Frederick Jace
Social media marketing can be one of the most tedious things to manage. If you’re not fully invested in the process of marketing your brand and making things work, there’s a good chance that you’re not seeing a lot of success.
It requires attention to detail, thought, and planning to find success for your business. There’s a lot you can do to automate the process, though, limiting the amount of effort you have to invest.
We’re going to talk about automating Instagram posts today, giving you some insight into how you can streamline your content marketing strategy and focus on the things you’re passionate about.
Automating content is an effective way to establish reliable success for your pages, too. Let’s get started.
The Art of Automating Instagram Posts
We’ll first take a look at how to automate your Instagram posts, then we’ll explore ways that you can fine-tune the process and start to see success.
If you’re interested in finding an automation software that work’s better than Instagram’s in-house one, there are a lot of options online. We’re going to talk about the one available through Facebook today, but note that you might be able to find a lot more variety if you look at some third-party options.
One thing to think about is the fact that most of those options require a monthly subscription. The expense tends to be pretty small, but some are a little more costly. If Instagram is an essential piece of your digital marketing strategy, though, it would be well worth it to find a platform that suits your needs.
That said, the in-house options offer all of the fundamentals. Most individuals running their own campaigns won’t need to use anything more sophisticated than what’s offered through Facebook. The in-house platform is free as well.
Link Your Instagram Account to Creator Studio
Facebook’s automation platform is called “Creator Studio.” Because Facebook owns Instagram, you can manage both your Facebook and Instagram posts through this medium.
There’s not a platform that’s specific to Instagram, though, so you have to work through Facebook to schedule your Instagram posts. The two interfaces blend very well, though, so you won’t have any trouble managing both accounts on the same platform.
In fact, you’ll see that Creator Studio has two buttons at the top of the screen next to the “Creator Studio” logo button. One of them has Facebook’s logo, and the other has Instagram’s.
Your Facebook account is immediately linked to the platform, but you might have to connect your Instagram account if you haven’t already done so in another way. This process is made as easy as possible.
Once you click the Instagram button, you’ll see another button at the top of the page that says “connect your account.” You’ll get prompted to log into your Instagram account, and everything gets situated.
Linking up is as simple as that.
Create Posts in the Platform
Once you’ve linked your account, you have the ability to create Instagram posts within the Creator Studio platform. In fact, you can carry out any function that you would otherwise use on Instagram through this interface.
You don’t have to go into the actual Instagram site to create posts or do anything that you normally would. This is one of the great benefits of Creator Studio, as it simplifies everything you need to do on Instagram or Facebook and compiles it into one space.
It can get confusing navigating the Instagram interface, especially when you’re doing things predominantly on your phone. Instead, sit down at your work desktop computer, pull up the page, and manage things from there.
Create the post like you normally would. Then, you have the ability to select the date and time that you want to schedule the post. Enter your desired information, submit it, and you’ll see that the post is sent out at the specific time that you requested.
Explore Posting Options
Note that there are additional posting methods available in Creator Studio that you might not have noticed on the Instagram interface. Make sure to take some time and look through the options available to you.
You might not have thought about some of the things that you’ll now be able to do. Those additional options might prove to be some of the most effective things in your arsenal.
For example, you can schedule Instagram live posts and work with them in this new medium. You can also manage the posting of multiple things at the same time on the platform.
Beyond that, though, everything in the interface should be intuitive to you if you’ve already used Instagram in the past. Scheduling your posts is as easy as the description above.
Things get more complicated the more nuanced that you want to make your post, but the bare bones are very simple. In some ways, scheduling a post is as easy or easier than posting immediately.
Scheduling out in advance might seem a little more complicated, but just visit the Facebook Creator Studio and give it a shot. You’ll find that it’s as intuitive as Instagram.
Testing Your Posts to Improve Results
Another thing you can do to streamline your process is to run some A/B testing on your Instagram posts.
There are some easy ways that this can be done. For one, you can just run two posts that are distinct from one another, make note of the time and day that they were posted, and see how well they do against each other.
This gives you a lot of insights into the general nature of how your audience engages with material on Instagram. The more posts you create, the more insight you have on what to do next. Start this process by looking through your existing posts, jotting down some of the relevant metrics like likes and shares, and seeing what works.
You’ve no doubt already made some mental notes of these things, but it helps to have the numbers in front of you.
You can improve this process a little bit by running almost scientific tests on your posts, though.
Mixing Up the Variables
Create two posts that are almost identical. They can’t be the exact same post, though, because posting both of them might confuse your audience or turn some people away from your page.
Just create two posts with the same general statistics like length, content style, description voice, or anything else that you normally include. While remaining distinct from one another, try to make things as similar as possible.
Once you’ve got your two posts, schedule them to get posted at different times of day on the same day of the week. One week, you can run the first post, and run the second one on the next week.
Give them both time to settle into feeds, then take a look at the numbers of both. A side-by-side look at these posts will reveal which time of day is more effective for posting. There’s no exact way to predict that time of day before you run a test like this.
People engage with posts differently at different times of the day. Plus, different demographics engage with Instagram more heavily on different days and times.
Explore all Testing Options
Once you run that first test, make note of the results, and move on to another test. You might start to mix up the style of content that you post at particular times of the day and explore the A/B results you receive.
Keep running through these things whenever you think of a new variable that could be affecting things. Don’t just assume that something will work before you set out a test for that metric.
Sometimes, things run counterintuitively on social media, so you don’t want to ruin the success of something just because it doesn’t seem like it would work.
You can get as nuanced as you’d like to with these tests. You could see which style of content leads to more visits to your site. Other forms of content might be more suited for increased followers, likes, and shares.
All of these data points should get recycled back into your digital marketing plan. The feedback loop is endless if you want it to be, and each loop should refine your marketing strategy and bring better results.
The beautiful thing is that you don’t have to worry about posting all of that content at the moment if you don’t want to. Plan all of these things in advance, and have your posting schedule automated for the next 6 months.
Then, all you have to do is look over the results for a moment and see if anything needs to change. If not, you just go back to whatever you’d rather be doing and your posts will continue on as normal.
Examining the Metrics
Instagram and Facebook offer excellent analytics for your posts. You can look at all different kinds of engagements, the percentages involved with your audience’s behavior, the demographics you’re having success with, and much more.
You can also look at these things in a graphic way that shows you how you’ve been changing over time. All of those factors help with the A/B testing you run throughout the process.
A look at the analytics can tell you a whole lot about where things are going wrong with your content. Look at the analytics in terms of the Instagram sales funnel.
Where are people getting caught up throughout the process? A perfect sales funnel would have everyone in your target audience engaging with your post, following through to your website, and making a purchase.
Alternatively, you might be looking for more followers as your primary metric. In any case, the arch of your sales funnel should be clear. The analytics can show you key points at different stages of the funnel.
Maybe people are scrolling right past your post, and you can tell that from the “average time spent” metric. You might find that people follow your link back to your homepage but don’t follow. That tells you that something about your page needs to change.
You can then work those insights into strategies to get more likes and followers.
Pairing Your Website Analytics With Instagram
If you run the sort of Instagram page that seeks to draw users back to your website, you can use your web analytics to inform your Instagram strategy and vice versa.
Say that a lot of people follow your Instagram page back to your website, but nobody is making any purchases on the site. Look into the analytics on your website and see where the traffic is coming from, then see where it’s leaving.
If you spot that Instagram traffic is hopping off almost immediately, that means there’s something wrong on the front-end of your website. Maybe the graphic design is uninviting, for example.
That dissonance could also signify that your branding is inconsistent across platforms. Your website might have a different voice than your Instagram profile. Users following your content back to the site will leave right away if the site doesn’t line up with their expectations.
These insights help you to plot your course of action to create an effective sales funnel.
Potential Results
You might wonder why in the world you’d put so much time and effort into this process. If your Instagram results have been nominal so far, you have a right to wonder why it’s even important.
That said, a well-oiled digital presence works full-steam to bring money into your pocket. There’s a massive audience out there, and a lot of those people are interested in doing business with a company like yours.
You just have to work things out a little bit to create multiple profiles that operate well. You could see that your digital presence becomes the primary breadwinner for your brand after a while.
Need More Help With Your Marketing Campaign?
Automating Instagram posts is a massive help in getting your digital marketing plan in order. The more that you can streamline things and reduce work, the more time you’ll have to fine-tune things the way you need to.
You can also use Social Scrape a instagram scraper that lets you collect data from instagram it can help you in reaching and talking to the correct people for your marketing campaign.
There’s more to learn, though, and we’re here to help. Explore our site for more smart marketing tips on ways to produce engaging content, insights into the marketing industry, and much more.
