How To Schedule Instagram Posts in 2024

It is no secret that social media managers have a lot on their plates. Whether creating content, planning ahead, responding to comments, or sourcing new partnerships, the list of tasks is endless. Saving time is essential to accomplishing more in less time, and although it may not feel like it sometimes, it is possible. One way to cut down on time while maintaining quality and consistency is to schedule social posts in advance, and this article gives you all the tips and tricks to approach this effectively.

Why Should Your Brand Schedule Instagram Posts?

Learning how to schedule your Instagram posts is beneficial since it saves creators the trouble of posting at the right time on the right day, every day. The process of scheduling Instagram posts can be learned in a few simple steps and will make it easier to share your content and allow you to create content in batches, thus saving time and ensuring posts are published on schedule. 

However, social media managers must clearly understand their account's overall content marketing strategy before scheduling Instagram content. This will help you reach your target audience, grow your presence on Instagram, and increase engagement. A solid content strategy includes several elements, such as identifying and setting goals, planning content, building a calendar, promoting and distributing content, and measuring the results. As soon as all of this is clear and planned out, scheduling your content will be a breeze once you understand the steps outlined below.

How To Start Scheduling Posts on Instagram in 3 Steps

In order to provide your audience with the most effective content, and do this in an effective way as well, it is important to have a game plan. Before you start scheduling content to Instagram, there a few key tips to keep in mind: 

Step 1: Develop a Content Strategy

As a brand or creator, you can determine how you want to diversify the way you share your content with your audience through Instagram stories, carousels, posts, reels, etc. Ways to do so include creating polls, sharing content curation through your Instagram stories, and posting user-generated content. It's an excellent opportunity to find out what content your audience prefers. Dash Hudson's Content Segmentation tool comes in handy here, as it allows you to further understand the wants and needs of your followers. By scheduling posts, you can get organized with the content segmentation tool and plan effectively.

Step 2: Determine the Best Time To Schedule Posts

Following the development of your strategy, you can determine when your content performs best. Why? Depending on your brand’s target audience, location, and industry, the best time of day you choose to post can vary. For instance, a good time to post on a Sunday is between 7pm and 11pm, compared to Monday, when it's between 12am and 2am. Instagram's algorithm ranks content based on a set of rules and will quickly learn if your content is popular when it's posted at the right time and receives early engagements. Determining when to post for your audience and how often can be challenging. But fortunately, Dash Hudson has the tools to skip the grunt work and save you time and effort. With our social media reporting tool, you can create Dashboards to leverage your most important metrics.

Step 3: Schedule Your Posts

After you decide what content you will post and when you will post it, you can begin scheduling your content. Due to our AI technology, Dash Hudson’s platform can predict your Instagram post’s estimated engagement rate, letting you know which photos and videos are likely to perform well. Dash Hudson can also give you the information needed to know when to publish them to drive meaningful ROI.

How To Schedule an Instagram Post With Dash Hudson

A Scheduler tool not only lets you keep your pre-publish your content, but tap into valuable data and insights once your content is live. Here’s how to schedule an Instagram post with Dash Hudson in __ easy steps. 

• Go to ‘Scheduler’.
• Go to ‘Overview’ to schedule an Instagram post and align your scheduled posts across all platforms, or head to ‘Instagram’. 
• From there, select ‘Add Post’ in Overview, or ‘Add Instagram Post’ in the Instagram tab.
• Select ‘Post’.
• Choose whether you’d like to post directly from Dash Hudson, or recieve a notification to post yourself. 
• From there, choose your date and time, add your caption, add a first comment if desired, location, People Tags, Product Tags, Links, and whether you’d like this post added to Boards, Campaigns or Galleries once live. 
• Click ‘Save’ — your post is now scheduled to go live.  
• Now, you can get an at-a-glance calendar view of your Instagram content for the week or month.

How To Schedule Instagram Posts With Creator Studio 

Creator Studio is a tool from Meta that lets you create and schedule Instagram posts from your computer for your Creator or Business account. 

While Instagram having their own scheduling tool is convenient, there are a few caveats — you must have a Facebook account associated with your Instagram account, and you can’t schedule Instagram stories from the Creator Studio. This is another reason an external scheduling tool is helpful. 

To schedule an Instagram post to Creator Studio: 

• First, link your Instagram account to Creator Studio — to do this, convert your account to a Business Profile or Creator Account and link your Instagram account to a Facebook page. 
• Next, from Creator Studio, select ‘Create Post’.
• Upload your post or video, write a caption and add trending hashtags if necessary.
• Click ‘Publish’, then ‘Schedule’.

Best Practices for Scheduling Instagram Posts

Don’t Schedule Too Far in Advance

It is advised that brands and influencers should only try to schedule posts a week in advance. As we are all aware, trends on social media are constantly changing. If you set a post for three weeks away, the trend could have passed, and you could be posting something outdated. Nevertheless, campaign-related content or content unrelated to specific trends can definitely be scheduled in advance and save you a lot of time closer to the publication date.

Always Be Prepared 

Prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. You never know when a social media crisis may arise, and you may need to change your upcoming posts completely. It is beneficial to have backup ‘filler’ posts in case you don't have anything prepared.

Don’t Spam

Although scheduling posts far in advance can be exciting, it is important not to overwhelm your audience with too much content. Stay consistent with your posting and be aware of when your followers are engaging with your posts — the best time a month ago may no longer be the best.

Invest in a Scheduling Tool

Investing in Dash Hudson’s Scheduler tool can save you time, make your job much more efficient, and allow you to plan and visualize your entire content calendar easily. It takes your strategy to the next level with Dash Hudson's Predictive Vision AI technology, which is fully integrated into the scheduler. Using this information, you can determine which posts are most likely to be successful and reach your goals.

Create an Instagram Posting Schedule

An Instagram posting schedule based on the best times to post helps make the most of the content you plan to share by posting content when your audience is most engaged. It also makes it easy to identify when specific time slots might not be the most effective. For example, if you consistently share a variety of content (think product images in your feed or video tutorials on Reels) that don't garner much engagement, this could be a sign that it's time to try a different time slot. This also helps keep your posting workflow dynamic, simple and agile.

Take your Instagram Strategy to the Next Level with Dash Hudson

Not only does Dash Hudson have a Scheduler to pre-plan your posts, but it also has a Social Media Scheduling App and Instagram Insights. The Dash Hudson Social Media Scheduling App allows you to plan, schedule, and publish your content from wherever you are on the go with your mobile device. We have also raised the bar by creating Instagram Insights, which allows you to build your social strategy based on Feed, Stories, and Reels data. 

Ultimately, the platform will save overloaded social media managers time to focus on other projects, plan entertaining content, and take their social media strategy to the next level.

FAQs

Is it possible to schedule Instagram posts?

Yes, you can, and various tools help simplify this process. For example, Dash Hudson’s Scheduler feature makes it easier than ever to schedule your Instagram posts in just a few simple steps, saving you a lot of time and helping you keep transparency in the social planning process.

Can Instagram posts be scheduled in advance?

Although it isn’t recommended to schedule further than a week in advance, Instagram posts can be scheduled as far in advance as you would like, and various tools, such as Dash Hudson, help simplify the process.

Can you schedule posts on Instagram for free?

Unfortunately, you cannot schedule posts on Instagram for free and must do it through a tool. There are many of these out there, such as Dash Hudson, which allows you to schedule your posts and predict how well they will perform.

Why you should schedule your Instagram posts?

You should schedule your Instagram posts because it’s proactive — while there’s always room for agility and spur-of-the-moment content, many brands plan their social media campaign strategies and related posts in advance. Scheduling your Instagram posts ahead of time gives the chance for any relevant team members to review the posts, ample time for revisions and most importantly, lets you share content during the best time to post on Instagram for your brand. These times help you form your Instagram posting schedule and might not always be during regular working hours, so scheduling ahead of time lets you capitalized on the times your audience is most active and engaged.