How to Schedule Instagram Posts in 2021 (Ultimate Guide)

It takes more than one ingredient to make a brand successful. But, perhaps the most valuable ingredient is consistency. 

If you want to ensure your Instagram audience engages with your content, you have to be consistent. 

But let’s face it, nobody wants to spend their entire day inside the app. Whether you’re a marketer or a business owner, you might have other more important things to do. 

So, how can you be consistent without struggling to show up every day? 

Well, this is where Instagram scheduling comes into the picture. 

Learning how to schedule your Instagram posts can save you plenty of time, increase engagement and conversions. 

In this article, we’re going to cover how to schedule your Instagram posts in advance. 

And if you stick with us until the end, we’re also going to share the three best Instagram post scheduling tools that save you a ton of your valuable time.

Instagram has over one billion monthly active users and 25 million business profiles. So, it’s a competitive and tedious task to post and grab the attention of your target audience. 

But, it’s possible to rise above the crowd by organizing your posts. And that’s why you should schedule your Instagram posts. 

Not convinced yet? Here are some reasons that might change your mind: 

Let’s assume you have two options: which one would you choose? 

1. Spend 1 hour every day to brainstorm a caption, select a photo, add hashtags, and post on Instagram. 

1. Spend a whole day to schedule your Instagram posts for an entire month or few weeks in advance. 

We’re pretty sure you’ll pick the second option. 

As a business owner or social media manager, you have a lot of tasks to do. And you already understand that time is money, so you can’t spend it creating Instagram posts every day.

Scheduling your Instagram posts can save you a lot of time. With Instagram scheduling software, you can create content in batches and schedule them at once.

You can use this free time wisely on other marketing or business activities, for instance, working on building a loyal online community. 

According to Forbes, presenting a brand’s message consistently across all platforms can boost revenue by a whopping 23%.

Consistency sounds simple when in reality, it’s challenging to maintain, especially when the platform is Instagram! 

With billions of monthly active users, it’s super competitive to stay consistent and grab the attention of the Instagram audience.

That’s why scheduling your posts can be a real savior. Here are some reasons to convince you:

• The Instagram algorithm loves consistency. That means, if you post regularly, it will help you reach out to more audiences. 

• With a consistent posting schedule, you’ll see increased engagement. Your Instagram audience will look forward to your posts. They’ll be more likely to share and engage on your posts.

• Scheduling your Instagram posts regularly will help your brand stay in the mind of your audience. So, if they need a product you offer, your brand would most probably be their first choice. 

Here’s a pro tip: Just like one shoe doesn’t fit all, there’s no single perfect time to post on Instagram. You can post three, four, or five times a week. What’s important is you must stick to your schedule to increase engagement. 

Scheduling Instagram posts helps you plan out your content ahead of time. 

And planning out content ahead of time helps you streamline your workflow. With scheduling tools, you can visually plan Instagram content to give an aesthetic vibe to your feed. Your audience will love to see a visually attractive feed on their device. 

Planning your Instagram content ahead of time saves you from the worry of creating posts every day. 

Using Instagram scheduling tools, you can plan multiple posts in advance. So, we can say scheduling Instagram posts is probably the best decision you can make for your business. 

But, how to schedule posts on Instagram? Are there any tools available? If yes, which one should you choose? 

Thankfully, we have all the answers to your questions. Read on to discover all the ways you can use to schedule your Instagram posts.

If you’re an influencer or a brand with a business account, Facebook’s creator studio can be your best friend. With Creator Studio, you can schedule all your Instagram videos and photos in advance for completely free.

It’s probably the only tool that will allow you to schedule your posts for free without any limitations.

Before Creator Studio, users had to depend only on third-party tools. However, Creator Studio is designed specially keeping the influencers in mind. So, this tool comes with easy-to-use, no-frills features. 

From scheduling to managing your posts, you can do everything from its dashboard. Using Creator Studio, you can also crop images, add hashtags, tags, captions, and set location. 

And if you want to post more than one photo or video, this tool lets you reschedule them according to your preference. 

But, before you begin, you must remember to convert your Instagram account to a creator account or business profile. 

Here’s a quick step you can follow to create and automate your Instagram posts using Creator Studio:

Go to Creator Studio, and link your Instagram account by following the prompts. Now, the steps to link an Instagram account with Creator Studio will entirely depend on the relationship between your Facebook and Instagram accounts.

You can follow Facebook’s instructions to get detailed information about each step.  

Once you’ve linked your Instagram account with Creator Studio, it’s time to craft posts.

For this, click the Instagram icon from the top bar and then tap on the “create post” button.

Next, choose whether you want to schedule an Instagram feed post or an IGTV video. 

Then click on “Add Content” and choose an image to upload. 

Now, write an engaging caption, add hashtags, tag accounts (optional), and add a location. 

You can even turn off comments for the post from the Advanced Settings option. 

A quick reminder: You can’t schedule Instagram stories from Creator Studio. However, there are many tools available in the market (To know details, skip to the next section) that allow you to schedule stories as well.

And that’s it! Now you’re all set to schedule your Instagram posts. Head to the lower right corner, and click the Schedule button. 

The only setback is, Creator Studio won’t help you track your Instagram post’s performance. So, you have to use your own Instagram Insights to see what’s working for you and what’s not.

Now that you know all the ifs and buts of Creator Studio, let’s find out about other Instagram scheduling tools that comes with more robust features and analytical options.

There are hundreds of third-party applications available in the market. But, we’ve done our little research and narrowed down the list to the three best Instagram post scheduling tools. 

Each of these three tools comes with different strengths and goals. 

Let’s scroll down to decide which one suits the best for your business or marketing goals. 

For tech-savvy marketers or social media managers, Hootsuite is an all-in-one solution. It’s by far the most popular Instagram post scheduler. It makes your life easier by helping you schedule photos, videos, carousels, and even stories on Instagram. 

Besides scheduling posts, you’ll also get access to their bulk composer tools, asset libraries, and other collaborative features. 

The best thing about Hootsuite is that it gives you access to a social media calendar. With the calendar, you can streamline your post publishing journey by planning and scheduling your content in advance. 

With Hootsuite, you can also manage, track, and grow your Instagram reach. So, analyzing the effectiveness of your Instagram content strategy is much easier with this tool. 

What’s more, Hootsuite lets you build intelligent workflows, drive sales, and scale your organization. 

Hootsuite offers a free 30-day trial. With the enterprise plan, you can manage up to 50 social media accounts and scheduled unlimited posts. For the enterprise plan, you have to contact Hootsuite for a quote. 

If you’re a solopreneur or own a small business, Buffer is your ideal tool. This social media management app lets you schedule posts on Instagram and other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest.

With Buffer, you can schedule and manage your Instagram posts from a single dashboard. There’s also a feature to drive sales via Instagram with the shop grid. 

You can also plan and publish stories from your mobile or desktop device. 

Whenever you decide to schedule your post, Buffer will also send you a notification. And there’s more! Buffer also gives you a feature to manage hashtags, collaborate on posts, and post the first comment. 

You can also use their analytics feature to track the Instagram posts performance. This will help you decide what content strategy worked for your business. 

All these great features come with both free and paid plans. In their free plan, you can post up to 10 posts and manage up to 3 social media channels. Buffer-paid plans start at $5 per social channel (if billed monthly). 

Like Hootsuite and Buffer, Agorapulse is yet another popular Instagram post scheduler tool. 

With Agorapulse, you can schedule and post videos, carousels directly to your Instagram account. Also, using this tool, you visually schedule posts with a social media calendar. 

Apart from this, Agorapulse also allows you to collaborate with your team in real-time to approve, schedule, and publish content on Instagram.  

This all-in-one social media management tool, gives you access to loads of in-built features like customization, video thumbnail, image cropper, saved hashtags, and post preview. 

This will even help you personalize your content and maintain a brand image. 

Social media reporting is another feature of this tool that adds more power to your content strategy. 

With this feature, you can determine what and when the post performs better. Also, with Agorapulse, you can track Instagram reach, clicks, and total engaged users. 

In short: you can gather vital data from social accounts to level up your lead generation game.

Agorapulse’s free plan gives you access to schedule 40 posts per month. Its premium plan starts at $159 per month and is ideal for agencies and teams. At the enterprise level, you can contact Agorapulse to request a quote or demo.

Scheduling Instagram posts can offer you a lot of benefits. It’s a great way to save time, get views, and increase engagement. Still, the effectiveness of post-scheduling tools is a controversial topic. 

While most marketers or business owners swear by post-scheduling tools, some consider engagement is everything. 

And automation can’t replace the effectiveness of real-time engagement. Instagram rewards early engagement, but it can negatively impact your brand image if you forget to engage with your audience consistently. 

Also, if you don’t have a perfect content strategy, scheduling Instagram posts can make your brand appear less personal to the audience. Social channels like Instagram are flooded with tons of bot comments which makes a brand sound robotic. 

However, the good news is you can avoid all these issues by simply keeping a few things in mind:

• Just because you’re using an Instagram post scheduler, don’t forget to come online and interact with your audience. Make sure to engage on their posts too.

• The Instagram algorithm loves engagement. So, you must nurture your audience by commenting, sharing, and engaging consistently.

• Humans are prone to make mistakes. When you create and schedule a large batch of content for your Instagram page, a few mistakes are bound to happen. 

• You may skip a few typos, sound boring, or confusing in your posts. So, it’s crucial to review the scheduled posts every time before publishing. 

• You might want to lose your burden by scheduling posts for two or three months. It’s definitely a big mistake. 

When you schedule too far, there’s no room to share content around trends and recent events, which will break your brand’s identity. 

Scheduling posts on Instagram isn’t bad for your business. Use the post scheduling tools to save time and increase productivity. And remember, all you have to do is schedule wisely. 

Scheduling your Instagram posts can save your business a great deal of time. So you can look at the bigger picture and focus on other business goals.  

And, we understand that choosing the right Instagram post scheduling tool isn’t an easy task. What features are helpful? What about their analytics? A lot of confusion comes along! 

So, we’ve got your back. In this post, we’ve explained everything you need to know about scheduling posts on Instagram. Now go ahead and start scheduling posts to make your work more efficient. 

Till then, happy scheduling!