If you’re a business owner using Instagram as part of your marketing strategy, then you know it’s a time-consuming social media network. With over 600 million users worldwide, it’s a must-use, visual-based social media platform, but how can you cut back on its time-consuming nature?
You can’t pass up the opportunity to grow your brand on this network. Using Instagram for your business and brand growth requires planning your strategy, creating and editing images and infographics, and sharing, liking, following, and commenting on your follower’s profiles.
The following will discuss five time-savers for your Instagram marketing that will boost your results with less effort and time.
Use Desktop Vs Mobile
Instagram doesn’t allow you to publish via its web application, but there are many tasks you can perform on your laptop or desktop computer to use on the social platform.
- Create and edit your images on your laptop or desktop because it’s faster and easier than on mobile
- Scheduling tools save the hassle and time of transferring your images from your laptop/desktop to mobile
Automation Tools (Bots)
While not all businesses will advise you to use Instagram automation tools for everything on your account, these tools are efficient, effective, customizable, and time-saving for almost every Instagram task (when used properly).
You can setup automation tasks such as likes and follows to match your industry, audience, and other relevant protocols. Comments and direct messages can be automated as well, but these should be used wisely. Scheduling posts is one of the most popular, time-saving ways to use automation tools. Patrice Press has written about this.
Create Multiple Posts in One Sitting
When you’re creating and editing content for your Instagram marketing, try making at least a week’s worth of posts in one sitting. You’re already doing the work, so it won’t take as much time to create multiple images for your account.
- Plan a weekly photo session for a series of posts
- Create and edit all your weekly images while you’re in your image editor
- Upload your weekly images to your scheduling tool, add captions, and set it to go in one sitting
It takes at least double your time to create, edit, and schedule your weekly posts daily. If possible, you may even consider prepping and scheduling bi-weekly or monthly posts in one sitting, depending on your industry and what’s trending.
Pencil in Engagement Time
Use calendars/reminders to engage with your followers. Schedule 30 minutes to one hour per day for replying to comments/messages, liking, following, and commenting on your followers’ posts. It’s better if you can engage two to three times per day this way at different times, but that depends on your time constraints. Turn off Instagram notifications so you can engage on your schedule without interruption.
Prepare Relevant Hashtags
If you use Evernote, you can prepare the most popular and commonly used hashtags for your industry/niche ahead of time. Copy and paste them accordingly on your posts. This saves you typing time. Remember that Instagram posts with more than nine hashtags provide higher engagement than those with fewer than eight.
You can also save time by reusing and repurposing your own content, and with the permission of the owner/user, you can do the same with follower’s content.
