We love a good Instagram story here at MeetEdgar because, really, what’s not to love about Instagram stories? They are fun, easy to consume and engaging.
We’re not the only ones loving Instagram stories! Everyone seems to be loving them these days! In fact, 500 million Instagram users upload stories every day. Experts say that stories now bypass the feed in number of viewers. That means more people will be seeing your stories than your actual Instagram feed!
Stories keep you at the top of the feed so your followers see your content more often and they can help grow your audience. Want to know how to use this feature and how to schedule Instagram stories? This guide will give you all the info you need to know!
What are Instagram stories?
If you are brand new to Instagram, you might be wondering “What are Instagram stories?” Instagram stories are photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. You’ve probably seen them sitting at the top of your feed or you’ve seen them at the top of users’ profiles.
How to schedule Instagram stories with Edgar
There are plenty of creative ways you can use stories from videos to sneak peeks to behind the scenes content. The options are endless! Now, this might stress you out because we’re telling you to create even more content (as if you aren’t busy enough).
That’s where a scheduling tool like MeetEdgar comes in handy. Scheduling Instagram stories with Edgar makes it much easier to stay consistent with your Instagram stories.
You may be wondering can I schedule Instagram stories? Well, Edgar allows you to schedule Instagram stories and feed posts for Instagram from your desktop, much like you schedule content for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Since we launched Instagram scheduling, we’ve had a few questions about how you can use Edgar’s unique features for Instagram scheduling, how to auto-post instagram stories and what’s the best way to use stories.
We’re going to let you in on some easy ways that we use Edgar to keep our Instagram stories consistent for the MeetEdgar account so you can start saving time while keeping consistent stories!
1. Schedule recurring stories for consistent updates
Do you post a blog every Tuesday or put out a new podcast? You can schedule a recurring Instagram story every time you have a new post! Here’s how we do it with Edgar.
Create a category in your Edgar account and add it to your recurring schedule. As you can see below, we created “IG Blog Story Announcements” to post every Tuesday and Thursday when we publish our blog posts.
Then, you’ll need to add content to your library. We like to add a few basic stock photos and graphics that rotate on a regular basis.
Once you add a few images, you don’t need to worry about updating your queue for a while! When it’s time to post, Edgar will send you a notification and you can select to post on your story. From there, we like to add some GIFs, hashtags, and stickers to make the post a little more engaging!
2. Schedule stories within a few minutes or hours of each other
Great stories entice your user to keep clicking through to see what happens next. You know, almost like you’re telling a story 😉
Of course, we’ve all had one of those days where you have every intention of posting follow up stories but then, life and business get crazy and before you know it, it’s the next day and your original story has disappeared!
With Edgar, you can use the “Schedule Send” feature so that you can schedule a few stories to go out within a few minutes or hours of each other. If you use the “Use Once” feature when you schedule your story, then they’ll be retired from your library so you won’t have to worry about Edgar reposting them.
We used this feature when we were announcing Content Creator Day and we wanted our posts to go out in a specific order, at specific times.
3. Schedule engaging stories on a regular basis
We love getting to know our audience so we’re big fans of the questions and poll tools in Instagram stories. But we must confess that we used to forget to use them or we couldn’t think up a good poll or story at the moment so we just skipped it.
Haphazardly getting feedback wasn’t doing us much good so we took to batching our engagement-style stories. Once a month, we brainstorm 4-8 questions we want to know from our audience. These could be polls like “Do you plan your content in advance?” Or they could be actual questions like “What’s your favorite podcast to listen to these days?”
Because we’re strictly using these for engaging with our users, we didn’t have a preference as to when they posted, just that they posted consistently. So we turned to our trusty recurring schedule once more!
We added a category for “Questions/Polls” into our Instagram content library and then added two timeslots in so that we’re asking questions and polls every week. We follow the same basic practices we used for scheduling our recurring blog post announcements. We used stock photos or graphics and our question in as the content. And when it came time to post, we added in either the poll or question feature, some GIFs and animation.
So we went from this…
To this:
In just a few seconds, we quickly dress up our scheduled Instagram stories and get them up into our story!
Start scheduling stories
These are just a few ways you can start scheduling Instagram stories. Whatever way you choose to use stories, remember that scheduling Instagram stories doesn’t take away your ability to post real-time stories.
Instead, you’ll have a balance of consistent content so that no matter how busy you are, you’re always sharing Instagram stories and popping up at the top of your user’s Instagram feeds!
Remember that Edgar has direct posting. You schedule your posts and leave Edgar to do the hard graft of sharing them.
Ready to get started with Instagram Stories and need a little help? Download 13 customizable Instagram Story Templates!
