- Nothing will save you more time on social media
than pre-scheduling your posts.
By the end of this video,
you'll know how to schedule Instagram posts
from your smartphone
so they'll automatically go up whenever you want them to.
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My name is Jerry Potter,
and on this channel part of the theme
is to save you time on your social media,
and nothing will save you more time
than pre-scheduling your posts in a big batch.
Now, one thing I want you to know before we start,
I'm adding hand gestures so you know this is important,
you can only pre-schedule your posts
and have them automatically go up
if you have an Instagram Business Profile.
It also comes with some analytics
and some other cool tools.
So if you'd like to switch, it only takes seconds.
I've got a tutorial on how to do that
in the description of this video.
But you do have to have a Business Profile
before you can pre-schedule your posts.
Scheduling posts to automatically go up on Instagram
does require using third-party software,
so I'm gonna show you how to do it
in a couple of different pieces of software today.
And I chose these ones because they have free versions
that are good for both Android and iOS devices.
The first app I'm gonna show you is called Buffer,
and it looks like this.
So find that for your phone in your respective App Store,
either the App Store or Google Play,
and then go ahead and open that up.
And if you don't have a Buffer account,
obviously, you'll have to create a Buffer account,
this is the free version I'm showing you,
and then, of course, connect it
to your Instagram Business Profile,
all explained within the app.
So, next I wanna compose an update,
so I tap that button there in the middle,
and you can choose,
some people like to add their photo or video first,
then write the caption,
of the people the other way around.
I'm gonna ahead and add a photo.
So I've pulled this photo in from my Camera Roll,
and you'll notice this morning it says
Will be sent to you as a Reminder.
That means that it won't automatically post,
which is obviously what I'm going for here,
and it's because of the image size.
It's too tall 'cause it was a portrait image
that I took for my phone.
So I tap on that.
It'll warn me, hey, you can't post
something automatically this way,
we'll send you notification, send the picture to your phone,
and then you can, of course, post it later yourself.
I don't want that.
So I'm gonna come down here at the bottom corner
and click Edit Image,
and then within here I can crop it.
So I'm gonna tap these little boxes here,
and I know 4:5 is the tall ratio
that Instagram will accept.
You can also, of course, do Square
or any of these other ones, but 4:5 will be accepted,
so that it crops it down for me,
then I can move my image
to exactly where I want it to crop, hit Done,
and now you'll notice that warning is gone,
it will automatically post.
Next, I'm gonna go ahead and put my caption in.
Below that, you can add another photo or video.
Just know that it won't auto-post.
You'll have to manually post it
when they send you a notification
if you use that feature.
Then below that, you can add a location.
Strongly recommend this in most situations
because a lot of people browse locations.
So if nothing else, just put your city in there
and you'll probably get more eyeballs on your post.
Now if it's a location that's tied into something
that might be good for your business, that's even better,
but we'll at least do that.
Now below that, it allows you
to include the first comment in the post.
So a lot of people like to include
the hashtags in the first comment of the post
instead of in the actual caption
'cause it's a little cleaner-looking.
Now, in the free version of Buffer, you can't do that.
Watch me when I tap on that.
It says, oh, this is only available with some paid plans.
But that's there if you decide to upgrade to a paid plan.
I see my image is there.
I'm happy with it.
I'm gonna go ahead and hit Done.
And then down here at the bottom, I'm gonna hit Share,
and it's gonna say Do you wanna share it now?
Which I certainly could,
although I might as well just do that
in the Instagram app, right?
Or I can Share Next.
Buffer will actually keep a queue of your posts.
And so if you're using Buffer that way,
it'll just go into the next slot that you selected.
And with Share Next, it'll go to the top of your queue.
Add to Queue here at the bottom
would be to just add it to the bottom of your queue.
But what I'm gonna do is say Schedule Post,
go ahead and choose a date, a time,
for some reason I always like to choose like weird times
like 10:09 instead of just 10 o'clock,
and then I hit Schedule,
it takes a second,
and there it is ready to go.
If at anytime, I wanted to come in and edit it,
I can tap the three dots here, edit the post,
share it immediately, change the time, delete it,
all kinds of app options there.
So that's how you would schedule a post
to go up automatically in Buffer.
I wanna show you one alternative to Buffer,
and that's an app called Later.
Also has a great free version for Android and iPhone,
so that's what it looks like in the App Store.
Go ahead and open it.
You need to create an account.
Or in Later, you can actually connect
with your Instagram account directly,
so it doesn't have to be a separate account.
One of the things that Later offers
is it'll let you keep a library
of photos to create things.
So as you take a picture that you liked,
you could then add it to your Later library
and then turn it into a post when you are ready.
So from the screen, I'm gonna go ahead and tap the plus sign
down here at the bottom, get a photo from my Camera Roll,
so it adds it here to my Media Library,
I go ahead and tap on it.
I wanna create post for it, so I'm gonna go ahead
and tap Create Post there at the bottom.
You can see it's set to Auto Publish to Instagram.
I can type my caption down here.
You can also edit the photo
on this screen here if you need to.
You can tag the location again just like we did in Buffer.
And if you want to on this one,
you can actually tag other users.
So, for example, I could tag myself in this photo.
Just so you know, it is against Instagram's terms
to tag anybody in a photo that's not actually in the photo.
They don't want people spamming that way.
But you can tag yourself in the photo.
If you allowed the people in the photo,
it's a great way to notify them.
Now they can share it to their Instagram story
or something if they wanted to.
Then if you are adding hashtags at the bottom of your post,
it actually has a hashtag counter down here.
So if I did
#socialmedia
#entrepreneur,
and now you see, it shows two hashtags down there,
and that's because you have a limit of 30,
so that way it'll keep track,
especially if you paste a bunch in from another document.
Once everything is set the way you want it,
you can go ahead and tap Next,
oh, and there I got that warning
that it's too wide or too tall.
So, again, I'm gonna hit that Edit sign
'cause I pulled it right off of there.
It has the same editing tool here that we saw before.
I'm gonna choose 4:5,
put it exactly where I want it,
hit Done, now we try and hit Next again,
and
it says Automatically publish your post or post now?
So I'm gonna go ahead and, of course, say Pick a Time,
Wednesday.
This one makes you choose on the fives, but that's okay.
(chuckles)
Set Time,
and that's it.
It is ready to go
and it'll automatically go up at that time.
Now, remember, this automatically publishing
only works, as of this recording, for photos and videos.
If you wanna do a carousel post,
where you swipe through the different images,
that you have to upload manually
or you can use the programs we showed you
and they'll send notification to your phone
and then you can upload them at the appropriate time.
So it's sort of like halfway scheduling them ahead of time.
All right, wanna schedule your Instagram stories?
There's a great tool for that,
and I've got a link to it in the description of this video,
so check that out.
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