It seems like such a simple process to find a photo, draft up a caption and hit post, doesn’t it? Well, if you are looking to grow your Instagram following and reach a bigger audience, than we all know there’s much more to that.
If you want to grow your account, you’ll want to take a strategic approach to publishing content and that starts with your content.
Plan out your content
I plan my content about one to two weeks in advance, but you can certainly plan out an entire month if you are comfortable with that as well. If I have a sponsored post that has a firm posting date, I make sure to mark that on my calendar first and start building out my content around that.
Are there important dates, timely events, etc. that I want to share? I then go in and plug all of that content to ensure I stay on track with trends.
Next, I plug in all of my “filler content”- I pretty much classify this as content that can be shared at any time so if something comes up, I can easily move it over to a different date.
I like to fill in my calendar using different colors, stickers, etc to make it fun and to keep me on track with my goals.
Here’s a sample of how I put together my content calendar and a free template for you to use too!
Schedule your content
I personally don’t like to pre-schedule my Instagram content because I like to be “live” when it also goes live. Since the first hour after postings is so important for your engagement, I want to be on the app, engaging with comments, responding to DMs, etc. However, if you find yourself pressed on time and need to pre-schedule your Instagram content, Tailwind offers tools that allow you to do that.
I do, however, pre-schedule my Facebook content directly on FB. If I don’t, I tend to forget to post so scheduling ahead of time is the best option for me. You can schedule posts in advance directly on Facebook and schedule the day/time you want to go live.
I always follow my analytics for the best posting windows for my content, here are the best times to post on various social media platforms.
Posting checklist
Whether you decided to pre-schedule or manually publish your content, always remember to triple-check your posts for grammatical errors, quality of your images, etc. You won’t want to go in and edit your posts after going live as this can effect your reach and engagement with Instagram’s algorithm so following a posting checking list is super important.
Pin me for later!
