Wonder how to be consistent in your Instagram posting? This post on how to schedule Instagram posts is for you.
Instagram has become a hub for social media activity Companies can reach their intended audience through many types of visual content, like images with interesting captions, reels and videos. Since last year, Instagram incorporated e-commerce features, slowly transforming the social media app into an all-in-one platform to reach, engage and convert your audience into customers.
Yet, achieving Instagram success depends on the right strategy, one that is consistent and targets the audience at the time they are most likely to be active on the platform. At UniClix, we researched the best time to post on Instagram, incorporating this to our algorithm. The UniClix Social Media Manager helps you schedule Instagram posts to keep your audience engaged and your posts consistent.
In this How to Schedule Instagram Posts: The Complete Guide, we’ll tackle why you should schedule your Instagram posts and how to do it right.
Table of Contents
- Why It Is Important to Schedule Your Instagram Posts?
- How to Schedule Instagram Posts
- Automation vs Scheduling Instagram Posts
- Tips for publishing great Instagram Content
- Tips for a great Instagram strategy :
- The takeaway
Why Is It Important to Schedule Your Instagram Posts?
#1: Scheduling Instagram Posts Saves Time
How much time do you spend every day looking for something interesting to post? Searching for photos, creating a clever caption for your Instagram? Would it be better to spend just a couple of hours once a week or month and plan and schedule your Instagram posts for the entire week/month?
With Uniclix, you can quickly create and schedule your Instagram posts right from the dashboard calendar. This gives you the visibility you need to plan your Instagram strategy.
#2: Scheduling Your Posts Helps to Align Captions and Hashtags to Your Strategy
Instagram captions can be the difference between someone opening your post or scrolling down. When you have to come up with engaging captions every day, it is easy to lose perspective. You risk getting sidetracked from your marketing goals.
Instead, write your captions for the entire week while scheduling your posts. This will help you keep the goal in mind and your captions and hashtags will be more effective. Uniclix Content Finder curates hashtag and keyword suggestions you can choose for your posts.
Related Content: Instagram Captions: Make Your Posts Stand Out
#3: Scheduling Your Posts Makes your Instagram Strategy Consistent
Consider your audience has tons of posts, plus videos, IGTV, to choose from. How can you ensure they remember your brand and get them hooked? Consistently posting the IG content your audience expects is key to get higher engagement rates.
That is not going to happen if you post three posts one day and none for the rest of the week. To achieve a constant presence on Instagram, you need to post between 1-2 posts every single day, at the time your audience is active. Scheduling your posts, helps you provide engaging content every day for your audience. This creates expectation and brand recognition.
How to Schedule Instagram Posts
- Create or curate the content
You can create your own content or leverage tools that automate content curation. If you create your own content, set a day for shooting and editing all visuals for your Instagram posts. Thus you can have them handy when creating your posts. You can create your posts by using Facebook Creator Studio, but keep in mind that its features are limited. For example, you only can create posts for your feed, not stories. Instead, you can use Uniclix to schedule your content until it is time to post.
- Go to your Dashboard and select Create Post
- Add your image, caption, and hashtags. You can see how the post will look on your Instagram feed.
You can save time by using a tool to automate content curation like Uniclix Content Finder. Instead of spending hours searching on the web, use auto-suggest to create and schedule posts in a jiffy.
- Plan the feed
Once you have your content ready, it is time to schedule it. To do that, you need to find out when is the best time to post on Instagram. To understand when you should post for your audience, first, you need to know who your followers are.
Do your company target end users (B2C) or other companies (B2B)? It is more likely your audience will be on Instagram on weekends or weekdays?
The Instagram algorithm prioritizes new content on user’s feeds. So, your best opportunity to engage your audience is to know when most of them are scrolling through their feeds. Since audiences are different for each business, it is key to find out when is your personalized best time to post on Instagram.
You can do it from your Instagram business account. Go to your Instagram Insights and review your audience metrics to find the times your posts are most successful. Then you can remind yourself to post at those times. Or you can do it even easier and let Uniclix Scheduler pick up the best times to post according to your time zone and target audience.
Related content: How to Find the Best Time to Post on Instagram
- Schedule your posts
Now that you know when it is best to post, you can start scheduling your posts. You can use the calendar in the Uniclix app to schedule an entire month of posts.
Alternatively, you can set the best time to posts on the Scheduler from the Dashboard. Select Manage posts / Schedule settings and then select when you want your posts to appear every time.
You can also schedule from the create post screen. When you choose to add to queue, Uniclix will select the best time according to your audience and time zone.
Automation vs Scheduling Instagram Posts
Using a tool to schedule your posts saves time and effort. It implies creating and planning your content in advance, using a tool to post them automatically at the best time for your audience. Automation, on the other side, means software tools that like posts, follow accounts, and comment on your behalf. This type of automation promises to increase your Instagram presence, but in fact, can even harm your account because of spammy practices.
With that cleared, there are Instagram automation tools and software that make marketer’s life easier without risking your account standing. These tools let you schedule Instagram posts ahead of time, automate analytics reports, monitor social listening and hashtags to understand how your brand is considered among your audience.
Tips for publishing great Instagram Content
- Attract your follower’s attention
Edit the images, use captions, and hashtags. You can learn more about creating the perfect Instagr\am post in our guide: How to Post on Instagram
Use Instagram Filters
Add clever captions and hashtags
Remember to use the hashtags your users can look for. Include seasonal events, like in the above image by Apartment Therapy, and engage your customers with interesting captions that make them look below the third row of content.
- Don’t plan too far in advance
We already talked about how planning your posts in advance saves time and keeps you in line with your marketing strategy. However, planning too far in advance can have the opposite effect, making your posts looking outdated. Keep some slots open. Then, when something trendy or interesting is happening that is worthy to post, you have the slot free.
Tips for a great Instagram strategy :
- Limit your posts to 1-2 per day, posting more can be spammy.
- Use Uniclix Social Media Manager to Create/Upload and organize your posts
- Check the analytics in UniClix to know how your posts are performing.
- Use the data to review and refine your strategy
- Use Unilix.io to drive more traffic. You can connect all links into one unified page. It is fully integrated with the Uniclix Social Manager so you can have all your social media efforts under the same umbrella.
The takeaway
Scheduling your Instagram posts is much easier when using tools like Uniclix Scheduler. You can plan, create and schedule your posts, even cross platform, posting also on Facebook or Twitter. Level up your Instagram strategy with Uniclix. Start your Free 14 day trial today.
