How to Batch Create and Schedule Your Instagram Posts Using Later
If you're using social media for business or for your brand then you should be planning your content in advance. Not only will it save you time, but it'll keep you sane!
July 15, 2020
If you're using social media for business or for your brand then you should be planning your content in advance. Not only will it save you time, but it'll keep you sane!
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I pray that all is well with you all this week. This week for me has been quite the interesting one. I found myself suffering from some migraines for a few days . I called out of work on Monday and logged out of work early on Wednesday. I found myself in pain, but also feeling somewhat defeated because I didn’t get to post my blog yesterday and I am also little behind on my content for next week (face palm) however, my health is very important. If I don’t take care of myself the last thing I’ll be worrying about is creating content right? Well nonetheless, I felt as if this is the perfect time to discuss the importance of batching and scheduling your content in advance and how to do it too.
Moment of honesty, I use to write about 90% of my captions and create my hashtags the morning that I wanted to my content to go live. Crazy right?!?! But, after doing a coaching call with Tina of Herlifesparkles and watching one of Mattie James’ IG lives, I learned that this type of practice will lead to burnout. Every once in a while is cool however, in order to fully show up in your business, build your brand, and still maintain your sanity it is imperative that we plan and schedule our content in advance.
For me that meant I needed to set aside the time for me to get everything done. Participating in the Mattie James Consistency Challenge is truly helping me to exercise my discipline muscle in that capacity. I mean, we have to write a bog every day.Blogs are more time consuming so in order for me to draft a blog, do SEO, edit, publish/schedule on my website then make sure I have an IG post or (2) with hashtags, captions, and images for both my blog and Instagram feed I have to create a process that I can stick to.
So far, I have been able to plan for an entire week. A week in advance is major for me! However, this week I fell short because I was sick on Monday and Wednesday. I didn’t foresee my illness however, I know that I could’ve planned my blogs better. I may not have been able to promote Monday and Wednesday, but the work itself would’ve already been complete. With all that being said I want to share with you why batching your Instagram work is the best way to save you time and your insanity and also the app that I use to batch create my content.
In simple terms, ‘batch work’ is a system that involves dividing your projects or workflows into specified chunks of time where you’re doing the same activity over and over, instead of jumping around from task to task. For example: Sitting down and dedicating your time to completing a blog post in one sitting takes less time than random 15-20 minute chunks throughout the week. Because the challenge requires us to write a blog post daily, I have committed to write two blogs a day.
Curating your Instagram photos,writing engaging captions, and scheduling your post for the week in advance really gives you more time to focus on other aspects of your business such as batching new photos for the following week or promoting previous work. I love to say I’m a master at multitasking, but for creating content the multitasking hat must go and I HAVE to focus on one task at a time which includes my Instagram feed. Below, you will see how I batch my Instagram content for a week or more. Feel free to follow along and try it out for yourself!
1. Collect your photos and Quote Posts
Gather all your photos that you have for the week, campaign posts for a brand, or your quote cards for inspiration,Q&A’s, or humor and load them all in to your content calendar.
2. Write The Captions
When you focus all your energy for an hour or two on writing for Instagram instead of switching between multiple tasks,you can do a deep dive into what you want to talk about. Whether it’s an inspirational story or a thought provoking statement, just remember to make it valuable for your audience.
3. Research Your Target Hashtags
If you’re making up your captions on the fly, then you’re likely copying and pasting the same hashtags over and over again.
When you schedule your posts in advance, you’re able to access your bank of saved hashtags, plus research a range of unique hashtags that are specific to what’s going on in your post. Changing them up slightly each time allows you to hit a larger scope of audience. Get those new followers!
4. Upload To Later, The Scheduling Tool I am Using!
Using my scheduling tool, Later, I like to upload all the photos alongside their designated captions to be posted automatically on their designated days. One thing I love about Later is that you can save your captions if you’re not ready to schedule them just yet,and once you are you can go back to that post and create when you're sure as to what day you want to schedule.
5. Recycle and Repeat The Process!
Let’s go! You’ve now planned and scheduled your content for the entire week. Lets do it again next week! As you get a hang of planning for the entire week, add on another week next month, before you know it you’ll be planning all your content for a month in advance. That’s my goal and I plan to continue using these five steps to get me there! How about you???
I really hope that this was informative and encouraged you to start a process that will be suitable for you and make your life run so much smoother. Being a content creator/Blogger full-time is my ultimate desire. To share my life experiences and knowledge to others through my writing and speaking is one of my major goals Therefore,I have to be disciplined and run this thing like I’m already creating content full-time and an IG post or a blog post determines whether or not I get paid. What’s that saying? …
XoXo,
