Instagram has quickly ascended to become one of the best social media platforms for businesses. With more than 800 million monthly active users, the platform is continuously growing—and because it wants businesses to make the most of its platform, it’s also continuously adding new features to help brands connect with their audiences.
But not all these features are worth reshaping your strategy for.
The Latest Feature
At the end of January, Instagram announced that it was rolling out a new feature that users had been requesting for months—the ability for businesses to schedule their Instagram posts in advance. Up until then, if you wanted to schedule posts in advance for Instagram, you had to use an unofficial third-party tool to get push notifications when you wanted to post your content, or rely on the Draft feature to save planned posts for the indefinite future.
This new functionality doesn’t extend to ads, but is a part of the Instagram API, meaning you can use third-party scheduling tools to take advantage of it.
So, should you take advantage of Instagram’s new post scheduling functionality in your marketing campaign? Let’s consider the advantages and disadvantages.
The Advantages of Scheduling
There are some significant advantages to take advantage of with this new change:
- Time savings. The biggest benefit of automation remains its ability to save you time. If you schedule a week’s worth of posts in advance, you’ll save much of the time that it would take to create those posts in the moment. Additionally, you won’t need to set up reminders or notifications to make your posts at a certain time, and you won’t have to go out of your way to log in and finalize your posts.
- Consistency. Scheduling is also advantageous because of the consistency it provides. One of the most important ingredients for a successful social media campaign is the consistency of its execution, since it gives your followers the chance to get to know your brand and learn what to expect from you on a regular basis. Scheduling your posts at relatively consistent times of day can help you build that consistency, even on days where you aren’t available. You can spend one day a week scheduling all your posts, but still have a daily active presence.
- Baseline metrics. Post scheduling also helps you gather baseline information about the performance of your posts. If, for example, you post something every Monday at 1 pm, you can compare metrics like likes and comments to determine what types of posts perform better than others.
The Disadvantages
However, there are also some downsides:
- Response limitations. When you schedule a post, you’re less likely to see it exactly when it publishes. Accordingly, you won’t be able to respond to immediate feedback; if you post something that’s unwittingly offensive, or something that causes a stir in the community, it could be hours before you see what’s going on and can start controlling the damage. Scheduling posts also limits the conversations you can initially have to drive initial engagement on your posts.
- Predictability. If you schedule your posts too rigidly, you’ll get consistency to the extreme, but you’ll also become a little too predictable. Overly predictable brands tend to lose audience members because they’re seen as stale, robotic, and uninteresting.
- Fewer in-the-moment posts. Today’s social media users want sincerity and in-the-moment posts. They want to feel like they’re a part of a present-focused experience, rather than looking at retrospective material. Scheduling your posts in advance automatically robs them of that possibility, since all scheduled posts will have been taken hours to days before their publication.
Tips for Success
If you want to be successful when using Instagram’s new post scheduling feature, follow these guidelines:
- Don’t depend entirely on scheduling. Don’t shift your strategy to rely exclusively on post scheduling. If you want to maximize your chances of actively engaging your users, and not just broadcasting to them, you need to make spur-of-the-moment and sincere updates as well. Your followers need to see you as a human being, or team of human beings, rather than a faceless algorithm.
- Experiment to find the best times (and vary your schedule). When scheduling, play around with different times and days. On one level, this will provide a degree of variability to your schedule (so you don’t fall into a rut). On another, you’ll get valuable information on post performances that you can use to improve your schedule in the future.
- Don’t schedule too far ahead. Try not to schedule your posts too far into the future. Trends and moods change quickly on social media, and you need to be able to adapt to them. Cementing the future course of your posts can interfere with that adaptability.
- Keep engagement a top priority. Remember, your followers don’t necessarily want more content; they want more opportunities to feel like they’re a part of your community. Throughout your scheduled and non-scheduled posts, keep your conversations and interactions with them as a top priority.
Almost any kind of marketing automation is going to be a double-edged sword; you’ll forfeit a bit of control, save a little time, improve your consistency, and make yourself vulnerable all at the same time.
What’s important isn’t whether or not you adopt it, but rather when and how you adopt it. As long as your new integrations remain grounded in the context of a sound broader strategy, almost any new technology or feature has the potential to succeed.
