When's the best time to post? We're building the answer.
A Rice D2K student team is building a data-driven best-time-to-post model for residential communities. We're looking for property marketing teams willing to share read access to their historical social data.
Good content, published at times nobody ever tested
Property marketing teams post consistently — but the timing usually comes down to convenience, or generic advice pulled from a blog post about social media in general. Almost none of it is evidence specific to a single community, its market, or the residents it's actually trying to reach.
A model that learns what actually varies between accounts
A Rice D2K student team is spending the semester building a model that recommends the best day and time for a given community to post — learning from the signals that differ account to account rather than one industry-wide rule of thumb.
Follower count
Audience size shifts when people are online.
Location
Market and time zone change the whole curve.
Topic & format
A tour reel and a resident event don't behave alike.
Caption
Language and length carry signal too.
Lineups can supply its own customers' data, but one company's accounts only cover so many markets and community types. Expanding the dataset beyond our customers is what makes the model accurate for everyone.
Read-only access. No exports, no spreadsheets, no work for your team.
You grant read access to your community Instagram accounts and we pull the historical data ourselves. Read access means we can see — and never post, change, or delete anything.
Data is anonymized or aggregated before it reaches the student team, and access can be revoked at any time. Governed by Rice University's standard sponsored research agreement and NDA — never resold, never used for advertising, never shared outside the research team. If your policy rules out granting access, we'll gladly take an export instead.
Post dates and times
When each post went live, historically.
Captions
Language and length are part of the model.
Engagement metrics
Likes, comments, and reach per post.
Three things back, none of them a sales pitch
More data, more accuracy
Every additional market and community type sharpens the results — for you and everyone else who contributes.
The results, at no cost
Contributors get the project's findings and the resulting posting recommendations at the end of the semester.
No obligation, ever
You don't need to be a Lineups customer or use our scheduling tool. The insights work standalone, whatever you post with.
Tell us about your portfolio and we'll send the paperwork
We'll follow up with the Rice NDA and the two-minute steps to grant read access. Nothing to export on your end.
Questions contributors ask first
No. Contributing data is free, and there is no fee at any point in the project.
Suggest the next D2K capstone
Best Time to Post is one project. If you have another multifamily problem worth a semester of Rice data science, submit it on the partnership page.