If you're looking to optimize your Instagram content strategy, look no further than creating an all-encompassing publishing schedule — here's how.
As a social marketer, you probably have a full plate. There are a million things to prep and plan for as you liaise between the marketing and creative departments to ensure that your most important visual touch points are relaying the right on-brand message through a carefully crafted narrative.
While many people might think you have a fun, easy job, you and your team (if you have one) tries to make strategizing and staying on top of a 24/7 Internet effortless. Little do they know, every IG post is the result of a thoughtful, intentional brand message.
To manage social media accounts is to be on 24/7/365 — which makes social media publishing tools and an Instagram post planner vital to survival. When you develop an Instagram content strategy, devising a workflow to publish your content is de rigueur.
Instagram Post Planner: 7 Tips for Content Planning
Keeping a social media posting schedule is about both organization and the ability to stay agile, while simultaneously executing your visual brand strategy. You're serving much more than just photos and videos — you're thinking about the bigger picture and the ongoing brand story you're telling through those Instagram posts. Social media content is your strategy's culmination, and you want your visuals to deliver.
Because Instagram automation is not an applicable solution, you'll want to opt for a comprehensive set of social content scheduling tools that will support your social media marketing strategy while also doubling as an Instagram post planner. The Dash Hudson's Social Media Scheduler is the complete package when it comes to planning your calendar, essentially stopping short of telling you how often to post on Instagram.
Planning everything provides social marketers a bird's eye view of their Insta flow at all times. Nothing plagues the Instagram manager more than the fear of running out of content.
Your brand's social media team needs a fully stocked, all-encompassing posting calendar, complete with all scenarios of optimization to support your brand's marketing initiatives.
Here are 7 social media publishing tips that explain how to plan Instagram posts for business:
1. Pick a Social Media Publishing Tool
Before filling that content calendar with all those great branded visuals you've been producing, you need to nail some assistance. The tools you use can determine your results, so make them count — without a solid arsenal of them in your kit, your social media life can become difficult.
A scheduling tool that fulfills your business needs is vital, and Dash Hudson's robust scheduler is a superstar solution for brands. Here's why:
- Upload all of your owned media into the scheduler to keep a bank of content to pull from.
- Source images from around Instagram directly from your Dash Hudson dashboard (more on that later).
- Schedule your posts in advance and be notified to publish by push notification once it's time.
- Curate your feed by dragging and dropping your posts in the order that works best with your aesthetic and onto your most active time slots.
- Preview what your gallery will look like and adjust until you're satisfied.
- Include links in each post to turn your Instagram into a traffic or revenue driver (or both).
2. Develop an Instagram Content Plan
As you know, posting on social media is not just something to do at your whim — strategy here is highly important in all matters of posting frequency, best social media publishing times, and aesthetic consistency. To that effect, the key to nailing your visual identity is to first devise a content strategy in which to anchor your efforts.
Brands should establish content pillars, each one derivative from your bigger brand narrative. They will serve as the vehicle for your company's tone of voice and visual point of view. For example, a beauty brands content pillars should not simply be 'makeup'. Depending on brand goals and marketing objectives, these pillars could contain various product lines, product types, or even colour families. Social listening can be a great tool to refine your content pillars over time based on topics you know your audience cares about. For example, does your brand consistently appear in mentions of red lipsticks? This could be a content pillar to look at developing now, or in future strategies.
Decide what holidays and events you want to include in your activities — ask yourself which collective conversations you want your brand to be a part of and what makes sense for your business. Weave those into your calendar.
The same goes for your collection drops and influencer activations. Be sure to pencil those in as far in advance as possible to keep your head above water and to know what you'll be posting to promote your campaigns. Build your calendar around them when you create your social media posting schedule.
3. Source & Schedule Earned Content
Repurposing high-quality user-generated content is hugely beneficial and adds a ton of media value to your social marketing. The main reason? It's a reciprocal act of love that lets your followers know you notice them, and further encourages more content creation around your brand, and consequently receiving more organic exposure. But how do you create a social media posting schedule?
The best way to schedule your social media posts is with Dash Hudson's content scheduler. Our top-rated social scheduler makes re-gramming an easy, seamless process by allowing you to input UGC into your social calendar directly from your Dash Hudson Dashboard. Here's how:
- Head to your UGC tab, and click on either Organic Reach or Timeline. The thumbnails that populate the page are in order of highest influence, and therefore likely highest quality.
- Peruse the posts to see who's talking about you, leave comments directly from their global pop-ups if you haven't already, and then click the Schedule icon at the bottom to add the media to your unscheduled bank of content or schedule it directly into the calendar. Easy, peasy, seamless.
Incorporating UGC into your Instagram content strategy is a super smart way to show your fans some love while also generating more organic exposure for yourself by encouraging others to tag you in hopes of a repost.
4. Drive Traffic or Monetization (Or Both!)
Consider a link-in-bio solution to fully optimize your Instagram content. Not only will it help bring your audience more value, but it can also potentially turn your IG account into an additional revenue driver. Redirect your followers with external links to increase web traffic and convert sales by adding URLs to your media before publishing.
You can do this for all your photos and videos before posting them to better capitalize on the first few moments after publishing. Just click on any of your unpublished posts in your scheduler and follow the prompts to add a LikeShop link.
You can also add links to UGC posts you are repurposing in the same step mentioned in point #3. As you're scheduling the post you want to re-gram from its global pop-up, just add the type of link—whether it's to a product page or a content page—to the scheduled post by inputting it into the LikeShop space.
And voilà, you'll be monetizing in no time! Just remember to add a strong CTA.
5. Polish Your Grid
Our scheduler drag and drop functionality makes curation intuitive. Easily play around with the order of your posts to make sure that your grid flows nicely and echoes your aesthetic. Be mindful of the dates to ensure that your marketing initiatives, special collaborations, and notable events are scheduled on the right days, and get a full preview of your feed's appearance.
Once you're happy with how everything looks, drag the thumbnails in order directly onto the calendar. Double optimization whammy: the time slots darkened in blue are your best times to post based on your engagement history. This is an incredibly useful functionality to make sure you're getting the most bang for your post.
Planning is winning, especially as it relates to what your Instagram profile will look like. Aka your homepage.
6. Predict Your Performance
For anyone with a Dash Hudson High Growth package and above, the Scheduler is now equipped with Visions' performance predictor tool. This is a game-changer. It will give every prospective image a real-time performance forecast indicated by a little icon in the top righthand corner of the post's thumbnail, allowing you to ax a visual and replace it with one that is likelier to succeed.
Like I said, a game-changer.
7: Don't Forget Instagram Stories!
You can also store your pre-produced Instagram Stories in the Dash Hudson Scheduler and add them to your calendar to receive a posting prompt. Once you go into the Dash Hudson for Brands app to post, you'll be asked if your visual is for your feed or your Stories. Tap Stories and proceed as usual.
Approaching Instagram scheduling from an all-encompassing standpoint is the best way to ensure you tick off all the required boxes, bringing you one step closer to total social domination. In all seriousness, that means reaching all of your goals and then some.
You only help yourself, your team, and your brand by doing the work ahead of time, as a thoughtfully organized schedule makes strategy execution a seamless task. Keeping things tight will help you establish a process and streamline your workflow, enabling you to visualize and focus on the bigger picture.
Social Media Publishing Checklist
Before sharing content to any social channel, there are a few helpful steps to consider to avoid sharing any copy or visuals that don't meet your brands standards and ensure your content makes an impact. Here's a quick and easy-to-remember social media checklist to keep in mind before scheduling content:
- Which goal or objective does this support?: While this would be determined in Step 2 detailed above, it's helpful to consider what goal this particular content will help you achieve. This is helpful to write the most impactful call-to-action you can.
- Has it been proofread?: Has everyone on the social or marketing team approved the copy and final designs? Is there another stakeholder (perhaps someone on a product or sales team) who could offer additional insight? Be sure all relevant parties have reviewed your content, especially for far-reaching campaigns.
- Are UTMs implemented?: If you want to send traffic to your website or boost social commerce, it's important to know which channels drive the most traffic for future planning and reporting. UTMs ensure the links you want traffic to have the right attributions so you have accurate data. It's also helpful to check the links themselves here — do you link to the right page? Is your site encrypted with TSL, and do your links contain the proper 'https' prefix?
- Is copy, grammar, and a compelling CTA present?: Of course, it's important to do one final proofread. Be sure visual images are sized correctly, grammar is air-tight, and of course, your call-to-action is relevant, persuasive, and stands out.
FAQs
What is social media publishing?
Social media publishing is the act of sharing content to social media channels. This can be done directly in the native app, or from a social media publishing tool like Scheduler.
What are the three main types of social media publishing?
While there are far more than three types of social media content or ways to publish social content, there are generally three stages of publishing. These include:
- Planning stage: When your social content plans which content will best support their brand's marketing objectives.
- Creation: The stage where your content and design teams digs into the creative and products copy and visual assets.
- Distribution: This is when you finally publish your content — social and marketing teams should consider the workflow that works best for them to review, upload, and actually publish content to your brand's social channels.
What are the benefits of social media publishing?
Social media publishing has a myriad of benefits for your social team. Social publishing solutions let your team plan ahead and have peace-of-mind that campaign-supporting content goes out on time, so your team is free to plan ahead, join organic conversations and more, without being focused on posting their pre-planned content each day. Perhaps the best time to post on TikTok for your audience is at 1am — social media publishing solutions let you reach your audience when you're most engaged, without your team taking on unreasonable hours.
