As a social media manager, I live in the world of Instagram day in and day out. I would not be able to create great content, plan out strategies, and keep track of it all without these! I’m excited to share the tools that help me “do it all” on Instagram and hope you find them useful too.
1.Google Calendar
Simple yet keeps me on track! I plan out each post in Google Calendar. I make an “appointment” for the time the post drops and plan out the theme, location, tags and hashtags right in the calendar. Then when it’s time to create, I know exactly what I’ll be making a post about and what to add to it. I also make sure to keep a reminder on so when the post goes live, it reminds me to hop on Instagram and engage for 15 minutes to help get the most reach for the post.
2. Planoly
There are some great free Instagram planners out there and Planoly is one I use often. It’s a great place to load your photos and plan out your grid. You can also save all your hashtags in groups to add to your posts. It helps you do a week’s worth of posts at once and then just schedule it. It will even schedule your Stories!
3. Canva
I love Canva and seriously don’t know what I’d do without it! I create all my social media graphics here. While I tend to create my own templates, there are hundreds of great template right in Cava for Instagram posts, Instagram Stories, and more. If you get the paid version, you can even save your brands colors and fonts to make it super easy to keep all your graphics to your brand and then create folders to organize them all in. But even the free version is great if you are only creating content for one brand. Canva is also a life saver with it’s filters for your Instagram photos. One downside to scheduling your posts is that you can’t use the amazing Instagram filters on your photos to keep everything looking similar. Canva offer filters so you can drop your photo in there, choose the filter, save and add to your Instagram scheduler so all your photos have that same feel to them! It’s a great tool to create social media graphics and keep your brand in line.
4. Followers Track for Instagram
Tired of people playing the Follow/Unfollow game on Instagram? It drives me nuts! Well, this app tells you exactly who is doing that so you can unfollow them back. Nobody needs to follow that kind of profile. If they aren’t interested in interacting with you and your brand then there’s no worth in follow them. Now you can easily just unfollow them back!
5. Boomerang
This app creates 4 second videos on a loop. You know those cute videos of someone’s pet going around in circles, snowflakes falling over and over, or someone jumping up and down? They probably used this app. Create some fun videos to post and liven up your feed!
6. Story – Social Media Ad Editor
So you want to start using Instagram Stories but you have no idea how to create those beautiful templates that everyone is using? Download this app. It has a ton of stylish templates ready to go that are even animated! Just drop in your own photos, change the text, save, and post to your Stories. You really can’t go wrong with this one.
7. Hashtag Research
I use a paid service to do hashtag research for myself and my clients. It is crazy time consuming, very detail and not for everyone. If you are interested, it’s called Social Info. Most small business can get away with doing it themselves though right on Instagram! You can type your hashtags into Instagram to find their size and other related hashtags. Create hashtag lists in Excel or Google Sheets to use with your themed posts. For example, as a social media manager, I have hashtag lists for small business, entrepreneurs, Instagram for business, social media, and so on. Unless you are a huge account, you typically want to keep the size of your hashtags to something like this:
3 1 million+
4 500k-999k
4 100k-499k
4 under 100k
To learn how to find hashtags sizes and related hashtags, watch this short video.
Now that you know what I use every day to rock it on Instagram, what do you think? Will you be trying any of these out? Are there others you use that I missed? Let me know. I’d love to hear from you!
Have questions? Feel free to email me: lori@loricaralisconsulting.com