Tips for Saving A Ton of Time on Your Instagram Marketing
As a business owner on Instagram, your time is incredibly valuable.
You have to run the several disparate aspects of the business, as well as ensuring that your Instagram presence is thriving, and that good content is being posted regularly.
At Robolike, we literally built an entire solution that is aimed at saving your precious time marketing on Instagram. We know all too well how time-consuming it can get.
With that in mind, today we are going to talk about some lesser-known strategies that can drastically reduce the amount of time you’re spending on Instagram marketing.
Let us begin.
1. Use presets to take all the guesswork out of editing on Instagram
One of the strongest branding rules of thumb you can follow on Instagram is having a consistent aesthetic and color palette across your feed and stories. This means that all of your stories and photos and videos are instantly recognizable as part of your unique style.
You can choose a minimalist, muted or vibrant color scheme or whatever else takes your fancy. But you need to make sure that you pick one theme and then spend as little time as possible editing individual pieces of content.
Presets are a great way to achieve this. Popular editing apps like Adobe Lightroom and VSCO come with a ton of professional filters that you can use to cut your editing time down significantly.
2. Planning your feed well in advance
Before you start creating a ton of content, you need to sit down and see what it will look like on your feed visually for people who land on your grid.
There are solutions like Planoly, Later and Sked Social who have offer grid planners to help you visualize your Instagram feed.
A consistent look and feel across your grid is a strong branding signal and solidifies your brand as a professional entity in the minds of your viewers.
3. Scheduling and auto publishing
There are several advantages to scheduling your Instagram posts. You don’t need to wake up every day and think of a new clever idea or caption.
There are several great Instagram schedulers available such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Agorasocial and others that you can choose from. Some of these schedulers will also automatically post to your Instagram profile with you needing to intervene.
4. Writing a bunch of captions at once
Writer’s block is a very real thing that comes up when you’re looking to create clever and engaging captions for all your posts.
Some days, you just can’t seem to find the right words and phrases, and other days you are extremely prolific. On the days where your creative juices are flowing, you should sit down and write a bunch of captions for future posts.
Usually, writing about a week’s worth of captions in advance is a good practice. Make sure you are including a good call-to-action at the end of each one.
5. Using templates for Instagram Stories
You may have wondered how some of the brands you follow on Instagram are able to create memorable, aesthetically pleasing Stories every day.
The secret is templates. Any brand that is serious about their Instagram marketing has a template for their Instagram Stories.
Apps like Canva have a massive library of professionally designed Instagram templates that you can edit modify and start using on your own account.
6. Scheduling for multiple social media profiles
If you are running a marketing campaign, chances are you are targeting several different channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc.
Putting all of your social media content into a scheduler is a great way to save a lot of time and confusion about what you should be posting where. Even if you are reposting your Instagram content to all of your social media profiles, a scheduler will still help you populate all of those platforms with new content.
7. Collecting your best-performing hashtags for frequent usage
Have you noticed how much of a pain it is to constantly look for the right hashtags each time you are about to post?
What you should be doing instead is creating a few different list sets of hashtags that include your most commonly used ones, including any branded hashtags you might have.
This way, the next time you are about to post an image, all you have to do is copy and paste one of your hashtag sets under the caption and you are good to go.
8. Setting up Quick Replies for Instagram DMs
If you offer customer service over Instagram, you can quickly find your inbox filled with similar questions from a lot of different people.
The key to stand out in this customer service-centric business world is to quickly respond to all of the queries you are getting. One of the best ways to do this is to set up Quick Replies on your profile.
You can find Quick Replies under your Business Settings on Instagram. Here, you can create a shortcut that triggers a pre-written message such as “Thank you for contacting us regarding your order. We will be in touch shortly.”
The next time you get a DM, you will see that there’s a Quick Reply box next to your send button that you can use to quickly fill in one of your pre-written messages.