That’s why you should look for opportunities to do things more efficiently and free up more time for other important tasks. On Instagram, there are plenty of ways to save time and improve your productivity. Here are 10 of the most powerful tips to save time on Instagram:
10 Powerful Tips to Save Time on Instagram:
#1: Plan Your Feed Layout
First, have a clear idea of how you want your feed to look. Planning your feed layout not only helps you maintain a consistent aesthetic but also gives you some structure when planning your content. So you’ll be able to come up with great content ideas without much thought, helping you save tons of time you would have spent brainstorming and developing a content calendar. Set the themes you want to maintain throughout your feed and clearly define the schedule for each theme. For example, let’s say you’re managing social media for a clothing brand. So you’ve chosen three main themes – promotional catalogue posts, user-generated content, and behind the scenes. In this case, you might want to schedule promotional posts three times a week, and the other two themes once a week. The Honest Company, for instance, maintains a feed consisting of user-generated content and relatable parenting quotes. They only post promotional content occasionally, but they maintain these three themes consistently.
#2: Create a Week’s Worth of Posts at a Time
From taking original photos and editing them to developing original graphics, the content development process can take up a huge chunk of your time. So instead of having to create a new post from scratch every time you have to publish it, create a week’s worth of posts at one time. Use the theme schedule you’ve set earlier to brainstorm content ideas and create them ahead of time. You can even use a visual planner such as Later to get a preview of how your feed will look. This is a great way to ensure that whatever content you’re creating fits right in to your feed.
#3: Plan Your Captions Ahead of Time
Even just captioning your posts can be time-consuming if you want your captions to captivate and engage your audience. So instead of having to come up with a caption every time you’re publishing a new post, write your captions ahead of time. It’s best if you do this while you’re preparing your posts for the week, so you have everything ready when it’s time to publish your posts.
#4: Use Scheduling to Post at the Right Time
If you’ve been doing social media management field for a while, you know how crucial it is to catch your followers when they’re most active. When you publish your posts at the right times, there’s a much better chance that you’ll engage your audience. But you already know how challenging it is to keep up with a regular posting schedule, especially when you have your hands full with other important tasks. That’s why you should start scheduling your posts to make sure that you publish them at exactly the right times without constantly having to set reminders and alarms. Most of the popular social media management tools have this function. In addition to the previously-mentioned Later tool, you can also use tools like Buffer or CoSchedule. These tools even provide you with valuable insights on when your followers are the most active, so you know exactly when to schedule your posts.
#5: Use Presets to Quickly Edit Your Images
With Instagram being a visual platform, your post aesthetics play an important role in how well you engage your audience. So you’ll ideally want to maintain a consistent look across all your posts – whether that’s happy and colourful or muted and minimal. For example, take a look at how Unbirthday uses a minimal yet vibrant look throughout their feed. However, the whole editing process can be time-consuming and challenging. It won’t be easy to always get the same look for all your images no matter how much you try. So instead of editing every element one by one to match your aesthetics, use presets to instantly get the same effect. You can use apps like Lightroom or VSCO for this. These apps come with high-quality presets and filters that will give your photos a professional feel. You can use the same filter across all of your images to get a consistent look.
#6: Design Your Stories Using Templates
The aesthetic consistency should also extend to your Instagram Stories as well. You don’t necessarily have to edit all the images and videos you share through Stories when it comes to in-the-moment content. But it does help to have some visual consistency if you want to engage your audience. This means using the same colour scheme, font style, etc. in all of your Stories. Take a look at the following series of Stories from Moment.
You can see how there’s an element of consistency throughout these images. They use the same fonts and similar colour schemes.
Blue, turquoise, and red are some of the common colours you can see in all of these Stories.
However, the whole process of editing your Stories for consistency can be time-consuming. Simplify it by creating templates that you can easily customise for each Story. These are predesigned layouts consisting of graphics, text, or other design elements. Tools like Unfold and Canva are perfect for this, as they come with tons of high-quality templates that you can customise and reuse multiple times.
#7: Set Aside Time to Engage
Everyone who’s familiar with social media marketing knows how crucial it is to engage with their audience’s comments. You probably want to make sure that you’re responding to your followers as promptly as possible. However, you may get overwhelmed trying to engage with each and every comment as soon as they get posted. Instead, set aside some time to engage with your followers every day. You could schedule somewhere around 30 minutes to one hour to respond to comments and see what people are saying about your brand. It’s best if you turn off notifications for your account outside of the scheduled engagement hours.
#8: Use Quick Replies for Common DMs
Some businesses may also use Instagram to provide customer service. For these businesses, it may not be uncommon to get tons of similar questions. While it may seem like no trouble responding to these questions, it does take away some of your time when you have to type a separate response to each and every question. Instead of doing this, cut down your response time by setting up Quick Replies on Instagram. The platform allows you to create messages to answer your commonly asked questions. This means you’ll be able to reply to your customers with a single click. The process of setting up Quick Replies is fairly simple. Just go to Business Settings on your Instagram profile and you’ll see the add Quick Replies option. Tapping the “+” button will let you create a new quick reply for a common question.
#9: Save Your Best Hashtags for Later Use
Hashtags are great for boosting the visibility of your Instagram content. They can help you reach people who aren’t even following your brand as your posts will show up in their hashtag search results. However, it can be extremely time-consuming to conduct hashtag research every time you’re going to publish a new post. Save some time by collecting the top-performing hashtags that you use frequently in your posts and saving them in a note. So you can easily pick out the most relevant hashtags when creating captions for your new posts. This way, you won’t have to start from scratch and look for the right hashtags to use every time.
#10: Use Reposting Apps for Quick Reposts
75% of respondents in a TINT study said that UGC improves the authenticity of content. When people see other consumers using your products or services, they may be more inclined to trust you. This makes it crucial to include user-generated content in your Instagram marketing strategy. However, there’s also the challenge of collecting and reposting content created by your customers. You may spend some time curating suitable content, getting their permission to repost, taking screenshots, reformatting them to fit your feed, etc. Instead of this, you can simplify this process using reposting apps like Buffer or Repost. You just need to copy and share the post URL and these apps will instantly share it to your feed with the original caption. So you won’t even have to worry about coming up with a fresh caption just to go with the repost. But make sure you still approach the content creator for permission before you repost.
Conclusion
These are some of the best ways to simplify tasks on Instagram and save time while increasing productivity. As you can see, there’s quite a bit of planning involved. You will have to set aside some time to prepare posts and captions ahead of time, schedule them, etc. But in the long run, you’ll be able to free up a lot of time for other important tasks.
