Okay so there are a number of platforms you could use to schedule stories, I’ve tried my fair share and all I’ll say is – as a professional and experienced marketing agency, we use Meta for a reason. The others break and lose connection far more often, they get features later and most importantly – they get fixes later too!
Again, this is an Instagram Live so if you want to watch the video – it’s here!
My stories have basically a three pronged attack…
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Pre-Scheduled
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Prepared
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In The Moment
I feel like ‘In The Moment’ is pretty self explanatory, you can’t plan it, it’s just ‘stuff’ that happens throughout the day that I post as it happens. It could be Soph, my to-do list, something funny, anything. It’s just as and when. Super good for showing my real self.
Okay so first things first, my content is always planned a month to 6 weeks in advance, more on that another day. But I make sure that I’m hitting my content pillars routinely and talking about our services in equal measure (or one more so than another if we’re pushing it that month). That’s the strategic part of my Instagram Story Marketing.
This is when I’ll plan in my Pre-Scheduled content. This is created on Canva, and scheduled via Meta Business Suite. As I said, I schedule it a month to 6 weeks in advance, it can be a video or a still – but it cannot have the interactive stickers, Instagram just don’t allow it. So this content is one of two things – direct sales posts detailing services or our business pillars (i.e our processes etc). These aren’t posted more than once a week as they speak to a really limited part of my audience and can be super fatiguing if you’re not ready to buy from me. The other content I’ll pre-schedule is what I call filler/fluff. These are pictures of coffee mugs, inspirational quotes, nice graphics telling you to have a good day. I go on a lot about audience fatigue, and this content lets my audience take a pause and a breath. It’s easy and nice to consume. Again, I try and put one or two of these a week, particularly if I know I’m potentially going to be too busy to post anything else so that I stay top of mind for my audience.
So that leaves my ‘Prepared’ Content, and this is the latest tactic we’ve been implementing. This is prepared either on Canva but usually on Instagram Stories itself, and then I save it down before posting it. I might do this either if I’ve already posted a lot that day, or if I just want to save it for another day.
Once I’ve made it, I use the ‘Reminder’ App on my phone, and literally set a reminder to post it. I upload the artwork and set it for a time and date I know I’ll be at least a bit free to post it. It takes mere seconds to save the story back down to my phone and upload it onto my Story. The content is created, I just need to save and upload, I tried to have it all saved in Canva or my Camera Roll, but I realised I needed something to scream in my face and remind me to post it. The benefit of this, is that I can then add the stickers to make it interactive. This has been a huge step in increasing my engagement, and has been somewhat of a game changer.
You can steal these methods, I hope they work for you!