How to Schedule Instagram Posts to Boost Your Instagram Marketing
Every marketer and entrepreneur universally accepts that Instagram is the one marketing tool that cannot be ignored. And that’s not surprising considering 80% of all Instagram users follow 1 or more of the 25 million brand accounts on the social media platform.
Apart from sponsored posts, discounts, and giveaways, content is what pulls in the audience. Everyone understands this truth, but not many realize how helpful and vital content scheduling is.
To that end, let us figure out why content scheduling is a critical step in Instagram marketing development.
Why schedule Instagram posts?
To save time
First, you save time for more important things than routine manual content posting. With scheduling, you can plan your posts and stories for days, weeks, and months ahead and forget about Instagram.
If you’re a social media manager or a digital marketer, you often have to maintain tons of Instagram content each day and manage multiple accounts. Manual planning is daunting and time-consuming so Instagram scheduling is a solution.
To reach a diverse audience
If you run your business internationally and your audience is spread around the globe, you may not worry about this diversity with content scheduling.
At times, it can be difficult to post on Instagram manually because you are half-world away from your target audience. If you don’t want to leave your followers without content, you can schedule posts at a time they are more likely to see them. Even when you have no access to your Instagram page.
If you and your audience are in different timezones, you can follow these three approaches to reach them:
Approach 1.
Post consistently at different hours throughout the day in your timezone. Posting up to three times a day will do. For instance, if you publish content in the morning, afternoon, and evening, you increase your chances that the majority of your audience sees your posts.
Note that this approach will work only if some of your followers live in the same timezone you do.
Approach 2.
On Instagram analytics, discover the hours when most of your audience is online and post at that time. To do so, go to Instagram Insights, then Audience. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the data regarding your followers’ active hours.
Approach 3.
Track where your most valuable audience is online. You can do that with Instagram analytics, as well. Top Locations tab will help you with this.
To demonstrate this approach in action, imagine the majority of your audience is from the USA, but your most valuable one is from Germany. And German customers buy your products more than others. Keeping this in mind, you can schedule content according to German local time.
Another tool to help you discover your most valuable followers is Google Analytics. Track who visits your website and makes orders most often and target your content by posting at their local time.
To post from PC
If you manage high loads of content, you know that posting on Instagram from a smartphone or a tablet is a challenge, even if you prepare drafts ahead of time. Long captions often turn in to hard-to-read content with no break lines which will make the content less valuable to your audience.
Also, stored media on a PC or cloud storage most likely needs to be transferred to your smartphone. By scheduling from your desktop, you can keep all the files in one place and format the captions with little stress and minimal time consumption.
To build consistency
When planning content, you can see in advance how your whole grid looks. Observing the entire campaign, you can make edits days and weeks before the publication, not seconds, and tailor the grid look as needed.
You can also make sure you don’t plan similar images consecutively. Thus, allowing you to improve your engagement.
Consistency is not only about the visual look of your Instagram. This is also about the timing of your posts, captions, hashtags, brand voice, customer service, etc.
With Instagram posts and Stories scheduling, you post content regularly, have time to think through hashtags, and most importantly, write better captions.
The latest Instagram update reveals that captions have never been more essential than they are now. Including keywords and creating captions relevant to the media, and the account as a whole, are key to helping your posts appear on the Explore Tab. And with content scheduling, you have time to think through each text without a wasted effort and be sure it will be published as you’ve formatted it.
How to schedule Instagram posts?
You already know why we should plan our Instagram content. Now, let’s focus on how to schedule Instagram content and what you should avoid.
Use Instagram scheduling tools
Tools like Combin Scheduler are best Instagram planning solutions to schedule your Instagram posts and Stories.
Combin Scheduler is a desktop app that allows you to plan and auto-publish Instagram content, edit it right within the tool, add a link in bio, tag other users, manage hashtags, add location tags, and control the whole Instagram content strategy.
With this tool, you can save time by uploading a handful of posts and Stories for scheduling and auto-publishing them later.
If you manage up to five Instagram accounts, use Combin Scheduler to plan content for all of them at the same time. It also gives you the option to tag locations to attract more genuine followers from a specific place and tag other users to draw their attention to your page.
Instagram is also one of the best channels to drive traffic to your website. To get the most out of the app, use the Link in Bio function. With every post you plan, you can add a custom trackable link in bio to lead your followers to a specific landing page.
The same works for Stories. Add a link when planning a Story for publication. Once the Story goes live, the link will appear in your bio.
Discover the best time to post on Instagram
It’s vital to know when your audience is active because you can assume when similar people are online, too. Schedule the content to be published at the right time to reach a particular audience.
Combining this data with well-researched hashtags, you can make your content land on the Explore Tab and appear in the top hashtag search results.
Don’t plan Instagram content too far ahead
By scheduling content too far in advance, you risk publishing a post that may seem inappropriate at a certain time. Imagine that you’re posting a joke while the whole world is talking about a tragedy. Keep an eye on the real-time events and tailor your strategy.
Don’t post too often
Instagram and even your followers consider this spam-like. Stick to the quality over quantity rule and only share the most valuable content with your audience.
Final thoughts
Instagram scheduling is a big deal that can streamline your overall social media marketing activity. It helps you keep followers engaged, saves your time, boosts your website traffic, and controls the entire campaign.
Manual posting on Instagram is not as helpful, so whatever your goals are, scheduling helps you bring them to life. And the Combin Scheduler app will do most of the job for you.
We hope you enjoyed this promoted piece as much as we did!
