A majority of social media users in the world are casual users and can manage most of their Instagram needs through the app directly. The high-involvement users who carefully curate their content use a social media management tool to help them optimize their usage. To maintain consistency and regularity while posting, scheduling tools play a key role in helping influencers and brands and you should know which are the most successful Instagram business tools you could use.
Business owners often find themselves at a loss while picking a scheduling tool as the Instagram API makes it a little complex. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the parent company Facebook has tightened its grip on Instagram’s API and its compatibility with third-party apps. In this blog, we take you through the advantages of scheduling posts using tools, and recommend popular choices you can consider using.
Instagram is crucial to most brands on the planet today. Get a holistic idea of how marketing works on the platform. Do read our blog: Your Guide To Building Your Brand On Instagram.
Why Schedule Posts?
Time is money, especially when it comes to brands and businesses. Rather than going through Instagram every day for 30 minutes coming up with a caption and hashtag, it is more prudent to just spend a couple of hours and do it for the entire week. The biggest advantage of scheduling posts is the time saved. Be it Instagram live, contests, giveaways, or collaborations, scheduling tools allow you to focus on other parts of your Instagram strategy. Scheduling multiple posts also helps create engaging captions in one go rather than going through the process daily. Better captions lead to better engagement and that could make the difference. By optimizing creativity, it helps you curate a beautiful and eye-catching feed. Scheduling tools help you keep your eye on the bigger picture of your social media strategy and add the touch of professionalism you need for Instagram success.
Now that we know why we need to schedule posts, learn how to do it with our blog: Marketers’ Pocket Book To Find The Best Time To Post On Instagram.
Planning and curating content
Be it brands or influencers, creating content usually involves ‘shoot days’. This allows bulk content creation on a single day to be posted over several days. This process is a lot more free-flowing when planned well. Similarly, knowing the genre or type of content being posted on certain days helps in planning and creating the content. It helps to build a bank of content and derive a posting strategy around it. Also with the Instagram algorithm in 2021, one needs to post content when most people have a chance of seeing it. To find this specific time that works and helps grab the most eyeballs, planning is crucial. Most brands and influencers have several content buckets for different days of the week and fill in the gaps with content available.
In keeping with the content formats of the platform, brands creating content on IGTV have noticed a significant increase in engagement. Find out more here: Instagram IGTV For Brand Success.
Studying posting trends
To be successful on Instagram, one needs to know what to post and when to post it. Instagram is merely a distribution platform to reach audiences and it is important to optimize how the content is delivered to this audience. By going into Instagram insights and reviewing the audience metrics, it is possible to come close to the most optimal posting time. Once you’ve figured out what to post and when to post it with some degree of certainty, the next step is to plan out the Instagram feed. The overall look and feel of a feed are just as crucial as the content in the feed itself as it is what audiences see first on a profile and decide within a couple of seconds if they want to engage or not.
Optimizing content through scheduling – captions and hashtags
Aside from creating content, scheduling content, and planning a feed, one of the most intense processes is coming up with engaging captions and relevant hashtags. This is another reason to go ahead and schedule content. These scheduling tools help you optimize your creativity and take away the stress of coming up with fresh content especially on days when your creative juices aren’t flowing. By going through the competition and understanding the target followers, users can create captions and hashtags that are relevant, engaging, and entertaining.
When it comes to hashtags, few do it better than influencers! Learn from them and their strategies on our blog: Hashtag You Way To Success As An Insta Influencer.
Instagram Scheduling Tools To Consider
Buffer
Buffer allows you to connect multiple social media accounts to a single user and post conveniently from within the app. While posting on Instagram is slightly complicated due to the platform’s restrictions, Buffer makes it easier than other scheduling tools. It works best when linked to an Instagram business profile. However, with a personal profile, Buffer still reminds you when to post, although manually. Buffer works only with posting schedules and queues content across platforms at the desired time. Buffer allows you to create your posts within it, add content through the easy-to-use browser add-on and upload directly to multiple feeds.
Hootsuite
The most popular scheduling tool for users and businesses alike, the Hootsuite platform is built up of blocks called Streams. Different social media feeds are built up of multiple Streams and users can queue up to 10 of them at a time for each social media network. Another advantage is the unified inbox for messages from all social media platforms in one place and responds directly. It also includes a Publisher tab to include original posts in different parts of the calendar. With Hootsuite’s unified platform, users rarely log in to their actual social media networks and control all their posts directly from here.
Figure 1: Hootsuite New Post. Source: Hootsuite
Sprout Social
Designed for organizations, brands, and users willing to pay, Sprout Social is a heavy-duty tool that is extremely professional. The calendar here allows the addition of graphics and links directly from the tool onto the calendar for multiple social media networks. It goes one step further than Hootsuite with a unified smart inbox that allows you to categorize messages in the inbox. The reason it is better suited for organizations is the approval stream that enables seamless transitions between multiple team members. For analysis and learnings, Sprout Social provides insights and trends to optimize content scheduling and improve your overall marketing strategies.
Later
Later is one of the few tools that have been designed for Instagram, although it services other networks as well. The main difference is that with Later, the user first uploads an image and then adds captions, hashtags, and links. The biggest advantage is the presence of a Stories option that allows the user to post Instagram Stories and schedule them. The Media Library is a one-stop storage option to store used and unused images with additional details. As with other tools, the complicated Instagram API allows it to work best only with business profiles, but on the plus side, the paid option allows users to interact with comments directly from the tool.
AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is the most user-friendly of all the scheduling platforms and is very simple to set up, even with the tricky Instagram API. Its biggest USP is a singular inbox that not only stores messages but also comments, conversations, and mentions from different networks in one location. A stable calendar allows users to publish the content of their choice in the desired time slot. It also displays the content backlog, and scheduled posts. AgoraPulse works best when it comes to bulk scheduling. By importing a bunch of content onto the platform and scheduling for multiple days, it allows users to take care of multiple weeks or months in one shot.
Figure 2: AgoraPulse Platform. Source: AgoraPulse
For businesses and influencers, time is an essential commodity. Scheduling content in an organized manner allows the saving of time along with more creative flexibility. This is a great way to keep the content optimized while still keeping an eye on the overall goals and engagement objectives. Not to mention the increase in leads and sales! There are several tools on the market to help you fulfill your scheduling needs, each with its own set of benefits. Based on the information shared here in this blog, you have enough resources to pick the one that best delivers your content to your audience. That takes care of how to reach, where to reach, and when to reach your audience.
The world of social media content is constantly changing. Go beyond Instagram and craft a winning online strategy for your brand that is relevant and fool-proof. Check out: How To Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy For 2021.
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