Hey man! Wanna know what my actual full-time job is? It’s staring at the Instagram feed and asking: okay, what should I post next? From coming up with content ideas for your feed and stories to designing visuals, writing captions, finding the optimal times to post, hashtags, and more…Nah, of course not, haha! But you see… managing your Instagram account is rewarding but sometimes crazy-making. Wouldn’t it be nice to simplify this whole process? For your brand account or your personal account, for all types of accounts: here’s how to start planning, creating, scheduling and publishing Instagram posts the right way. Ready? Let’s dive in!
Why You Need a Seamless Instagram Workflow
Having an efficient Instagram workflow in these swirling times is less of a hobby and more of a must-have If you’re having to manually check Likers and leave likes and comments, manually pinging boring Instagram ‘influencers’ about a great piece, you could be needlessly doing a lot of work and losing more inspiration than you might think. It’s also why you’re not making those 15 appointments a week to get ahead of the pack.
Consistency is Key to Instagram Success
Consistency is a major key to success on Instagram. By posting consistently, you keep your followers engaged and entice them to return to your page for more content. However, in order to consistently post, you’ll need to prepare for it. You can do this by creating a content calendar and publishing on a schedule.
Enhancing Productivity with the Right Tools
Instagram, like any other aspect of your business, may be a disorganized jumble of half-finished thoughts, hastily written down, and prone to errors and delays. Here, enter the right tool that takes your Instagram game from higgledy-piggledy to System:1. To plan, create, schedule and publish across all your social channels concurrently, you can explore Later, Planoly, Buffer, Hootsuite and other such all-in-one solutions. These tools let you see your calendar, drag and drop posts, fill in all the blanks, save it in the cloud, and publish to Instagram all from one dashboard.
Planning Your Instagram Content Strategy
The first step in any good Instagram workflow is to plan. A good plan will help you define your content goals, pinpoint your target audience, and outline the types of posts that you think will be most popular.
Developing a Content Calendar
Cue the content calendar: a blueprint for Instagram success. First, identify any relevant dates, holidays or events associated with your brand and create seasonal content themes around them: A florist enlists her followers on Valentine’s Day to share pictures of their flower bouquets; an art gallery celebrates a 10-year exhibition with exclusive artist interviews; a desserts blogger packages her favourite recipes as Christmas gifts. Map out a month of posts, anchoring your content calendar to key dates. That way, you can balance different content types, ranging from promotional product shots to educational tips to user-generated content, within a unified visual rhythm.
Setting Content Goals and Metrics
Give yourself some objectives before you start posting: whether that is to increase engagement, drive website traffic or grow your follower base. Having set objectives will also guide your content planning and allow you to structure your posts to achieve set goals. You can measure your performance using Instagram’s native analytics.
Creating Compelling Content That captures
Once you have your plan in place, you’re ready to create content that stands out and gets loyalty. Great photos, witty captions and smart hashtagging are the ingredients of a great Instagram post.
Crafting Stunning Visuals
Instagram is about pictures, so make sure that your images look good within the Instagram feed. Use Canva, Adobe Spark or VSCO to create high-quality graphics and photos; these platforms provide literally thousands of templates, design elements and filters to help you make visuals look great. Even if you’re not a graphic designer, you can easily create stunning graphics and photos.
Writing Engaging Captions and Calls-to-Action
Captions are where you get to make your audience feel something! If there’s a story to tell, a tip to share, a question to pose, and a CTA (call-to-action) to make, do it in your caption. Tell the story, give the tip, ask the question and ask for the like, comment or click-through to your bio link so your follower knows exactly what you want them to do!
Scheduling Your Posts for Maximum Impact
When all your content has been created, the next task is to set this and give your posts to the timing. When your audience is most active, it will ensure maximum visibility and engagement with your posts.
Using Analytics to Find Optimal Posting Times
Of course, scheduling your posts won’t mean just putting it on at random. That’s when understanding your audience and timing your content publication come into play: Use Instagram Insights, or any other third-party Instagram analytics tools, to determine your posting windows. Analyze peak engagement hours, day-of-the-week, or any other metrics and tweak your publishing strategy accordingly.
Automating Your Publishing with Scheduling Tools
Where automation creates the greatest opportunity is helping you scale your Instagram engagements with a workflow. The great Instagram workflow takeaway money-can-buy is a scheduling platform such as Later or Planoly that allows you to load up your posts for the week or month ahead at specific times of day, which will then automatically be published on your feed at your desired times. This saves you the time of manual posting and ensures your stuff goes live (even when it’s near midnight and you’re already tucked up in bed).
Publishing Like a Pro: Tips for Flawless Execution
However, the posting step is arguably the most important stage in that it is the time to be vigilant about all the things you’ve done up to now going into overdrive. The most successful post isn’t just one you publish; it’s one you polish, optimise, prime for, post at the right time, enhance and promote.
Double-Check Your Captions, Tags, and Links
Proofread your post before you publish it, check that any URLs in your bio actually work (and are pointing to the right page), and double-check that you’re using the right tags and appropriate hashtags. Even the smallest of precautions can make all the difference.
Engage Immediately After Posting
With your post now live, it’s engagement time. Sit for the first 10-15 minutes and reply to comments, like replies, or simply interact with your audience. Not only does this immediate engagement help with the post’s performance with the algorithm, but also with your followers.
Measuring Success and Refining Your Strategy
You can’t have an Instagram strategy without analytics, because you need to know what’s working and not working so you can make informed decisions for future posts.
Analyzing Post Performance Metrics
Check Instagram Insights to review metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement rate, and follower growth. Observe the patterns of your most popular posts and the types of content your audience responds best to. Then use that data to refine your content calendar and direction going forward.
A/B Testing for Continuous Improvement
A/B testing isn’t just for websites. You should do it for your Instagram as well. Try out different captions, images, posting times and hashtag sets, and see what sticks. The beauty of rigorous testing is that you can constantly micro-adjust. You can keep your strategy fine-tuned, fresh and updated as you go.
Conclusion
Imagine our surprise when we started getting messages from followers telling us to ‘get a life’ or claims that we were ‘nothing but bots’. To be completely fair, those same users did praise the consistency of our posts, and some went on to become loyal friends. Another argument against carefully mapping out an Instagram workflow is compounded by the belief that automation is cheating. From scheduling posts to personalising your responses, here are seven steps to regain organization and boost your Instagram ROI. It’s time to optimise your process and make followers fall in love with your Instagram account like never before! Start here.
FAQs
How do I find the best time to post on Instagram? Do this by using Instagram Insights or a third-party analytics tool, which allows you to monitor your audience’s peak times. Focus on timing your posts to match these peak times of the day and when your followers are most engaged.
What tools can I use to schedule Instagram posts? With tools such as Later, Planoly, Buffer and Hootsuite, you can schedule your Instagram posts before the day of publication. You can even set up a drag-and-drop scheduler, enable analytics and auto-publish your posts.
How can I improve my Instagram captions? Improve your Instagram captions by focusing on storytelling, adding value, and providing a strong call-to-action. Use emojis to break up your text, and always proofread your captions for spelling and grammatical mistakes in order to look professional.