Alexa will you upload my Instagram posts for me? Alexa: "Hmm, I don't know that one."
That sounds like a no. Wanna schedule Instagram posts? I'm gonna show you how
to schedule them right now so they automatically show up on your account
You can schedule them all ahead of time, alright? Let's get into it
What's up busy people - welcome to Five Minute Social Media. If you have had
"figure out my social media" on your to-do list for the longest time and just keep
kind of shoving it down because it's overwhelming, you don't know where to
start, you're in a great place because every week we put out a new video
helping you with a different piece of your digital marketing strategy. If that
sounds like something you could benefit from take a second, hit Subscribe, click
that bell so you'll be notified when a new video comes out. My name is Jerry
Potter - we can connect on social here -and one of the things we try to do on this
channel is save you time on your social media. One of the best ways to do that is
schedule a bunch of posts at once. If you are posting in real time - like
putting it up every time when it's time for it to go up - you are wasting tons of
time. One thing to know before we get started - because I don't want to waste
your time right now - is this only works if you have an Instagram business
profile. Now if you are interested in growing your account bigger than it is I
see no reason you shouldn't go ahead and switch to an Instagram business profile
It's free, it'll let you schedule your post ahead of time and you get a whole
bunch of other free tools with it as well. So if you need to switch to an
Instagram business profile first go ahead and click the link up here, or I've
got the link down in the description of this video about how to convert right
now. So unlike Facebook you're gonna have to use a third party tool to schedule
your posts on Instagram. There are tons of them out there. I'm gonna show you a
few that I like today. So first I want to show you one of my favorites and that is
Buffer. You can find it at buffer.com and the basic concept of Buffer that
sets it apart from other scheduling software is you can put in posts and
they'll automatically go out at pre scheduled times. So let's say you research
and you say, "Okay I want to post on Instagram because the most people are
online Mondays at 10:00, Wednesdays at 2:00 p.m. and Fridays at noon." You go
ahead and set up those times in your buffer, and then it would just - every time
you thought about a new post you throw it in, adds it to the buffer, and
until you run out posts will just keep going out at those times
So that's the basics of Buffer. It's also super easy to use and unlike some
scheduling software it just works. I've rarely run into issues with Buffer
So what I'm gonna do is over here on the left you can choose your social network
So I've got my Instagram here - go ahead and paste in what your caption is going
to be or you can start with the image. I've already got my image all
set so I'm gonna go ahead and pull in my image, drag it drop it right there. It'll
upload. Now if you drag in an image that is the wrong size for Instagram (there's
a range that Instagram will accept), square is the original one. It'll accept
some wider photos and some taller photos. But if it's too tall or too wide Buffer
will tell you, "Hey we can't automatically post this for you but we will send a
notification to our mobile app and you can manually upload it and adjust the
crop when it goes up." But if you want it to upload on its own and not think about
it then make sure your image is sized properly beforehand. So I've got my
caption, the image is loading up there and then I'm gonna go ahead and throw in
a few hashtags. One thing that has been neat about buffer I've noticed is you
see this space between my caption and my hashtags? Buffer usually will preserve
this when it goes up. Other software I've seen, you'll type something here to look
really pretty, nicely spaced out, and then when you paste it in Instagram all the
spacing is gone. I don't know how Buffer figured it out but they did. Another
thing Buffer has for scheduling that a lot of them don't is you can put in the
location. And you should add a location to pretty much every post if you can
It's just another way for people to see your posts. So if I say, "Hey this happened
in Seattle," or I could get more specific with a neighborhood or a restaurant,
people browsing posts from that area will also see it. Once the image is
uploaded you have a few options here. If you add it to queue that'll just means
it'll go out at the next available time that you've preset in Buffer that you
don't already have something. You can click Share Now which means it would go
up right away, or you can Schedule Post - and this is what you'll most likely be
doing in most programs - let's go to the post, pick the date, the time, hit
schedule. Once it's scheduled if you hover over the time here you can change
the time, you switch to the Buffer schedule which
means it'll go to one of those predetermined spots that you set up in
your calendar and clock, you can of course delete it, you can edit it and you
can also share now if you change your mind. Once you have a few posts listed
here Buffer also lets you drag and drop them if you wanted to change the order
So that is Buffer. All of these programs do what I'm showing you for free - I'm not
logged into a paid account for any of these programs. The free version of
Buffer will let you have up to three social media accounts. So you can see
I've got an Instagram and a Twitter and a Facebook here and you can have ten
posts scheduled before you have to upgrade to a paid account. Buffer also
has a great mobile app for smartphones. Next I want to show you Later.com
One of the things that is neat about Later is they will actually let you upload a
photo library. So if you got a bunch of photos you set aside, like, "Hey I want all
these on Instagram at some point," you can upload them right here. They are all
ready to go. Now if I want to schedule one of these
pictures I can just click on it, drag it to the calendar. Say I want this to go up
Wednesday at 5 a.m. Boom, creates the post just like that. Now we'll come back
to that in a second. If you want to upload a new photo click Upload Media up
here at the top, or you can see next to it you can pull from Google Drive and
Dropbox. Upload media - here's the photo I'm working with. Now I can drag it in
and say, Okay, Thursday 7:00 a.m. Why not? Stick in my caption, add my hashtags. If
you use the same caption or hashtags or anything a lot, right here you can see it
says Saved Captions. You can click on that and over here you can save captions
and then you can keep them for future things. So you may have a hashtag group
that you use as your basis a lot. You can go ahead and get those there without
having to copy them from another document. Later also allows you to edit
the photo. So if you had something that wasn't gonna go up automatically because
it was too tall or too wide, you can click here to edit the crop on the
picture and do all of these different choices. And then when you're ready,
you've already chosen the time from your calendar but if you want to adjust it
here you can. And then here it says Auto. That means it's gonna automatically put
it on Instagram. If you'd rather be notified when it goes up and upload it
yourself you can switch to Send Notification. Otherwise Auto Publish, hit
save, and there it is on your calendar waiting to go up at
7:00 a.m. on that day. The free version of Later will give you one account per
social media network for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. So you
couldn't have three Instagrams but you could have one Instagram, one Facebook,
one Twitter, and one Pinterest. And then you can have up to 30 total Instagram
posts per month. And finally I want to show you HootSuite. HootSuite has been
around a long time there are a lot of people that love HootSuite. I'll be
honest, I am NOT one of them. But I have not used regularly in years so
maybe it's gotten a lot better (other than just kind of showing people things
like this). But this is HootSuite and what you would do is come up here, choose the
social network. So there's my Instagram. Then you want to compose the message, and
then you want to attach the media. So if I click on that I can click here to
upload the picture, or since I have it handy I'm just gonna drag it up here and
drop it in that box. Paste in my caption and my hashtags, then I'm gonna click
this little calendar icon to schedule it. So Thursday, 6:45 a.m. sounds good to me.
And you can also add a location, allegedly, doesn't seem to be working
right now. See why HootSuite is not my favorite? (chuckling) Come on HootSuite you had a
chance to show off. So when you're done you're gonna go ahead and hit Schedule
and there it is ready to go up at 6:45 a.m., and it will post automatically. The
limitations for the free version of HootSuite: you can have up to three
social media profiles and up to 30 scheduled posts total, but you can post
live as many times as you want. So if you're posting similar content on
Facebook and Instagram you can do it here and as long as you're publishing
now. The limit just happens to be when you are pre-scheduling your posts.
Alright, do you use an Instagram scheduling program that we didn't cover?
Let us know down in the comments. That would be helpful to me and everybody
else in our Five Minute Social community. One thing to know though as of this
recording, scheduling where it'll automatically upload your post only
works for single images. So if you are doing a carrousel post where you swipe
through the posts or a video, these software programs will send you a
notification when it's time to upload it and they'll copy the caption to your
clipboard, but you'll still have to upload the video or the images for your
carousel on your own. Further questions? Drop them in the comments, join me in my
Facebook group, we're in there all the time
answering questions and helping each other out. Just search Five Minute Social
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