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Instagram Planning – boost your social media with Planoly

Instagram‘s draft functionality is a little clunky, and the default tools aren’t especially well suited to planning great posts. But planning a marketing push or even just a family photo album can sometimes be a real headache, especially once you start including targeted hashtags and optimal posting schedules. Yawn.

Whether you run a business, are a content creator, or just want your Instagram page to look more polished, there are plenty of apps to help you plan a more engaging and aesthetically pleasing account. 

We tried out a few of these planning apps and Planoly was our favorite pick – it’s a full-featured solution with a generous free plan. Here are a few tips for streamlining your social media posts using the app.

PLANOLY

Note: Though you can plan both Posts and Stories with Planoly, we’ll be focusing on planning regular Posts here. If you’re interested in making great content for Stories, you could also check out Unfold.

Layout

All the best creative accounts look great even with just a quick glance down the feed. You can achieve that with quality content, naturally, but you can also achieve it with careful planning of your feed layout. Ideas include matching colors (see below), splitting large images across multiple adjacent posts, or alternating styles in a checkerboard pattern.

Planoly links to your Instagram account, which allows you to see what a new post would look like nestled into your existing feed. This makes coming up with these kind of creative layouts much easier to plan and execute – simply drag and drop draft posts into position as you please, and then post the lot once you’re ready. 

Tap on a post thumbnail to add a caption and hashtags, which you can save for when it comes to posting. 

Scheduling

No matter how good your content is, if you post at the wrong time of day you’re potentially missing out on tons of views.

Planoly can set regular reminders on your iPhone at optimal posting times, to take advantage when your followers are most active. You can find this out by tapping on Insights > Total Followers from your Instagram profile, then scrolling to the bottom.

Tap post now from the edit screen and the app will copy your caption to the clipboard ready to paste directly into Instagram, saving you having to worry about wording when it’s posting time.

 

This will copy the text ready to paste into your post when uploading to Instagram.

With a premium subscription and an Instagram business account, you can even have Planoly auto post for you at the ideal times.

Optimization

Planoly also allows you to create and save folders of your favourite hashtags, which can be very useful if you post a lot of similar content that you want seen by particular channels or niches. When editing a planned post you can tap to add hashtags from one of these saved groups, which can save a lot of time.

It’s also worth creating entire draft plans, allowing you to work on multiple projects side by side. A great tool if you want to get ahead with the content for an upcoming product release, promotion, or whatever else you have planned. 

The only notable restriction here would be the upload limit on the free plan – you get 30 posts a month before you have to pay for a premium subscription. Still, even that works out much cheaper than hiring a social media manager!