Instagram Marketing: Curating and Scheduling Your Posts

Like in life, your brand’s Instagram feed is the first thing people look at when visiting your profile, and it is therefore important to make a good impression. Six years since it was founded, Instagram has grown into a key marketing tool that requires more than just beautifully edited photos. Today brands’ Instagram feeds have to be constantly updated with quality, authentic content that represents the brand visually. Now that you’ve created and optimised your Instagram account, it is time to curate and schedule your brand’s posts so you too can make a good first impression.

As Instagram gets more users, brands have a unique opportunity to increase engagement with its followers. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Instagram posts generate a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21% – that is 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter.

For a brand to be successful on Instagram, it needs to do more than just post attractive photos and hope that its following and engagement rate will grow. A successful brand on Instagram is the product of thoughtful strategy and a well-defined brand identity. By putting these two key elements into practice and combining it with beautiful images that tell the story of your brand, you’ll reap the benefits.

An excellent example of this is the beauty brand, Jurlique Australia, who uses its images to promote its products, what ingredients are used in them, and inform its customers of special offers and sales.

Remember that first thing that your customers and potential followers see visiting your brand’s Instagram profile is your feed. It is important that you catch that customer’s attention and inspire them to click through to your website, follow your account or view more images. Jurlique Australia does this by posting beautiful images with enticing captions.

Having a well curated Instagram feed is becoming as important as having high quality photos on Instagram. To help you start planning and scheduling your posts for Instagram, here are a few things that you should know.

How to plan your content

Start with a clear goal

Before you start planning your Instagram content, it is important to have a strategy with clear goals.

Depending on your industry, brand and key performance indicators, your Instagram strategy might target several objectives including the following:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Showcase your team.
• Increase customer engagement.
• Share company news.
• Grow your community.
• Connect with influencers.
• Demonstrate company culture.
• Showcase products and services.

As you continue to develop your strategy, these objectives will guide you in determining the best approach to each part of the process. Activewear brand Lorna Jane uses its Instagram account to meet the following goals:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Demonstrate company culture.
• Showcase products and services.
• Inspire its followers to be more active.

Curating all your Instagram content

Once you have clear goals, you can move on to curating content that meet your goals. Instead curating images on a daily basis, it may be more efficient to do so weekly or bi-weekly. Some brands have shoot days were they photograph all content for Instagram at one time. This also helps with the consistency of your brand identity on Instagram and will help with your scheduling on Instagram.

Once you have your final photos ready to go for Instagram, you can simply upload them to your media library for later use. Apps like Dropbox or Google Drive are excellent places to store your images for Instagram where you know they are all together.

Popular social media speaker and author, Peg Fitzpatrick, provides this advice about taking photos for Instagram, ‘Think like an editor! Create a stockpile of photos that you can use to design posts for over time. If you’re taking photos at a cafe of your friends look around for other interesting shoots like the bookshelves, collections of eclectic coffee cups, or the hipster baristas.’

Creating the perfect content schedule

Once you have all your photos together in one place, it’s time to start planning!

Jen of Jen Trend’s shares her insight on the importance of scheduling content, ‘I recently had a week where not only was I feeling worn down and sick, but I had a couple things come up that preoccupied my time. I honestly didn’t have a lot of time to commit to posting to social media that week. And although I wasn’t necessarily as chatty or available for online discussions, my social media pages kept on posting content on a regular schedule so that my audience barely noticed that I was busy elsewhere.’

Set a content calendar

To establish and maintain an active presence on Instagram, the first thing you need to do is determine the frequency with which you will post. Whether it is once a day or once every 3 hours,  you can now move onto developing a content calendar. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Instagram unfortunately does not have a scheduling function, and it does not grant third-parties API access to publishing. This  means you cannot schedule posts directly on Instagram or through your social media management tool, but you can still prepare your photographs, videos and captions in advance to be published.

Some of the best content will occur spontaneously, especially if one of your goals is to highlight company culture or events. But by preparing content and setting a general schedule in advance, it allows for flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. Lorna Jane’s Instagram is a good example of a brand that does this.

During an event called #LunchWithLorna that the brand hosted, they posted spontaneous, unscheduled photos taken at the event. These photos appeared in-between the  scheduled post, and added a real-time dimension to the brand as well as showed off more of the brand’s personality.

Now that you have set clear goals, curated your photos and scheduled it, you are now ready for the next step in your Instagram journey.

Next up in this series is perfecting posts.