Social media marketers rejoice. If you head over to Facebook’s Creator Studio app, you’re likely to see a notification like this at the top of your dashboard.

Yes, that’s right – native Instagram scheduling, via an official app.

Instagram scheduling has long been a headache for social managers, leading to a range of alternative posting options, each of which has its own value and capacity. Most of these options have been limited due to Instagram’s API restrictions on what third-party tools can access, and how they can post – though Instagram did provide capacity for third party providers to facilitate Insta scheduling last year.

This new option, however, provides increased capacity, in that you can better see exactly what your Insta posts will look like, which is similar to posting to a Facebook Page natively, as opposed to through a scheduling app.

The new Instagram scheduling option has been rolling out to users over the past month, though it looks to have been expanded more broadly this week (as noted by social media expert Matt Navarra), so if you don’t have it yet, you likely will soon.

The team from Later have actually provided an in-depth rundown of the process – first off, if you want to schedule your Instagram posts, you need to have an Instagram business account linked to your Creator Studio dashboard.

Once you do, head to that profile and select ‘Create Post’ at the top left of screen, which will enable you to choose whether you want to post to your ‘Instagram Feed’ or IGTV’.

(Note: You can’t schedule Instagram Stories posts as yet).

In the feed post option, you can upload your image and add in your caption, along with emojis, location tags, etc. You can also edit your image content within the Creator Studio workflow.

Also worth noting – you can add multiple images here, which is an element that many third-party tools are unable to facilitate. 

Once you’re ready to schedule your post, you click on the drop-down arrow next to the ‘Publish’ prompt at the bottom right of screen, which will bring up the scheduling tool.

You can then set the date and time you want to post, while you can also view a full list of scheduled Instagram posts within Creator Studio workflow (Later provides a more in-depth overview in this post).

The option will no doubt make a lot of social media managers very happy, with full Instagram post and scheduling functionality built into an official app. That could make Instagram management much easier – though some have also questioned whether posts which come through this process will see less engagement, as has long been the concern with various third-party scheduling tools.

It’s obviously too early to say, but it’ll be worth experimenting with and seeing what results you get. 

Source: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-adds-instagram-scheduling-to-creator-studio/560162/