9 Powerful Time-Saving Tips to Help Grow Your Brand on Instagram

Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform and around half of its user base (more than 300 million people) use it every day.
Brands on Instagram are also seeing huge amounts of engagement on Instagram. According to Forrester Research,  per-follower interaction rate is 2.3 percent- way above Facebook (0.2%) and Twitter (0.02%).
That all sounds incredible, right? But how do you find time to dedicate to growing your brand on Instagram? From planning and editing to posting and engaging with your followers, there’s a lot on your plate when it comes to Instagram marketing.

1. Create Instagram posts on desktop instead of mobile

Thanks to the great amount of tools out there, social media management has become much easier than it was a few years ago. While Instagram still doesn’t allow publishing through its web application, there are many tools that allow you to create your Instagram posts on desktop first.

Creating Instagram posts on desktop can be a massive time saver. 

Here’s why:

1. Creating your graphics or editing your photos on your desktop can be much faster than doing so on your mobile.

2. Most Instagram scheduling tools save you from the hassle of transferring your graphics and photos from your desktop to your mobile.

With Buffer for Instagram.

2. Repost quickly with permission

A study by marketing startup, Crowdtap, and the global research company, Ipsos, found that user-generated content is 35 percent more memorable and 50 percent more trusted than traditional and non-user-generated media

A typical way of reposting an image after asking for permission looks something like this:
1. Take a screenshot on your mobile
2. Crop away everything apart from the image
3. Copy and paste or type out the caption
4. Add your own caption
5. Finally, publish the user-generated content

3. Plan the layout of your gallery

Instead of thinking about what you want to post every day on the day itself, a good approach might be to plan your posts with your overall social media strategy in mind.
Also, Instagram is becoming a curated platform where businesses and individuals only post their best photos according to specific themes instead of every photo they take. So, it’s important to have a well-curated and consistent profile gallery.
the themes we chose for our Instagram account are:
• User-generated content
• Digital nomad lifestyle
• Productivity and motivation
Knowing these in mind allows us to plan how we want our gallery to look like. Hope our gallery is giving off these vibes!

4. Use tools to separate content creation and engagement

One of the most common productivity advice is to do one thing at a time.

A research by New York University business professor, Sophie Leroy, discovered that there’s a cost to switching your attention from one task to another — even if the switch is brief. Whenever our brains switch to a new task, the old task leaves an “attention residue” that reduces our cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time.

Multitasking actually cause us to take a longer time to complete all the tasks because our brains have to constantly switch between those tasks.

5. Create a week’s worth of posts in one go

Batching is a popular time management technique that aims to maximize concentration and increase productivity. The idea is to do similar tasks that require similar resources together.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, experimented with a day when he forced himself to batch tasks

6. Schedule time to engage

Another task you can batch is responding and engaging with others on Instagram. By batching them and scheduling the time to do that, you gain control over your schedule instead of being dictated by notifications

Here’s what you can try:

• Turn off notifications for your Instagram account.

• Schedule 30 minutes to an hour on your calendar every day to reply to comments, like, and comment on your followers’ posts.

• You could also schedule up to a few sessions like this in a day if you want to have a faster response time on Instagram.

7. Prepare commonly used hashtags in an Evernote note

After analyzing over 65,000 social media posts for their study on hashtags

However, typing nine or more hashtags every time you want to publish a post can be very time-consuming. A solution is to create a few sets of commonly used hashtags for different themes in an Evernote note or your preferred note-taking app.

8. Use the same filter and/or edits

Here’s another trick to help you save time and create a consistent profile gallery: use the same filter and/or edits for most — or even all — your images.

A lot of the time spent on publishing an Instagram post is usually spent on editing the image. By using the same filter and/or edits for every image, you can drastically reduce the editing time. This not only saves you time but also helps to keep your Instagram posts consistent.

If you use a photo editing application on your desktop like Lightroom, you can save a filter and the edits as a custom template.

If you prefer to edit your photos on your mobile, apps like VSCO or Instagram itself allows you to rearrange the filters and toolkits so that the most commonly used options

9. Repurpose posts on other platforms for Instagram (and vice versa)

Your Instagram posts don’t have to exist on Instagram only, and that’s the same for your other social media content.

Instead of re-creating new content for each social media platform, you could repurpose your posts on other platforms for Instagram and vice versa. This increases the impact of your content and saves you time from creating new content.

Over to you

And that’s the nine time-saving Instagram marketing tips to help you achieve results for your business with less time and effort. As a recap, here are the nine tips:

1. Create Instagram posts on desktop instead of mobile

2. Repost quickly with permission

3. Plan how you want your gallery to look like

4. Use a tool to separate content creation and engagement

5. Create a week’s worth of posts at a go

6. Schedule time to engage

7. Prepare commonly used hashtags in an Evernote note

8. Use the same filter and edits

9. Repurpose posts on other platforms for Instagram (and vice versa)