If you’re intent on growing your Instagram followers, whether it’s for business use or as an individual – perhaps you’re a budding Influencer? Staying active on this popular platform is a full-time job! You need to keep your brand name high in your users’ minds and help it to regularly appear on your followers’ feed. You also want to be discovered by all of those other Instagram accounts, by using hashtags, posting Instagram Stories, using IGTV and the LIVE feature.
As well as regular posts, you need to be creative and post relevant, useful information that catches people’s eyes. It takes time to craft the perfect post, take the best-looking image and decorate it with emojis, symbols and hashtags. Most people don’t have time to just focus on their Instagram account – but even a few, rushed Instagram posts at random times of the day could cost you dearly. If you aren’t keeping your followers engaged, they will go elsewhere and worse still, click the dreaded “Unfollow” button! Don’t forget – for best credibility, your Instagram account needs to be verified, especially if you’re a business or brand. Find out about Instagram verification in this useful link.
How to Schedule Instagram Posts
You may already know that you can schedule Instagram posts and if you didn’t know that – then you do now. There are various tools available online, and even through Instagram (if your account qualifies) that you could take advantage of to plan your Instagram posts for the future. Once you’ve spent time scheduling a few, attractive and exciting posts, you free yourself up to get on with other things that matter, such as building your brand or business – or just getting on with your regular tasks of the day.
Why You Should Schedule Your Instagram Posts
In this piece, we’re going to teach you how to schedule Instagram posts using a variety of innovative tools. Before we do so, let’s recap the benefits of learning how to schedule Instagram posts:
- You can grow your social media presence and ensure that you’re targeting the right potential followers. To further boost your profile, did you know that you can also buy Instagram followers for $1? Alternatively you might want to try buying likes for Instagram and buy Instagram views cheap – but choose a reputable Instagram marketing company in order to do so successfully.
- It frees up your time so you can focus on other things you want to do.
- When you book out an hour of your week to plan your Instagram schedule, you can use the time to get creative with your posts.
- You perfect your posts in the future, and schedule them at times you know when you get the biggest audience engagement.
- You stay active on the platform, even when you’re not “there”!
How to Schedule Instagram Posts – Tools to Use
There are various online tools designed especially to help you with how to schedule Instagram posts. They are third-party tools that you need to download, and most are available on the app store as well, which keeps it nice and handy as you only need your tablet or smartphone.
Best Tools for How to Schedule Instagram Posts
We’d recommend the following programs for scheduling your Instagram posts:
Let’s go into a little detail on each Instagram schedule tool, some are free, some you have to pay for.
Later
This Instagram scheduling tool is free to use, but if you choose an upgraded package, prices range from $12.50 to $33.33 for the most advanced package. The beauty of Later is that it’s dedicated only to Instagram and gives you a generous social media planning calendar and the option to simply drag and drop your posts into your planner. You can also post automatically, or you can publish to Instagram at a later date. There’s another additional feature attached to Later and that’s the Linkin.bio feature, using this you can link certain Instagram posts to targeted product pages. We like this Instagram scheduling tool and rate it very highly.
Tailwind
This Instagram schedule tool is not free to use. It costs from $9.99 for the basic package, right up to $49.99 for the most advanced package. This tool is designed especially for use with the Instagram and Pinterest platforms. There are lots of excellent features available, such as uploading a large number of images at once and there’s a useful hashtag finder so you can discover the best hashtags to use for your content. You can also use the Tailwind calendar to plan and preview your posting schedule on one, easy-to-interpret dashboard so you see exactly what your followers see, before you hit the post button.
Buffer
This Instagram scheduling tool has a variety of packages to choose from. The free package, the pro package ($15), the premium package ($65) and the business package ($99). If you have other social media networks that you regularly use for business or personal content then it’s a useful tool to download as you can also schedule your posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.
The tool gives you a useful dashboard and you may also include relevant hashtags. Additional benefits include an insights area to see what’s worked and what’s not worked for you and there’s an extension for your Internet browser.
Loomly
Another very well-regarded Instagram scheduling tool, Loomly is more expensive, with starting packages at $34 right up to the biggest package which costs a whopping $332 per month, however, if you’ve got the budget this is the very best scheduling tool of all because you can manage all of your content in one place. It’s not just an Instagram scheduling tool, there’s an abundance of interesting features to explore and you can use this across your social media platforms. Additionally, there’s an automated Instagram ad feature. The app provides notifications, so you know when a team member has worked on a post, which makes it great for collaborations. The app also provides inspirational ideas for your social media posting, including holiday ideas, trends, and events to name a few.
What About How to Schedule Posts on Instagram Using Instagram?
For this feature, you need access to a business page, and you need to have access to the Instagram Creator Studio and to do this, you’ll need to meet the criteria of having 10,000 followers as a minimum. Here’s how to connect up your Insta account with Instagram Creator Studio.
- Click on this page to access Creator Studio.
- Find the Instagram icon on the screen.
- Login to your account.
- Linke your Instagram account to your Facebook page and if you don’t have a Facebook page, create one on www.facebook.com.
- Once you’ve linked up your accounts, you’re ready to use the Creator Studio which has a scheduling feature.
Use Creator Studio to create your posts, view all of your activity in one place and to gain insights into how well your Instagram posts perform (across all categories, LIVE, IGTV, Stories etc.). Here’s how to schedule Instagram posts with Creator Studio:
The Creator Studio – How to Schedule Instagram Posts Using Instagram
To schedule your posts in the future login to your Creator Studio account and follow these steps:
- Locate the blue “Publish” button, it’s at the bottom of your screen on the right.
- Select the arrow facing downwards.
- A popup will appear, follow the prompts to select when you want your Instagram post to appear.
- Check that your post is perfectly prepared and then schedule.
- The Creator Studio keeps all of your scheduled content in the Content Library that you can access any time and edit posts if you wish.
More on Instagram Creator Studio in this useful link:
Final Words on How to Schedule Instagram Posts
Now you know how to schedule Instagram posts, you can streamline your working day to get on with other important things or give your marketing team the tools to work faster and smarter. Try out some of the tools above to see which one works best for you.
