Be honest. Have you ever wondered HOW it is that some Instagram marketers make it look so easy!?! How are they firing out post after post with attractive visuals and relevant content that receive consistently high engagement? Dollars to donuts , a big part of the secret is: they’re using an Instagram planner app!
There are so many Instagram planning apps available on the market that it can make selecting the right one a difficult choice! The key to choosing the best planning app is to find one that goes beyond mere appearances to truly support and enhance your Instagram strategy. Sound like too tall an order for an Instagram Planner? It’s not – and you deserve it all!
If your planning app is worth its salt, it’s going to free up lots of valuable time by simplifying the process of planning your feed and scheduling your posts. Then you’ll be able to spend time doing what only you can do: creating out-of-this-world content that your followers love and engaging with those followers!
1. Your Instagram Planner App Should Help You Build a Content Strategy
Speaking of content that your followers love, finding that core group of followers who love, want and even need your content is crucial to a successful Instagram marketing strategy.
Look at it this way: If you attempt to market to everyone on Instagram, you’ll probably see mediocre engagement (likes and comments on your posts) at best. However, if you drill down on who your target audience is and create content specifically for them, you’ll see your engagement soar!
We call these folks who boost our content with likes, comments, shares and mentions our “ideal followers” and finding them will change your Instagram marketing game forever!
So how do you determine exactly who your ideal followers are? This handy graphic (borrowed from our brand-new Instagram 101 Webinar) breaks down who you should focus on connecting with!
Your ideal Instagram followers are:
- People with a need you can fill
- People you can deeply impact
- People you truly enjoy engaging with ♀️
- People excited to buy what you’re offering, work with your company and support your efforts!
The best Instagram planning app for your business will support these efforts to find your ideal followers and create more content they enjoy. How? By providing in-depth analytics to show you what kind of content is resonating with your followers, and how they’re interacting with it!
For example, Tailwind’s Post Inspector organizes all your likes, comments, and clicks in one easy-to-organize chart. For example, you can filter the content types to determine which posts have the most likes, which have the least and so on.
This can help you figure out which content pieces are resonating with your followers the most, and which types of your content might need to be removed or reworked.
There are a ton of benefits to the data you collect from analytics like this! For example:
Another way that you can find your ideal followers and attract them to your Instagram profile is through hashtags. Let’s dive into hashtags next!
2. Your Instagram Planner Should Help You Hunt Down Hashtags
News flash: hashtags are extremely important to a good Instagram marketing strategy. If you haven’t paid much attention to these searchable wonders before, now’s the time to implement them into your Instagram posting strategy.
Don’t believe us? Just take a look at these stats!
Crazy, right? Even using just one hashtag can boost your engagement significantly. However, finding the right hashtags to use can be difficult, and a lot of users even resort to making up their own – with no idea how they will perform!
This may be fun, but it won’t do much to help your Instagram marketing. The trick is to choose relevant hashtags that people are searching for on Instagram. If you tag a post with #MyDogFidoIsTheBest, chances are you won’t see much traffic on this post. Most Instagram users won’t be looking for that hashtag, or even using it on their own posts, right? However, if you use #DogsOfInstagram, you’ll probably see a lot more traffic!
With that in mind, here are some other clues for finding hashtags that will benefit your content the most:
So how can you tell which hashtags have enough traffic to make using them impactful?
Tailwind’s Hashtag Finder Tool (Part of OUR Instagram Planner App) is a great place to start!
Hashtag Finder is an all-in-one tool that populates hashtag suggestions, ranks hashtags for competitiveness (informing you how likely your content is to be seen when using that hashtag) and even allows you to save entire lists of hashtags that you might use frequently.
This is key to your Instagram content strategy. After all, with the right hashtags, users who have a genuine interest in the subject of your hashtag will be delighted when they stumble across your content!
Any Instagram planning app you use should have capabilities to find, rank, and store hashtags for future use, to save you tons of time that can be better spent engaging with your followers.
Another important part of your Instagram strategy is to make sure you’re putting out content when your followers are actually online. Instagram scheduler tools can make a huge difference ensuring your posts go out when the peak concentration of your followers are active and online, just waiting to stumble across your post. And this should all happen without you having to think about it!
Let’s talk more about scheduling!
3. Your Instagram Planning App Should Help You Schedule At Peak Times
Scheduling at peak times for own your account is often overlooked as an important piece of Instagram strategy, but it’s actually crucial!
This is because unless your ideal followers are online at the exact moment you post, your content will age in their feeds and decrease the likelihood they’ll see it among newer posts. If your ideal followers follow and engage with a large number of accounts, your posts can easily get lost in the noise!
That’s why you deserve to make the best use of your time (literally!) with an Instagram scheduling app. With a tool like Tailwind’s SmartSchedule, you can decide how many times you’d like to post in a day, and what general time of day you’d like your posts to go out (Hint: this can help you keep on top of replying to comments in a timely fashion!). Then, SmartSchedule will auto-populate a schedule for you with the peak times your followers are more likely to see your content and engage.
If you need to change the time, or even create custom times, you can edit these in each post. It’s so easy to use!
Here’s a quick walkthrough of how to make your own SmartSchedule using Tailwind for Instagram:
There’s another amazing benefit to using Tailwind, as well! Even some of the best Instagram scheduling apps out there rely on push notifications to help you manually post your Instagram content during scheduled times. However, Tailwind has Auto Post, which allows the Tailwind App to publish your scheduled post at the selected time – no push notifications or copying and pasting required!
Super cool, huh?
There’s one final mission that your Instagram feed app should be able to accomplish: helping to plan your Instagram feed design and allow you to preview that finished design before your content is published.
Let’s take a closer look!
4. Your Instagram Planner Should Help You Create and Maintain Your Instagram Feed Design
Have you ever stopped mid-scroll to marvel at a gorgeously-themed Instagram profile? We know we have. Themes allow you to establish brand identity, help you align your content, and make your profile really fun to visit!
There are so many themed options for your Instagram feed, with more themes being invented daily. Running dry on theme inspiration? Here are some of our favorites:
Whether you decide to post photos using the same filter, tile your 9-grid, or use a moody black and white, your followers will be delighted by your carefully planned and impeccably presented theme! And it doesn’t have to take all day to design, either!
Tailwind App contains an easy-to-use drag and drop Instagram planner called the 9-Grid Preview. This feature allows you to preview your Instagram feed and edit in real time, giving you control over how all your scheduled content looks in your feed before you post!
This design and layout support is crucial in a strong Instagram planner app. While you can get multiple apps to schedule and design your feed, an all-in-one tool like Tailwind will save you so much time and effort!
You’ll be freed up to do more things you love (brainstorming new content, showcasing your brand, and all-around living your best life ) and less of the things you don’t love so much (formatting, researching, scheduling and manually posting.) ♀️
How to Choose the Best Instagram Planner App
What it all comes down to is this: The best Instagram planner app doesn’t just help you design a pretty feed, or schedule all your posts for you. It should do these things and more!
The right Instagram planner app will not only support your Instagram marketing efforts, but it will also transform them. At a minimum, your Instagram planner should help:
- Build and manage a content strategy
- Find, save, and reuse the best hashtags with ease
- Schedule your posts at peak times for maximum visibility ⏱
- Create and maintain your Instagram feed design
After all, these four features aren’t just cool app functions, they’re incredible tools to build a content strategy that works!
Pssst… want to learn how to harness these tools (and many more!) to learn a proven Instagram marketing strategy that really works?
Join social media marketing mastermind Rebekah Radice for our Instagram 101 Webinar! You’ll learn about the many features of Instagram and how to best use them to your business’s advantage, and get our easy content planning strategy that will shave hours off your Instagram post planning every month. Sign up for the webinar below!
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