How to Schedule Instagram Stories and Save Time and Effort

Instagram is the most popular social media platform. The social media platform is a great way to stay in touch with friends, family, and business associates. Moreover, There are over 200 million businesses on Instagram.

As Instagram continues to evolve, Instagram stories are a feature that has grown significantly in popularity. You can share specific moments from your days using this feature, and people can also react and comment on your stories.

While Instagram stories are an excellent way to engage with your audience, the time and effort are required to create and upload them continually, especially if you are a business owner, thus, scheduling your Instagram stories in advance is a strategy that may help you save time, and effort and be consistent.

In this article, we’ll explore the advantages of scheduling Instagram stories and provide detailed instructions on how to do it successfully. By implementing this time-saving technique, you can keep up a regular and exciting Instagram presence even when busy with other stuff.

What are Instagram stories?

Instagram lets you post 24-hour-permanent images, videos, and other visual information. Thus, stories on Instagram provide a momentary experience from your day than standard posts do on the platform’s feed.

Instagram stories are represented by profile photographs and displayed as a slideshow at the top of an Instagram user’s feed. To see the story in full screen, tap on the profile photo. Also, you can add artistic components while posting a story, including text, stickers, GIFs, filters, music, polls, quizzes, and more.

You can use Instagram stories in various ways; You can submit many stories in succession to construct a larger, continuous tale, each with a maximum duration of 15 seconds.

Additionally, Instagram includes interactive tools that improve engagement and conversation with your audience, such as swipe-up links (for accounts with over 10,000 followers), mentions, and direct messaging within stories.

Instagram stories are an excellent way to engage with your audience, grow your exposure, and promote engagement, whether you’re an individual sharing personal moments or a company offering goods or services.

Why use Instagram stories?

Instagram stories are a useful tool for individuals and organizations due to their wide range of advantages.

The following are some persuasive justifications for using Instagram Stories:

Authenticity and real-time engagement

Sharing moments from your day on Instagram stories is more informal and real to engage with your followers. You can see real-time engagement and views as well.

Increased visibility

Your Instagram story is visible to your followers only. Whenever you post a story, the story is displayed at the top of your Instagram feed of your followers. Therefore, they are more likely to click and interact with your account.

Creative expression

Using different elements and tools on Instagram stories like text, stickers, GIFs, filters, music, and more to your post. You can enhance the aesthetic appeal of your stories and produce content using Instagram story makers that is interesting and distinctive from the competition.

Swipe-Up links

If your business account has more than 10,000 followers, you are qualified to use the swipe-up function. As a result, you can incorporate links in your stories that take readers to other websites, blogs, product pages, or any other location you like. Swipe-up links are an effective strategy for pushing certain behaviors, generating leads, and increasing traffic.

Story highlights

Instagram lets you store your stories as highlights prominently displayed on your profile. Highlights allow you to collect and present your greatest and most important stories for longer than 24 hours, which in turn, makes your profile more interesting.

More valuable engagement

Instagram stories include various interactive elements, such as polls, quizzes, question stickers, countdowns, etc. Using these elements, you may actively interact with your audience in comments, conduct market research, and promote involvement. You build community among your followers and improve your interaction with them by including them in your Stories.

Importance of Scheduling Instagram Stories

● Saves time: You can schedule stories using Instagram schedulers well in advance, so you do not have to spend time posting them daily. Once you have all the content, you can schedule it according to your content calendar and plan.

● Consistency: Your audience will always get constant updates via stories. It will help you build good connections with them. With good consistency, your audience will be in the habit of seeing you daily and want more of you.

● Increase engagement: Stories are a great way to engage with your audience and build a one-on-one relationship with them. Once you get into a habit of scheduling stories regularly. Your audience notices that you are consistently posting high-quality content. This way, the audience can interact and engage with your content more easily.

● Improve content strategy: By scheduling stories, you can launch your content strategically. Meaning that your content aligns with your overall marketing goals and brand messaging.

● Track your results: You can see the analytics and engagement metrics with scheduling. You get detailed insights about your content. It will help you identify trends and help make decisions based on data.

So you can avoid relying on luck and gut feeling. This way, you can asses what things are working and what needs improvements. You can also double down on things that are working.

Scheduling Instagram Stories

As of now, you cannot directly schedule stories from the Instagram app itself. So you have to install Meta Business Suite on your mobile phone.

Step 1: Go to Play Store/App Store and download Meta Business Suite.

Step 2: Open Meta Business Suite and log in to your Instagram account.

Step 3: At the very bottom of the app, you will see a button with an add icon.

Step 4: Click on it and select the story option.

Step 5: Select an image and create the story you want. Then press the share on button present on the bottom right.

Step 6: Then Schedule for later by selecting the date and timing.

Step 7: Congratulations your story is now scheduled for later.

Step 8: To check your scheduled content, go back to the home page. Tap on Content from the bottom menu. Select the scheduled option from the dropdown, and you will see all the scheduled content, including stories.

Apart from using the Meta Business suite to schedule your Instagram stories, you can also use third-party Instagram story scheduler tools.

Instagram Story Scheduling Tools

Here are some Instagram story scheduling tools you can use to schedule your Instagram stories easily.

#1. Later

Your go-to Instagram scheduler to schedule Instagram stories in bulk. Later lets you ideate, plan and schedule your social media content visually.

Features:

• Visual content calendar that gives a clear overview of your scheduled posts.
• Schedule multiple posts all at once in bulk.
• Prepare your content in advance and auto-schedule it for later.
• Gives you hashtags recommendations specific to your content.
• Linkin.bio feature that allows you to create a clickable landing page that connects your Instagram posts to external websites.
• Track metrics such as engagement, reach, and follower growth.

It also provides detailed analytics that will help you measure success, learn the best time to post on social media, and get hashtag suggestions. Furthermore, Its mobile app allows you to schedule your Instagram stories.

#2. Pallyy

Pallyy is An all-in-one Instagram scheduler that lets you auto-publish your content in just a few clicks. It is highly collaborative, which allows you to plan, schedule and analyze your content effectively.

Features:

• Simple and clean interface.
• Collaboration that allows you to manage team members, assign roles and work together smoothly.
• Analyzes your content and provide hashtag recommendations.
• Set your scheduled content to be automatically published at your chosen times.
• Easily curate and repost user-generated content.
• Provides detailed analytics and insights.
• Mobile-friendly and responsive design.

Pallyy’s simple and clean interface ensures a smooth experience, helping you streamline your social media efforts and drive results.

#3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a 360-degree social media management platform. A simple, easy-to-use, and collaborative scheduling tool.

Features:

• More than 16 million users worldwide.
• Multiple platform scheduling.
• Highly collaborative workflow
• Provides content suggestions and helps you curate relevant content from trusted sources.
• Hootsuite has native mobile applications for both iOS and Android.
• Comes with a content calendar that gives you a visual overview of your scheduled posts
• Auto scheduling and bulk scheduling of content.

With Hootsuite, you can seamlessly schedule, publish, collaborate & analyze your Instagram content.

#4. Buffer

Buffer is one of the most popular and beloved scheduling tools. Visually plan and schedule your Instagram stories to grow your brand organically.

Features:

• Clean user Interface
• Create a customized posting schedule tailored to your audience’s engagement patterns.
• The queue scheduling feature automatically schedules your posts at predetermined times based on your preferred posting schedule.
• Offers in-depth analytics and insights to track the performance of content.
• Provides content suggestions to help you discover and curate relevant and engaging content

Buffer allows you to create and schedule content for various social media accounts simultaneously.

Remember, third-party tools are super powerful and helpful for scheduling and auto-posting content. However, they do come with their limitations. So try out all the different Instagram story scheduling tools and pick the tool that best matches your need and business requirements.

Best Practices for Scheduling Instagram Stories

• Use proper hashtags and mentions: Use relevant hashtags to help increase your story’s reach. Please mention people or brands if it is appropriate to the content. It is an excellent way to get followers and engagement.
• Schedule the story for the best time: If you post randomly at any time, then even great content will fail to perform. So analyze when your target audience is the most active and schedule accordingly. This way, the stories are more likely to be visible in their feed, and there is a high chance that they will see them.
• Keep stories engaging and interactive: Stories don’t have to be plain, static, and boring. Make full use of the innovative features Instagram stories have. Try to make them as creative, fun, engaging, and interactive as possible. Incorporate GIFs, videos, stickers, and various other cool features that come with stories. Doing so makes your audience more likely to interact and engage with it.
• Be consistent with branding: No matter what, you always need to stay true to the brand. Make sure you use the brand guidelines, colors, typography, etc. It will help you create a consistent theme that aligns with your brand.

Conclusion

By scheduling Instagram stories, you can save time and get more things done efficiently. It helps you stay consistent and connect better with your audience.

Try the abovementioned Instagram story scheduling tools and best practices to start leveraging the power of scheduling Instagram stories. And unlock the maximum potential to achieve greater success online.

Remember, success on social media takes time, so stay motivated and persistent. Embrace the journey, knowing that each step forward brings you closer to achieving your goals. You’ve got this!

You may also explore some top Instagram analytics tools for social media success.