How to Schedule Instagram Posts Using Facebook Creator Studio

Life may have just gotten a little easier for many social media marketers. Facebook has just included native Instagram scheduling by using a formal app which will allow Instagram posts to be scheduled and published, right from within the Creator Studio. It has always been difficult for social media managers to schedule posts for Instagram, and they have been obliged to come up with their own particular plans and options for posting.Each of these approaches has had a certain value and some limited capacity, and were undoubtedly at least somewhat effective in their own way. The problem has always been that whatever options were being used, they were restricted by Instagram's API policy on what any third party tools would have access to. Similar restrictions were placed on how third-party tools posted to Instagram. Late last year, in an effort to reduce the headaches associated with this process, Instagram finally provided the ability for third-party providers to accomplish scheduling to their platform.

What the new option brings

This new option included in Facebook's Creator Studio provides much greater capacity, so that you will be able to see just how your Instagram posts would appear on that platform. This will be very much like making a post to any Facebook Page in native mode, rather than making use of some kind of scheduling app.Over the past month or so, Facebook has been rolling out this new Instagram scheduling option, and the pace of the rollout appears to have picked up, so it's reaching more and more users. The main requirement of using this new option is that you must have an Instagram business account linked to the dashboard of your Creator Studio. Once you have this in place, you'll be able to freely schedule your Instagram posts whenever you're ready.

Background on Facebook Creator Studio

This whole process has been in the making for quite a long time now, and Facebook has been making steady progress on it since late in 2017. That's when they launched their Facebook Creator app and their Facebook for Creators website, both of which were intended to help creators manage their Facebook accounts.In August 2018, Facebook launched its Creator Studio, which allowed creators to publish content on the platform and to subsequently manage it. By December of the same year, Facebook announced that it was testing an Instagram Creator Account which would provide users with ready access to simplified messaging, flexible profile controls, and several other handy tools.

Back to the present. Facebook has now incorporated Instagram into its own Creator Studio, so that content creators can schedule, post, manage, and even monetize all content throughout their Facebook Pages, as well as their Instagram accounts. This new capability is intended for all those individuals who create original content and share it with their followers. Also included in this group are social media influencers, bloggers, and all those people active in social media who desire to share original content.

The aim of Creator Studio

In a recent press release, Facebook announced that one of the primary goals with the release of this new option is to facilitate the process of earning money for content creators. This would include earnings through brand collaborations, support from followers and fans, and ad revenues. Theoretically, it would allow these content creators to convert their hobby or passion into a legitimate business, earning revenue from content creation from whoever their audience might be.In this sense, Creator Studio would appear to be positioned as a competitor to other content distribution platforms which have similar monetization features in place. YouTube for instance, has a number of such monetization features available for its users. However, this monetization of content is not the only potential usage for Creator Studio.Another new option made available in this new release is the ability to schedule IGTV videos, which will appeal to a broad number of Facebook users. There are some limitations to Creator Studio, specifically in the areas of team collaboration, analytics, and visual planning. So if you need help to manage your complete Instagram strategy, as well as to visually plan and schedule all content, Creator Studio may not cover all those bases.

Using the new options

Once you have an Instagram business account connected to your Creator Studio dashboard, you'll have to go to that profile and select Create Post, which is located at the upper left portion of your screen. That will allow you to choose between posting to your Instagram Feed or scheduling an IGTV video. If you're ready to post to your Instagram feed, you can upload any images, captions, location tags, and emojis which are associated with the content.You'll also have the option to edit your images right within the Creator Studio workflow. If necessary, you can include multiple images, which was a common drawback of many third-party scheduling tools formerly used by social media managers. When you're ready to schedule the post, you'll have to select the drop down arrow, which is situated adjacent to the Publish prompt on the lower right part of your screen, and that will invoke the scheduling tool.You will then be able to establish the date and time you choose to post, while simultaneously viewing the entire list of previously scheduled Instagram posts. This should be extremely useful for social media managers, in that it provides full scheduling and posting functionality to Instagram, all provided by an official app. This will undoubtedly make it much easier to manage Instagram content, although there is a concern by some people that posting in this way may see less engagement on the Instagram platform.There is of course, no way of knowing whether this will prove to be the case, since the option has only recently been rolled out to most users. At the very least however, this new option provided by Facebook will definitely be worth a try. The results will, at a bare minimum, be much easier to achieve than they have been in the past, and it will be much more efficient for managing all Instagram posts.