You will be able to set a posting frequency that fits your time and find out whether it works.
Choose a posting frequency you could keep up in your busiest month of the year, then post at the times your own followers are online. If you set the rhythm by your hardest month, the quiet months will look after themselves.
Most small business accounts post in bursts. A typical pattern is a post every day for a fortnight, then silence for six weeks, then a "we're back" post and another burst. The usual cause is a plan that needs more time than a normal week can hold, rather than a lack of effort.
Consistency helps in two ways. Your audience learns to expect you, and the feed gets a regular stream of posts to work with. If people see a useful video from you every Tuesday and Friday (an illustrative example), they start to look for it. An account that disappears for weeks gives people a reason to stop paying attention.
Lesson 1.1 looked at how the feed decides what to show. Instagram's own pages describe showing a post to a small group first only for Trial Reels, an opt-in feature that shows a Reel to non-followers before you choose whether to share it with your followers. Instagram's ranking explainer at about.instagram.com does not say that every new post is tested on a small group before it is shown more widely, so check Instagram's own pages for how this works now. A steady rhythm gives the platform a regular stream of posts to work with, and gives you a regular stream of results to learn from. A burst of fourteen posts followed by nothing teaches you very little, because you cannot tell which changes made a difference. If you took the Content and copywriting course, lesson 9.2, "Publish less, more consistently", made the same argument for blogs and email. Social media follows the same logic, only faster.
Start by naming your busiest month. For Mei Ling, it's the weeks before the school holidays and the festive season, when orders pile up. For Priya, it's the run-up to exams. For Farah, it's the weeks before Hari Raya.
Take the weekly hours you counted in lesson 1.3 and adjust them for that month. Say you have about four hours a week in a normal month and two in the busiest month, so you plan for two. Then work out how many posts those two hours buy. That depends on how long each post takes you, which depends heavily on batching, covered further down.
A frequency that feels small is fine. One good video a week, every week for six months, gives an account far more to build on than seven a week for three weeks.
Once you have chosen your frequency, hold it. Don't add extra posts on a good week, because that creates an expectation you then fail to meet on a bad week. Put extra ideas in the backlog, the place where post ideas wait until there is a slot for them.
Published "best time to post" articles are at best a starting guess. They are usually averages across many accounts, or the result of one study at one time, and your followers are not average. Different audiences scroll at different times. Parents of primary school children might scroll after nine at night, while office workers tend to scroll at lunch or on the evening commute.
Most platforms show when your own followers are active, usually by hour and day. The report becomes available once your account is set up as a business or creator account and has some followers. Its name and location vary by platform and app, so you may need to look around for it. Once you find it, use it, and post when your followers are active.
If you're new and don't have enough data yet, pick a sensible starting schedule based on what you know about your buyers, and write it down. Keep it steady for a month, then review the results. After that, try a different time slot for a few posts and compare. Change only the time slot and keep the type of post the same, so you know what caused any difference.
Making one video at a time means setting up the light, the phone and the space every time, and most of the effort goes into getting started. Batching is doing one stage of production for several videos at once: scripting several in one session, filming them all in one session, then editing them all in one session. A week might look like scripting three on Sunday evening, filming all three on Monday morning and editing them on Tuesday (an illustrative example).
Priya worked out what this saved her (her figures are an invented example). One video made from scratch, setup included, took her about two hours, so three separate videos would take six hours. Batching three took about half an hour of setup once, plus about an hour per video, three and a half hours in all. Your numbers will be different, so time your own and use them to work out how many posts your busy-month hours buy.
Batching also protects you against bad weeks. With finished videos ready to post, a week where you can't film doesn't stop your posting. You post what's ready and catch up on filming later.
In the activity, you will check when your followers are active or, if you are starting out, write down a starting schedule and how you will test it.
Open your audience activity data. If your account is new, pick a starting schedule and write down how you will test it.
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