Have you ever wished that you could schedule your Instagram posts ahead of time but didn’t want to spend money on expensive third-party programs? Well, now you’re in luck! Instagram has recently added the ability to schedule your posts from your desktop. No third-party programs required. And completely free!
In today’s post, we’re going to cover how to schedule your Instagram posts using Facebook’s Creator Studio.
For the longest time, scheduling our content on a desktop has always been a pain for social media managers. We’ve had to use third party accounts or make our postings from our phone, which is obviously not ideal. Recently, Facebook (which owns Instagram) has introduced the ability for us to actually schedule our posts natively using the Facebook Creator Studio.
Using Facebook Creator Studio
If you log into Facebook Creator Studio you will see your Facebook page and you will see your post and the results from those posts. But what you want to do is move over to your Instagram account.
Select the Instagram button and the display will change to show all of your Instagram content. Note your recent posts and the engagement of those posts. Now you want to create a scheduled post. In the upper left-hand corner, you will see create a post and then you will see two options.
Scheduling an IGTV episode
The first option is to post to the feed and you’ll also see an option to post to IGTV. If you are a video creator and you have a lot of video content, having the ability to schedule your TV content natively through the Facebook Creator Studio is welcome news. I would highly encourage you to give that a try.
Can you schedule Instagram Stories?
One thing that you will not see here is the ability to schedule Instagram stories. Keep an eye out for that though – we suspect that that will be a feature that will be added sometime soon. In the meantime, you can schedule your post to your Instagram feed by clicking the feed button.
This will load up your Instagram accounts. Next, go ahead and create your post. This is where you will paste in your Instagram post.
All the information you need
What is really great about this is that it will allow you to know how many characters you have left and how many accounts you can mention. It also allows you to identify how many hashtags you’ve used. We all know that we can use up to 30 hashtags at the moment for posting to our feed. The next thing you want to do is add your location. If you’re not currently adding a location to all of your Instagram posts, you really need to start. This allows you to get some additional exposure. It can be a geographical address, or maybe a business name like Newfound Marketing.
Choose to post from your desktop or your Facebook Page
It’s going to load in here and then you want to load your content. What is really great about this piece is that when you go to click on add content, it gives you two options.
The first option is to upload a file and the second is to choose an image from the Facebook page. If you have a post that’s getting a lot of engagement on your Facebook account then maybe you want to post this over to your Instagram account. This is a great way to repurpose your content and an easy option to allow you to do that.
If you click on file upload there are a number of posts that you have either scheduled or will schedule in the future.
If you want to add more content, you can. You can also change your location and then you have two options. One option is to publish immediately. But the true value here is that you can choose an option to schedule and this will allow you to schedule your content in the future. Facebook will also show you the recommended times to post, taking the guesswork out of wondering when people are most likely to see your post.
Plan your grid
You can see when your future posts are scheduled, and continue to add more posts. This is important for managing your social media calendar. You can view your calendar for the entire week or for an entire month.
For social media managers, with multiple clients and multiple accounts to manage, this is a fantastic feature for Instagram users. What about the average Instagram user? Is this a feature that you think you will use from Facebook Creator Studio, or are you going to use a third-party app? Or maybe scheduling your content isn’t important for you. Leave us a comment below and let us know!
Do you want to learn more about social media marketing, and how you can use it to help grow your business? Have questions that we haven’t answered here? Subscribe to our blog, sign up for our newsletter, or check out our YouTube channel! It’s super simple to stay on top of the latest trends in digital marketing by following us!
