Scheduling posts on Instagram is one of the best ways to save time, increase followers and stay in touch with them. Here’s how to do it.
Scheduling posts on Instagram for automatic publishing at a specific time is a great way to save time, increase productivity and grow your followers and likes.
This option, however, is not available to everyone in the app, and to plan the publication of photos on Instagram you need to use external tools, suitable for both company and standard profiles. Below we find out how to schedule the posts on Instagram so as to publish them in a day and at a set time.
When to schedule posts on Instagram
The best time to post on Instagram is not always the right time for you. Planning in advance will save you time and get better results as you can create your post calmly, thinking well about the caption, the filters and the hashtags to use.
Programming the posts in advance is the technique for those who always go running but want to take care of their Instagram profile: since the app no longer shows the posts in reverse chronological order but for relevance, it seems that publish more frequently is the only way to make sure that the followers see our posts and then can create interaction (pushing others to follow us or put the like).
Convert your account into a company profile
At the beginning of 2018 Instagram introduced the possibility to program individual photos to be published directly, but this feature is only available for company profiles. If you want to use it, you will need to convert your account into a business account.
To do this, go to your profile and tap Switch to company profile. Select the Facebook page of your business (you must be a Facebook page administrator, otherwise you will not be able to do so) and make sure your Instagram account is public, as well as that your contact information is accurate.
App to schedule posts on Instagram
As for the tools that allow you to program posts on Instagram, the first we want to talk about is Later, a content planning tool that offers direct publishing and programming on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. After setting up the app, you can start dragging photos from your computer and schedule them for publishing to your company account.
Another tool is Zoho Social, always available for corporate Instagram profiles. To allow it to automatically publish posts on Instagram at a set time and date, click Set up direct delivery.
Then there is Buffer, which allows you to manage up to 10 posts for up to 3 social accounts for free. premium plans start at $15 a month. After setting up direct publication to schedule photos and videos on Instagram, Buffer will publish automatically without annoying push notifications sent to your mobile device.
Finally there is Hootsuite, which works in a similar way to the other post planning tools but that allows programming even if you do not have a company profile.
Add your Instagram profile to the social media management platform: from the Hootsuite dashboard, touch your profile icon and select Add social network, tap Connect with Instagram and enter your credentials.
Create the post: tap New post and select your Instagram profile from the drop-down menu. Upload your video or photos, tap Edit with Creative Cloud to access the retouch tools, or edit details later on Instagram. In this phase it may be useful to insert the best hashtags to increase followers and likes.
Plan your post by customizing date and time of publication based on your audience. You will receive a push notification from the Hootsuite app when it is time to post. If you are a company profile, the scheduler will automatically tell you what time of day it is best to publish on Instagram, a very useful function in the case of promotional posts.