Scheduling your posts can ensure you get in front of your audience at the right time. Not to mention you can set up your content calendar for a week or a month at a time in just a short amount of time. You simply set it and forget it. Unfortunately Instagram doesn’t provide a way to do this natively, so this post shows you how do so with a great app.
My recommendation is to use Iconosquare. I’ve tested out a few different Instagram marketing apps, but this is definitely my favorite. In full transparency, if you sign up through one of my links I’ll get a small kickback, which I use to keep this site up and running. You can try it out for free for 14 days and take it for a spin!
Step 1: Download Iconosquare
You can create an account on a desktop, but you’ll need to download the app on your iPhone or Android device to use the scheduling feature. Go through a few simple steps to connect your Instagram account by entering your username and password.
Step 2: Pick A Date
In the main menu, find Schedule Post under Publishing (there’s a ton of features in this app, which I’ll save for another post). You’ll then see a calendar, which defaults to the current week. Click the blue plus sign in the bottom corner to begin.
Optional: Click the “filters” button for suggested times to post. These and indicated by national holidays, as well as your own post performance. Iconosquare analyzes all previous posts to pull out the post times which earned the greatest engagement from your audience. These are marked with gold stars, and are driven by your actual account analytics.
Step 3: Create Your Post
Select your photo from your phone’s library, or if you’ve previously saved them in the app. After you select a photo, you can enter the caption. One of the best features of the app is Hashtag lists – it’s exactly what it sounds like. No more using Notes app to store the hashtags you want use. Instead, you can drop them right into the post, and it even keeps count for you (Instagram only allow 30 hashtags per post).
When you’re finished uploading the photo, caption and hashtags, just pick a time from the selector on the bottom of the screen.
That’s it! You’ll get a push notification when your post goes live. And after it does, you’ll get a ton of great analytics to make sure your Instagram marketing efforts are as effective as possible.