How to Plan a Month’s Worth of Instagram Posts

I was going to take the day off from blogging today and tackle a plan for a themed month of Instagram Posts – but, then I remembered that it’s Tuesday – the day that we Tackle things together. And, since I am creating a working draft for my, I thought I’d share a bit of my process with you…hopefully you’ll find it helpful for your own campaigns. As the day went on, I only managed to work in short bursts – but, I did get a good start on my plan, and come up with a hashtag (see what I did there?) that sounds much more fun to me than ‘Working Draft’. Read on and see if you can find it!

We’ll take a look at what you want to consider when planning your campaign, how to find and best utilize the best hashtags, how to schedule your posts, and then I’ll share with you how one of my posts might have looked like (and why I’m glad I did a little research).

Things to Consider

If you’re planning a short term theme for Instagram, there are things you’ll want to ask yourself first. Keeping these things in mind will help you to consider exactly what you’ll want to post, when to post it, and how.

• How long with this theme last?
  • Is there enough content out there that I can share, or will I need to create my own?
  • Is it interesting or engaging enough (to me AND my audience to last as long as I plan?
  • How often will I post this topic? Daily? Weekly?
• Can I schedule this content?
  • Can it be scheduled ahead?
  • Will I need to post daily updates?
    • Make sure you’ll be available to do that – ie no planned vacations, major life events, etc.
    • How in depth will these posts need to be?
• What are my goals with this campaign?
  • Gain new traffic/followers?
  • Engage current followers?
  • Connect with other creators/accounts?

With the answers to the questions in mind, you can start planning your content.

Creating your content

Instagram is a very visual platform, so it’s generally best to start with graphics and images. It’s always best to use your own images and graphics rather than someone else’s on IG. If you do you use someone else’s content, be sure to get there permission first and tag them in the post. There are several apps and websites where you can create your own graphics and images you can often even do that with your phone’s basic photo editor. If you’re using a quote by ANYONE, credit them IN the photo, and the text. If anything is shared by anyone else, it’s typically the photo. If you want to ensure that your work reflects back to you, be sure to include your logo, website, or IG handle on your graphic

• Start with 3-4 graphics for your campaign before trying to create the entire duration of your campaign in one sitting. You might change your mind once you see how they lay out together…
• Once you’ve chosen or created your graphics, save them together in a labeled album on your device or computer. If I want things in a certain order, I’ll name the graphic with a descriptive word and number tag (post 1, week 1, etc.) – just something simple to make the posting part of the process run a little smoother.
• Evaluate how much time it took you to create those graphics, and if you’re willing to invest that time in the number of posts you will be creating. Creating the first couple of graphics might take a little longer to as you’re basically creating and tweaking template. After the first couple of graphics are created, the rest should be simple and quick.
  • If no, then try a simpler graphic or template.
  • If yes, move on to the next step.

Text can create engagement. Sometimes, the graphic itself is enough to generate engagement, sometimes we need a little extra backstory or context to go with it. Your theme and the goals you set for the campaign should guide your text.

Things you might add to your text:

• Tell a personal story, or just add your personal thoughts on a quote or graphic.
• Give a brief backstory on a quote – was it part of a speech, an interview, a quote from a film? Finding this backstory is also a great way to fact check your quotes.
• Ask a question about the graphic.
  • what’s your favorite…
  • do you have a memory of…
  • have you ever…
  • what would you do…
  • would you rather…
  • this or that…

Hashtags are a vital part of any Instagram Campaign. It’s always tough to figure out the hashtag game, and I can’t say that I’ve mastered it completely, but I’m currently working to up that game.

Here are some of the most recommended strategies I’ve seen:

• Always use your own personal hashtag.
  • This will be unique to you, and your account. It will go on every single post…
  • Your hashtag should be simple and descriptive of your overall content.
  • It can play off other hashtags, or be completely unique.
• Use only RELEVENT trending hashtags.
  • Using trending hashtags to get more views might boost your initial views, but will decrease engagement percentages. For example, using #puppiesofinstagram on a post about meal planning makes zero sense, and you’re going to get zero engagement from people following or engaging with that hashtag.
  • Pay attention to the hashtags your followers engage with. This is a little tricky, as you do have to actually spend some time reading through comments and engaging with posts. If you want to grow your engagement, though, it’s a great way to do that.
  • Don’t create a post just because it’s ‘trending’. If it’s not relevant to your account and content, it’s not going to do any favors to your algorithm.
• Search for, follow, and engage with hashtags that are relevant to your campaign.
  • Others might click on your profile from those comments and, likewise, engage with you.
  • Keep it authentic! No one likes phishy or spammy IG comment or messages.
  • Find those hashtags with a google search! There are several sites that list trending hashtags, and help you discover more related hashtags.
    • Do check those hashtags on the actual IG platform for yourself before relying on them for an entire campaign.
    • Here a couple of sites that might be helpful:
      • top-hashtags.com
      • rite-tag.com
    • A google search might be more effective, depending on your campaign, than relying on specific sites for hashtags.
    • Don’t try to use them all!
      • Choose a small number of hashtags relevant to your campaign.
      • Choose one to use on every post in the campaing.
      • For the others, use those on posts that are directly related to the hashtag.

Scheduling your campaign

There are several apps available that you can utilize for post scheduling. (Here’s a link to a review of several of those) I find it simplest, and more efficient, to simple use the Creator Studio by Facebook. Unless you are using an app or service that allows you create AND schedule graphics, I would recommend starting with that. You can schedule you posts when you are ready! All at the same time, or a week at a time. If you prefer to post content as events and life occur, you can simply save the posts as drafts and post them at your leisure. This option will allow for the most flexibility without you having to reschedule anything. It does, however, require you to remember to actually post them! That’s easy enough if you set a reminder on your phone to do that, and actually do it when the reminder comes through. All of the resources available to us now make this process so much easier!

The Basics for My Campaign:

Next month is Women’s History Month…and women, historically, have hair.😊. So, I’m spending today choosing items from my website that I would offer to historical women…I think it’s going to be fun! I’ve already collected some quotes that I’m considering using, and I don’t really want to use someone else’s images on my IG, so I’ll create graphics for the quotes, and then add photos for products I would ‘wear if I was’ or ‘recommend to’ historical women.

Most of the images of these women are very expensive to use, and ripping someone’s pics for IG is just really not cool…I checked out some images of Maya Angelo on Getty just to test that idea…as mentioned above, just the amount of time that would be involved in finding useable and/or affordable images of these amazing women is not reasonable for the purposes of this campaign.

My goals are to increase engagement, encourage & inspire women, reflect on historical women and their accomplishments, and to showcase products.

Here’s a rough draft of what might have been one of my posts – the campaign is still a work in progress – I’ve played with ideas today, and will continue to work on this for the remainder of the week. Why won’t I be using this one? Well, before you post a quote, it’s always a good idea to do a little fact checking. Though this is a beautiful quote, it’s not hers…and we ALL know that Angelo has many incredible quotes that CAN be attributed to HER! My goal is not to #factcheck, or #correcthistory with this campaign – but to share the words these women used to inspire women, and humanity, everywhere. So, this one won’t remain in the campaign. The goal is to have everything ready and scheduled by Friday afternoon, without spending hours working on this, though I will be looking for the quote origins that I’m not familiar with – because I’m kind of a geek like that.

And, here’s the start of a spreadsheet I’ll use to schedule posts. When scheduling many posts, it helps to have a clean layout to follow so that you stay on track – it can also assist you in visualizing your posts all together, so that you can make adjustments if you’d like. It’s unlikely that I’ll fully type out all of the text for each post onto the spreadsheet, but that gives you an idea…a place for thoughts and prompts for yourself. Or, you can put them all there – it makes it very simple to copy/paste. Below the table is the link to my active spreadsheet – I’ll leave that here for you to view as I work and add to it!

					Hashtags
Date	Post No.	topic/quote	image	text	all posts	campaign	individual post
Monday, March 1, 2021	1	Maya Angelo	You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.	Things can sometimes seem absoletely impossible…but take a moment to look back at what you have survived, and where that journey has delivered you….	#messybunmoments	#womenshistorymonth #HERstory #strongwomen	#survivor #joyinthejourney #theotherside
Tuesday, March 2, 2021	2
Wednesday, March 3, 2021	3						#wearitwednesday

I’d love to know, in the comments, what brought you here? What campaign are you planning? Drop your IG handle, too, so I can follow along and see how it turns out!

Be sure to follow me on IG to see how my Women’s History Month campaign turns out!

I hope you found this post helpful, and that it guides to create a fun, engaging, and potentially educational IG campaign!

Resources:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/03/bird-sing/

https://professorbuzzkill.com/angelou-bird-sings-because-it-has-a-song/