Processes For Planning Your Instagram

Your Instagram feed is a statement about your brand. It takes time to create content, craft posts, and engage. Like everything else, it comes down to process. Here’s an idea of how to plan your feed so that you create a polished and cohesive look + feel for your brand.

All about process

When it comes to social media, think long term strategy but post often. You want to plan content ahead of time so that you are not tied to your phone, editing photos and coming up with captions on the fly. Decide how many posts you want per week - are they feed, stories or reels? Aim to create content for each month is one block of work time versus planning & posting every day.

Plan for cohesion

Having a goal of a cohesive feed with unified photos and captions with a clear voice is good for brand recognition. Some of our go-to apps for this:

• A Color Story: Provides palettes and preset filters  for visual planning.
• Canva: Provides templates for Instagram posts and stories. Free graphic design tool.
• Group tags: Preset hashtags, locations and product tags in your posts for consistency.

Content with purpose

Plan for a mix of types of posts on your feed and post intentionally. The main categories are:

• Informational: Highlight your products/services and promote special events.
• Lifestyle: Take people behind the scenes and show them who you are as people.
• Community: Spotlight artists and students and get conversations going.

Schedule posts

Once you’ve crafted your images and written captions, it’s time to schedule posts out. The beauty of auto-posting is the ease of mind and freedom from the reminder to post at 2pm on a Saturday.  Decide on the optimal times for posting, then use one of these tools to schedule:

• Planoly: All-in-one software for Instagram planning. It includes visual planning, drafting captions, auto-posting, and analytics.
• Hootsuite: Your social media helper. You can create posts in Hootsuite and set publishing dates. 

How do you plan your feed? Let us know below!