on Instagram is early in the morning, when engagement suddenly picks up at 7 a.m. It peters out slightly as the day wears on while Instagram users are likely at work. There is a slight uptick in engagement around midday, during lunch breaks, which makes this a good time to post on Instagram, too.

Engagement picks up slightly in the early evenings. On Thursdays and Fridays, there's suddenly an engagement spike at 4 p.m. — likely when Instagram users mentally check out of work a bit earlier as the weekend nears — making this a great time to post to add to your social media calendar.

Weekends are completely different. Our data shows that engagement drops significantly on Saturdays and Sundays, with some slightly more engaged times on Saturday morning and Sunday evening — though these weekend peaks are nothing close to the weekday engagement levels. The best time to post on Instagram on weekends is 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings and 7 p.m. on Sunday evenings.

The best time to post on Instagram at a glance

• Monday: 7 a.m.
• Tuesday: 7 a.m.
• Wednesday: 7 a.m.
• Thursday: 7 a.m.
• Friday: 4 p.m.
• Saturday: 7 a.m.
• Sunday: 7 p.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Monday

The best time to post on Instagram on Mondays is in the morning when most users wake up between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., with two more (albeit smaller) peaks at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Monday: 7 a.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Tuesday

The best time to post on Instagram on Tuesday is in the early mornings — our analysis showed an engagement hotspot at 7 a.m. There is another (slightly lower) engagement peak in the early evening at 6 p.m.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Tuesday: 7 a.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Wednesday

The best time to post on Instagram on Wednesday follows a similar pattern. There is a solid peak time from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., with no real engagement spikes later in the day.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Wednesday: 7 a.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Thursday

The best times to post on Instagram on Thursdays are 7 a.m., 8 a.m., and 4 p.m., according to Buffer data. These posting times tended to see more engagement than those posted during other times of the day.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Thursday: 7 a.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Friday

The best times to post on Instagram on Friday are at 4 p.m. or between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. However, the numbers show that there are slightly more high-engagement time slots than on the other days of the week. Friday is the best day to post on Instagram.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Friday: 4 p.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Saturday

The best time to post on Instagram on Saturday is 7 a.m., though it's worth noting that Saturday engagement pales in comparison to weekdays. That said, engagement on an Instagram post shared between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday tends to be better.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Saturday: 7 a.m.

The best time to post on Instagram on Sunday

The best times to post on Instagram on Sunday are in the evening, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday is also a quiet time on the app, with Instagram users indulging in slower mornings.

• ⏰ Peak Instagram engagement time on Sunday: 7 p.m.

This is where social media management tools like Buffer really shine. Experiment by systematically going through the times on the list above, scheduling a post, and tracking its performance to see what works best for your target audience.

What is the best day of the week to post on Instagram?

You really can't go wrong with sharing content on Instagram on weekdays. But Monday and Friday are the best days to post on Instagram — an inch about the rest of the week for engagement times.

Comparatively, the worst time of the week to post on Instagram is on a weekend. Saturday and Sunday are the worst days to post, with engagement significantly lower than the rest of the week.

What is the best time to post Reels on Instagram?

The best time to post reels is between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on weekdays, which aligns with all the graphs above. In our analysis, we reviewed all Instagram posts, rather than segmenting by post type (but we're working on it, so watch this space!).

That said, it's also worth considering that people treat different segments of the Instagram app a little differently.

An update on the algorithm by Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri offers some interesting insight on this front: “People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, use Explore to discover new content and creators, and be entertained in reels.”

It stands to reason, then, that people are looking to be entertained at certain times of day, and catch up with friends, family, and their favorite creators at other times.

If you're looking for a slight boost in reels engagement, we recommend testing out the peak evening times to post reels. Your followers will have slightly more time to scroll and enjoy your content before bedtime than they would in the peak morning slots when they need to rush off to work.

The best type of content on Instagram

This might not surprise you — the most engaging content on Instagram is video. Our data revealed that videos perform a head and shoulders above carousels and photo posts.

Reels are an excellent way to gain followers on the platform — even Instagram says so. “The most effective way to grow on Instagram is to consistently create engaging reels, as reels are the best way to reach new audiences,” head of Instagram Creator Partnerships at Meta, Carly Lynn, said in a video.

That's not to say other content types don't have an impact. Carousels tend to perform slightly better than images, though the difference is not as marked as the one between reels and everything else.

How to find the best time to post on Instagram for you

While all of the above time frames can be useful in helping you put together a posting schedule as you're just starting out, take it all with a pinch of salt.

There are better ways to figure out when your audience is online and engaging — and your personal best time to post on Instagram might not align with the general guidelines above.

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all for the best time to post on Instagram. Your peak engagement time will likely differ from someone else's.

For example, my personal Instagram audience's activity level is pretty steady on work days and on the weekends. They're less likely to be online during work hours, and engagement usually peaks in the early evening. They're slightly more active on Wednesday, with activity peaking at 6 p.m. in my time zone (SAST).

For Buffer's Instagram following, things look a little different. “We've found that posting between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. PST on weekdays works well for us, though Mondays at 7 p.m. PST are our best engagement time,” says Social Media Manager Mitra Mehvar. For ease of comparison, those times are 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. EST, and 10 p.m. EST.

“In general, I've found that weekends have had a lower engagement for us so I usually don't post on Saturday and Sunday,” she adds.

Buffer Analytics

A social media management tool like Buffer can be really helpful in pinpointing the best times for your posts. If you're a Buffer user, our analytics offer even deeper insights into the best times to post on Instagram. To find yours:

• Head over to analyze.buffer.com in your desktop browser and make sure you're logged into your Buffer account.
• Click on Instagram on the left side of your screen. There's a host of important data to dig into here, including Instagram post performance and audience demographics.

• Click on Answers. Here, you'll find insights on a whole lot more than the best time to post on Instagram (like which post types are the best for you, or how often you should be posting) but the best time to post is the second box from the top.

Here are some of the answers for our Instagram account in Buffer:

Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights, the native analytics tool for the social media platform, can be helpful in pinpointing some good times to post on Instagram.

To get stats for your own audience via the Instagram analytics baked into the app, head over to Instagram Insights on the mobile app:

• Go to your Instagram profile and click on the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines) on the top right of your screen.
• Tap on Insights.
• Click on Total followers.
• Scroll down to the bottom of this page and look for Most active times. You'll be able to toggle between hours for every day of the week or look at specific days.

You can also access Instagram Insights via the web version of Instagram. To find yours:

• Log into instagram.com
• Click on your profile photo on the bottom left of the window to navigate to your Instagram account.
• Click on the View insights link underneath your Instagram bio.
• Scroll down to Followers to see your audience's most active times.

Note that you'll need to make sure your account is a Business Instagram account or a Creator account to access Instagram Insights.

The best time to post on Instagram FAQs

Here are some commonly asked questions when it comes to the best time to schedule your Instagram posts.

Does the time you post on Instagram matter?

Our data shows that the time you post on Instagram does matter. Analyzing more than 5 million Instagram posts showed that content posted at specific times had higher engagement rates.

That said, a high-engagement posting time is not going to be enough to save a low-quality Instagram post. Sharing your Instagram Reels, photos, and stories at these optimal posting times should be the cherry on top of your Instagram strategy rather than its foundation.

For guidance on how to improve your Instagram account and content, head over to the section: Your Checklist for High-performing Instagram Posts.

When is it best not to post on Instagram?

When it comes to when not to post on Instagram, common sense rules apply. When is your target audience not online? The most obvious answer is overnight. Our analysis supports this — any Instagram posts shared between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. tended to get the least engagement. Engagement on posts drops off significantly during these times, no matter what day of the week it is.

According to our data, Instagram posts shared on the weekends tended to have lower engagement rates too, though there are some good times to post on Saturday and Sunday. Scroll up to The best times to post on Instagram for more.

Is it better to post early or late on Instagram?

On most days, early mornings between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. tend to be good times to post on Instagram. Some later slots, like 6 p.m. on Tuesday and 4 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, also saw good engagement metrics.

What is the best time to post on Instagram today?

As a rule of thumb, if it is a weekday, the best time to post on Instagram is usually 7 a.m., except on Fridays, when the best time to post is 4 p.m. On weekends, the best time to post is 7 a.m. on Saturday and 7 p.m. on Sunday. For more details, scroll up to the cheatsheet section above: The Best Time to Post on Instagram at a Glance.

When is the best time to post on Instagram in my country or timezone?

Many of the guides you'll find to the best times to post will be in U.S. time zones, like Eastern Time (EST) or Pacific Time (PST), which can be super confusing when it comes to figuring out your best time to post on Instagram.

But if you're based outside these zones (hello from South Africa!), all of the data above is still applicable to you. The Buffer data scientists have crunched the numbers to be universally applicable. So if the best time to post on Instagram on Friday is 4 p.m., that's 4 p.m. in your time zone — whether you're based in California or Calcutta.

How often should I post on Instagram?

Social media post frequency is important — regularly showing up on the platform is often a powerful way to gain traction. According to the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, sharing one to two Instagram Stories daily and a couple of in-feed posts (reels, carousels, or photos) weekly should be enough for consistent engagement.

Stories, in particular, which disappear after 24 hours, offer a helpful, lightweight way to stay consistent on the platform. Post an Instagram Story at least daily to stay top-of-mind for your followers.

I know that's not super specific, but that's because every target audience is different. Perhaps your target audience is office workers who regularly check the app during their lunch break or students who log on late at night.

It's worth experimenting with your posting schedule to see what cadence, along with time to post, works best for your Instagram audience. Buffer can help here, too: with enough data, our analytics tools crunch the numbers for you to recommend the best posting frequency for you (and adapt as that changes). Scroll up to The best time for you to post on Instagram section to learn how.

Your checklist for high-performing Instagram posts

While figuring out the best time to post on Instagram for maximum engagement is an important part of your Instagram marketing strategy, it's not the be-all and end-all.

As we unpack in our guide to the Instagram algorithm(s) there are a huge number of factors to take into account if you want your content to perform well. Here's our checklist for high-performing Instagram content:

1. Make the most of Instagram's new features: As with the launch of Instagram Stories and reels, the platform loves showcasing its new features. Using them could mean getting your content in front of new audiences.
2. Experiment with content types: Regularly trying out a new type of content when you post on Instagram will help you figure out what resonates the most with your audience. Plus, it's a great way to repurpose your content.
3. Don't neglect your caption: According to a fascinating report by HubSpot, captions that performed the best were either very long (over 2,000 characters) or very short (less than 20). Using emojis in captions was also shown to boost engagement.
4. Use hashtags: Studies show that posts with hashtags receive higher engagement than those without. Buffer's Hashtag Manager will make adding your favorite ones to your caption or comments a breeze.
5. Prioritize authentic engagement: Rather than wasting time and resources on Instagram algorithm hacks, focus on fostering meaningful engagement with your followers. That means replying to comments and messages, resharing their mentions of you, and even interacting with them on their own content.
6. Analyze to see what's working: Use Instagram Insights to see which of your posts have had the most engagement. Buffer's analytics will also help you uncover your best posts (those with the highest engagement) in just a few clicks.

What have you found most helpful when determining the best time to post on Instagram for you? Let us know @buffer on all our social media accounts!

Many people, from brands to babies, have a TikTok account. For context, the app reached one billion) global monthly users in 2021, making it one of the fastest-growing social media apps. And with TikTok’s popularity explosion has come different approaches to money-making.

For businesses and content creators alike, TikTok is a great tool for discovery that also has the potential to create a new source of revenue or income. TikTok offers various creator tools that help users manage their accounts and monetize their content. These tools include features like enabling video gifts and joining the Creator Fund, which assists content creators in maximizing their earnings and engagement.

Of course, you might already know some popular ones, like sponsored content and the TikTok Creator Rewards program (formerly the TikTok Creativity program). But some other methods have been successful for creators which we’ll discuss. Without further ado, here’s how you can make money on TikTok.

At a glance: 7 ways to make money on TikTok

1. Collaborate on sponsored content
2. Tap into affiliate marketing
3. Sell your own products
4. Set up crowdfunding to collect donations from fans
5. Collect tips from your audience
6. Join the TikTok Creativity Program
7. Grow your audience

1. Collaborate on sponsored content

Brand deals are one of the most obvious categories of monetization on TikTok. Sponsored content is when brands and creators work together to have products or to feature their offerings in your video in return for a fee. Brands often pay content creators not only with monetary compensation but also through product exchanges, highlighting the potential for financial collaboration.

Sponsorships are one of the best ways for any creator to make money on TikTok or for a brand to partner with influencers. Sixty-eight percent of marketers made TikTok part of their influencer marketing strategy in 2021. So if you’ve been considering reaching out to brands as a creator, or to creators as a brand, you’re on the right track.

If sponsored content is a path you want to explore, how you can get started? First, and perhaps most importantly, you need to identify and partner with brands that fit your niche and values as a creator and vice versa.

This helps build trust with your audience – TikTok users don’t want to feel like your content is disingenuous – as well as improves engagement on your sponsored posts since they match what your audience comes to your account for anyway.

You can start by working with smaller brands or creators for a more intimate working relationship. This lessens the pressure to have a high follower count, allowing you to focus on creating engaging content, sponsored or otherwise.

Reach out to local businesses or people with accounts in your region to see if they’d be interested in partnering up for a feature.

Also, consider joining the TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM), a collaboration platform that allows brands to connect and run marketing campaigns with TikTok creators.

Whichever side of the brand-creator relationship you’re on, using TikTok’s native marketplace might be a better way of connecting and collaborating with the right people to monetize your content. Creators need to meet certain eligibility requirements to be invited to the platform, but brands can join and connect with creators instantly.

2. Tap into affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a powerful strategy to monetize your TikTok account by promoting products or services and earning a commission on sales generated through your unique affiliate links. Here’s how you can set it up and maximize your earnings.

TikTok ads are also an effective way to reach targeted audiences and complement your affiliate marketing efforts.

Start by identifying a niche that aligns with your content and interests. Your audience will be more likely to engage with affiliate links that match their preferences. For example, if your content revolves around fitness, partnering with health and wellness brands can be highly effective.

Look for affiliate programs that offer products or services relevant to your niche. Some popular platforms to find affiliate programs include:

• Amazon Associates: Offers a wide range of products to promote.
• ShareASale: Connects you with numerous brands across various categories.
• CJ Affiliate: Features many well-known brands and products.
• Rakuten Marketing: Provides access to global brands and products.

After selecting an affiliate program, sign up and obtain your unique affiliate links. These links will track the sales generated through your promotions, ensuring you earn your commission.

Here are a few ways to incorporate affiliate links into your TikTok content effectively:

• Product reviews: Create engaging and honest reviews of the products you’re promoting. Highlight their benefits and how they solve problems for your audience.
• Tutorials and how-tos: Demonstrate how to use the product in a tutorial or step-by-step guide. This approach provides value to your viewers and can drive higher engagement.
• Unboxing videos: Share the excitement of unboxing new products. These videos tend to attract viewers interested in your niche and can lead to more clicks on your affiliate links.
• Challenges and trends: Participate in TikTok trends and challenges while subtly promoting the products. Ensure the promotion fits naturally within the content.

TikTok allows you to add a link in your bio. Use a URL shortener or a landing page tool like Start Page to include multiple affiliate links. In your videos, prompt viewers to visit the link in your bio for more information or to purchase the products you’re promoting.

Transparency is crucial in affiliate marketing. Always disclose your affiliate relationships to your audience. This builds trust and complies with legal requirements. A simple statement like “This video contains affiliate links, and I may earn a commission if you make a purchase” can suffice.

3. Sell your own products through TikTok Shop

If you have an existing line of products, merch or are considering creating one, TikTok can help you sell them. Creators from the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. with a TikTok for Business account will be able to add a shopping tab and product links to your profile.

The shopping tab is a new feature resulting from TikTok’s partnership with Shopify as well as other e-commerce platforms. It’s designed to help TikTokers with a Shopify store promote their products through the app. Users who click a product link are redirected to the merchant’s Shopify store for purchase.

To effectively drive sales, brands need to create authentic content that resonates with specific subcultures and interests within the TikTok community. Understanding and engaging with TikTok audiences is crucial for success.

Brands like Youth to the People and Glow Recipe (which TikTok published a case study about) have made use of the Shop tab, putting their actual products on sale for purchase through the app. This feature is only available in the U.S. and U.K. for now, so that’s a major factor for businesses outside those regions to consider.

Another snag with using TikTok Shop is that TikTok Business accounts only have access to generic sounds, making it more difficult to participate in trends on the app, so you’ll have to get creative.

An interesting example of this is a viral video where the Bed, Bath and Beyond social media manager hummed a viral sound that they couldn't access because of Business account restrictions.

4. Set up crowdfunding to collect donations from fans

If you’re looking to fund a specific endeavor like your startup idea or becoming a full-time creator, crowdfunding is a great option.

Offering an easy, no-pressure way for fans to give back or contribute to your idea is great for securing a regular income stream. For addressing common questions and concerns related to crowdfunding and donations on the platform, you can refer to the TikTok FAQ.

Crowdfunding could also be a great way of growing your audience if you’re offering perks to contributors. Here are some crowdfunding sites to explore:

• Kickstarter: Consider Kickstarter if you need a lot of eyes and a trusted platform for your fundraising.
• Indiegogo: If you don’t have a specific amount you’re trying to raise, you might prefer Indiegogo, which offers more flexible fundraising goals and lets you collect funds even after your deadline.
• Crowdfunder: Crowdfunder has a network of more than 12,000 accredited venture capitalists and angel investors to connect with.
• Mighty Cause: Use Mighty Cause to avoid fees and a waiting period to launch your campaign.
• Patreon: This is a great option for creators who aren’t looking to raise money for a specific project, but need to raise funds for you to continue publishing. Patreon allows you to set up subscription tiers for your followers to choose from and offer different types of exclusive content for each tier.

In practice, crowdfunding on TikTok has proven successful for businesses. Osien Gwynned found success with his Kickstarter campaign for Antur Supply Co, reaching its almost-$35,000 goal 9.5 hours after going live.

5. Collect tips from your audience

Crowdfunding platforms might not be ideal if you don’t have a specific project to fund. Consider using a tipping platform to accept donations quickly and easily. Here are some great tipping platforms to check out:

• Tipeee: Tippee is simple and easy to use, allowing creators to set up a page for their fans to directly “tip” any amount at any time.
• Buy Me a Coffee: This platform is specifically created for creators and is also simple to use. Followers can choose to buy any amount of “coffees” for $1 each, which is then sent to the creator through PayPal or online banking.
• Ko-fi: Consider this if you want more extensive options to offer audiences. Creators can offer tips, memberships, and commissions for personalized content.

Additionally, creators can earn through video gifts sent by fans during live streams or popular videos. These virtual gifts can be converted into Diamonds, TikTok's virtual currency, which can eventually be converted into real cash.

Tipping platforms work just like a real-life tip jar – the option is available, but not mandatory, and your fans can donate any amount they like at any time they want.

Creators like sarahopkinsart and thepaytonproject have put tipping platforms to good use by including these links in their TikTok link in bio.

6. Join the TikTok Creator Rewards program

The TikTok Creator Rewards program is the most straightforward way for creators to make money through the app. It’s not an ad revenue-sharing program like YouTube’s AdSense; it’s simply a way for TikTok to share income with creators. TikTok monetization is a growing opportunity for users to earn money through various methods on the platform, such as collecting tips from fans, utilizing TikTok's tipping feature, and creating a TikTok Shop for small business owners to sell products.

TikTok calculates its payouts based on factors like video length, views, video engagement, and even region-specific performance.

So, how much can you expect TikTok to pay? The program offers a generous payout increase from previous monetization initiatives, with potential earnings ranging from $4.00 to $8.00 per 1,000 views. This is a substantial uplift from the Creator Fund’s payments, which generally ranged between $0.20 to $0.40 per 1,000 views​​.

The Creator Rewards program is available for users in the U.S., Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, and the UK, and is rumored to launch in additional countries in 2024. As long as you’re in the right location, there are a few other requirements to join the Creator Fund:

• Be at least 18 years old
• Have at least 10,000 followers
• Have a minimum of 100,000 valid video views in the last 30 days
• Have a personal account that’s in good standing – business accounts are not accepted
• Create videos that follow TikTok’s Community Guidelines and Terms of Service

Advice for growing your audience on TikTok

A lot of our advice relies on having a dedicated following of people who might be interested in whatever you’re selling them. To get in a position where you can start making money, you’ll need to grow your audience and keep them engaged with your content – here are some tips to do just that:

• Post consistently: A consistent stream of content will keep you at the forefront of your followers’ minds, add value to your content in the eyes of TikTok’s algorithm, and give you more opportunities to go viral and expand the scope of your audience.
• Use TikTok’s features to the maximum: Add hashtags to boost your TikTok SEO, play into trends, including trending sounds, and use duets and stitches.
• Be authentic: The most popular TikTokers all offer different types of content but what they all have in common is their authenticity. Creating engaging TikTok posts that prioritize authentic content over aggressive advertising can help you forge personal connections with your audience.
• Engage actively with your followers: TikTok offers lots of different ways to engage with your audience⁠, from stitches to video replies. These features help you add a more personal touch to your content.
• Leverage TikTok Lives to engage with your audience in real-time and showcase products or services.
• Avoid too much sales-y content: The tricky part of using social media to sell products is not overdoing the amount of promotional material. Take a content-first approach by creating and letting your audience and their response inspire the best ways to monetize your account.

Focus on creating valuable content no matter your audience size

You don’t have to have a large number of followers to make money online. Micro-influencers are just as in-demand as the bigger influencers, as they are easier for small businesses and niche brands to partner with. Focus on creating value for your target audience as well as educating yourself on the best approaches to brand partnerships. Creators can also earn money through virtual gifts, which are tokens of appreciation from their audience that can be converted to real money.

For business owners, keep in mind that being genuine is the best path to success in making money on TikTok – it’s the easiest way to get audiences on the platform to trust you.

From being transparent about the behind-the-scenes of your business to engaging with followers consistently and not leaving their comments hanging, there are many ways to grow your account and gain your audience’s trust.

In this article, we’ll share exactly how to repost on Instagram.

One of the best aspects of social media is being able to share something with your followers, but other social media platforms make reposting a bit easier.

On Twitter, you can retweet. On Facebook, there’s the option to share a post. And on Instagram, you can repost, which is essentially a way to share a picture from another Instagram user with your followers.

Though reposting isn’t an official feature of Instagram’s apps or website, it’s something that many brands and users have been doing for a while now. And it’s a tactic that has delivered great success, too. Here at Buffer, reposting user-generated content was a key factor in our growing our Instagram audience by over 400%.

Learning how to repost on Instagram is the key to taking your marketing strategy on the photo-sharing platform to the next level. We’d love to help get you started! Keep reading for advice and tips on the best ways to add reposting to your social strategy and the ideal workflows for doing it quickly and efficiently.

How to Repost on Instagram

First things first, before you repost…

With other social networks, reposting is a native feature that comes baked into the product experience and expectations. On Instagram, since this isn’t a native part of the app, there needs to be an additional step:

Before you repost, it is best to get permission from the original poster so that you can repost their work with credit.

You can do this in a few ways:

• Send the original poster a direct message on Instagram.
• Comment on their photo to start the conversation.
• Connect via email to iron out the details and get explicit permission.

Reposting has been around as a strategy on Instagram for quite some time, long before tools like Buffer for Instagram came around. Third-party apps allowed for particular repost functions, often including watermarks or @-mention credits on the reposted photo. The absolute simplest way, though, was with a screengrab of the original post — a process that can still be replicated today.

Here’s how to manually repost photos in four easy steps:

1. Screenshot a photo

Open Instagram, find the photo you’d like to repost with your audience and take a screenshot of it.

2. Upload your screenshot to Instagram

Once you have the Instagram photo saved to your camera roll, tap on the plus-sign icon within Instagram, hit post, and select your screenshot as you would any other image you want to share on Instagram.

3. Resize the image

Next, you’ll want to resize your post so that only the image remains. You can do this using the resize functionality within Instagram, or if you’d like to crop before you upload the photo, this can also be done using your phone’s photo editing functionality.

4. Add a caption

Be sure to credit the original source of the image within your caption and tag their account using their Instagram handle (@buffer, for example).

Third-party apps for reposting to Instagram

There are also third-party apps available in the app store that allow you to repost photos and Reels directly inside of Instagram. Here are a few you can try.

Repost+ for Instagram

Available on iOS and Android.

Repost: For Posts, Stories

Available on iOS.

Repost for Instagram - JaredCo

Available for Android.

How to repost to your Instagram Story

You can also repost someone else’s original content to your Instagram Story. You’ll need to be on the app to do this, but the process is the same from Android to iPhone. To repost content to your story, follow these steps:

1. Tap on the paper airplane icon on the post or Reel you want to share.
2. Tap on the option to add this to your story.
3. Customize your post with GIFs, stickers, text, and caption options in the top-right corner.
4. Tap the arrow in the bottom-right corner, and make sure “add post to your story” is selected,
5. Select whether you want to share it to your story or close friends, and then click the arrow to post.

Keep in mind that this won’t work with a private account or with ads; only those set to public will let you share their content on your own account.

Why reposting can be important for brands

Instagram has become an incredibly important network for brands. In fact, 48.8% of brands are on Instagram.

Instagram is used by more than 200 million businesses and 2.75 billion monthly users.

Instagram offers a prime opportunity to engage with your customers. Your audience is there, ready, and expecting to interact with you. The vast majority of people — 90%, in fact — follow at least one brand on Instagram. One in two people have discovered new brands using the platform, and 63% of people say they’ve formed meaningful connections with companies using Instagram. And with social commerce on the scene, 44% of users said they use Instagram to shop on a weekly basis.

But how does reposting come into play here?

People tend to trust user-generated content (aka UGC) more than they trust branded posts. Consumers are twice as likely to see user-generated content as authentic — and that authenticity directly influences their purchasing decisions.

How we use reposting at Buffer
Here at Buffer, we’ve also made reposting a key part of our Instagram strategy and this tactic has helped us to significantly grow our account. In under 3 months after implementing a user generated content campaign on Instagram, our account grew by 60%  – 5,850 to 9,400 followers and counting.

How reposting can fit into your Instagram strategy

Here are three ways to make reposting a part of your strategy.

1. Share UGC from events and milestones

Live events, meetups, and talks are great times to create and curate content. If you’re running your own event, or maybe a member of your team is giving a talk at a conference, this is a golden opportunity to repost some content on Instagram.

Addressing big milestones or celebrating key moments can also be a great strategy to inspire your followers to share some user-generated content.

Coachella sometimes features UGC to generate hype for their music-loving fans. For instance, they shared an incredibly creative video from artist Rudy Willingham that showcases headlining performer Harry Styles:

2. Monitor brand mentions, tags, and hashtags

Your Instagram notifications can also be a great source of user-generated content. Keep an eye out for any new mentions and tags, as these can be great sources of content for your own Instagram feed.

Airbnb features guest photos (and tags rental listings) in their feed, sometimes drawing from their #airbnbsuperhost community for content.

This approach from Airbnb serves two needs: they get compelling visuals to share with their audience, and they promote the properties that support their bottom line.

3. Acknowledge and share content from community members

People enjoy being acknowledged for their content and efforts on social media. And sometimes, reaching out and asking to share some fan’s content on your brand’s profile can be a great way to acknowledge their work and discover new brand ambassadors.

Etsy puts their community of makers front and center on their feed, showcasing the products available on their wide-ranging shopping platform. They also created an elegant way to secure permission to repost: they ask people to respond to requests with the custom hashtag #YesEtsy if they’re comfortable with the reshare.

Etsy is built on a community of makers, so showcasing their creativity and craftsmanship helps them feel supported while getting customers excited to purchase their products.

Discover more about how we use reposting and UGC as part of our Instagram strategy here at Buffer:

How to decide what you should repost on Instagram

Cool, so you’re ready to repost some content on Instagram, but which photos should you share?

It’s important to ensure you have a strategy in place when it comes to reposting and also an idea of how the content you repost fits into your wider Instagram strategy. There are a few factors to think about before you hit “share post.”

Composition

Composition refers to the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art as distinct from the subject of a work. A good composition makes an image pleasing to look at and will draw in more viewers. The rule of thirds is a great starting point for a well-composed image: if you imagine a grid of nine equal zones, the subject of the photo should be in the right or left third of the grid (or the top or bottom if it’s a vertical shot).

This fan image of a Getaway House rental cabin is a striking example of the rule of thirds at work.

When it comes to sharing images from other Instagram accounts, think about your brand’s style of composition and whether each image fits in here. For example, if all of your images feature a solid background, it might not fit in with your visual style to repost an image with a textured background.

Color palette

Many brands use a set color palette or aesthetic on Instagram, and moving away from your brand style may make your reposted content feel a little out of place. For example, Everlane tends to use a soft palette made up mostly of neutrals with the occasional pop of bright color:

If Everlane were to repost an image with a busy, saturated color scheme, it wouldn’t feel aligned with their brand.

Content

This is probably the most important factor of any reposting strategy. Before sharing a photo, think about whether the content is aligned with your brand. For example, at Buffer, our Instagram content focuses on three main themes:

1. Social media strategies
2. Small business advice
3. Remote work

Before reposting anything, we’ll ensure that the photo aligns with one of these three themes and helps us execute our strategy.

3 reposting best practices

1. Be thoughtful when you ask for permission to repost

Once you’ve discovered a photo you’d like to share, we’ve found that it’s best to send a thoughtful message in your outreach. Include a kind word about why you liked the original post, and tell the poster why you’d like to share their photo. If you have any terms and conditions before you offer attribution, give the original poster a link to review them. Finally, give them directions on how they can respond if they’re on board with a repost: These could be as simple as “Respond with ‘yes’ if you’re interested” or could include a custom tag that you’ve developed specifically for this purpose.

2. Avoid edits

If you’ve picked out a photo you’d love to repost, it’s a best practice to share it untouched and unedited. If you do want to add something to the post, reposting it to your story will preserve the original while giving you a chance to include commentary, stickers, etc. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’ll be able to go ahead and publish without any changes, but for those rare occasions where a slight edit may be needed, reach out to the original creator and ask before publishing an edited image.

3. Credit your source

This one is super important. If you choose to repost someone’s photo, ensure you give credit in your post. The best way to credit someone is to include their username within your caption.

Instagram captions become truncated with an ellipsis after three lines of text, so, where possible, try to include the credit within those first three lines so it’s visible.

Here are a few ways you can give credit within your photo caption:

• Credit: @username
• Photo credit: @username
• Moment captured by @username
• 📸 by @username
• Thanks to @username for sharing this image with us

7 Inspiring examples of reposting done right

Which brands have top-notch UGC?

1. GoPro

GoPro is built on user-generated content. Their Instagram feed regularly features content from members of their community and showcases the amazing images you can capture using a GoPro camera. They also host challenges where their followers submit photos for a chance at an award.

2. Bēhance

Bēhance from Adobe uses Instagram to showcase illustrators and graphic designers who use their platform. They spotlight artists and feature guest curators while including links to their work, which gives their feed the feel of an inclusive museum.

Bēhance runs a social platform for artists where they can share their projects, connect with peers and potential clients, and even live stream their creative processes. Reposts go one step further in promoting their users and likely drum up interest for creatives who haven’t signed up yet.

3. Quince

Quince reposts examples of customers wearing their clothing or using home goods out in the wild — while keeping a tight focus on their minimalist vibe. For example, here’s a cozy photo of their linen bedding that was originally shared by a customer:

These kinds of posts from users give Quince’s products a much more accessible feel — it doesn’t take an expert to re-create their looks in your own home or wardrobe.

4. Poler

Poler produces outdoor adventure and camping accessories and clothing. They share UGC on Instagram to showcase products being used by customers.

Poler’s products are designed for the outdoors, not for staged or stuffy photoshoots. User posts show off how their products work in an authentic setting — and that’s much more compelling for their audience.

5. The Design Tip

The Design Tip is a must-follow account for anyone in the design space or anyone with a desire to learn a little about design. Every day, the account features work submitted by their community of followers, such as this piece by Scott Martin (aka Burnt Toast) that asks you to fill in the blank:

By exclusively sharing user content, the Design Tip can maintain a rigorous posting schedule and keep engagement high without having to spend time and resources creating fresh, original content.

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is incredibly welcoming, and their brand personality carries over into the content they repost on Instagram. They regularly feature posts from partner companies in their story to showcase how businesses use their email tool

This doesn’t just promote Mailchimp’s partners; it gives their audience valuable tips and creative ideas on how to use their software.

7. WeWork

WeWork uses Instagram to showcase their co-working spaces and the amazing people and companies who are a part of their community. WeWork often shares photos of their spaces that are shared by community members. For example, this post featuring a member with her dog was originally shared by the member herself:

WeWork’s spaces are designed to be modern and inviting, so they look great in customer photos. Sharing UGC of their workspaces lets their audience imagine themselves at WeWork.

Reshare Instagram posts as part of your brand strategy

Repost UGC to elevate your brand on Instagram.

Reposting the right way can expand your reach, turn your followers into ambassadors, and boost trust among your customers. Be strategic when you’re picking user-generated content to share, and look for posts that match your goals for social.

If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, for instance, focus on posts from users with a large number of engaged followers. If you’re hoping to create an engaged community, create branded hashtags or contests where users can submit posts for you to share. And always make sure your reposts reinforce your brand’s look, feel, and tone.

Remember you can use Buffer for free to stay on top of all of your Instagram and social media needs! ➡️