Plan and publish to Instagram

Social media sits as its own row in the menu, in the Contact & messaging group, directly under Email. This guide is about Instagram.

Under the row there are five sub-pages:

• Posts & calendar — write and schedule posts, see the calendar.
• Inbox — messages to your account.
• DM automations — replies that send themselves.
• Statistics — what worked.
• Accounts — the connection to Instagram.

Connect the account

Go to Social media → Accounts. There are two ways in:

• Connect via Facebook Page — recommended. Works if your Instagram is linked to a Facebook Page you manage.
• Log in with Instagram — for professional and business accounts. This route needs an approval from Meta that’s in progress.

If you take the first route you need to be an administrator of the Facebook Page. That’s the most common snag: if someone else set the page up for you, you need the admin role before the connection works.

Write a post

1. Go to Social media → Posts & calendar.
2. Create a new post.
3. Write the caption and add an image or video.
4. Choose to publish now, or set a date and time.

Images and hashtags are chosen inside the same view — they no longer have tabs of their own.

The calendar

In Posts & calendar you see the whole week or month. That’s where you notice you have four posts on Tuesday and nothing for a week.

Plan a week at a time. It takes an hour and removes the daily question of “what should I post today”.

The inbox

Inbox collects your messages. You answer from there without opening Instagram — which in practice means you answer without losing twenty minutes to the feed. The inbox also has a view for comments, but Meta is still reviewing the permission to manage comments, so don’t count on it yet.

DM automations

Under DM automations you set up replies that go out on their own — for example when someone writes a certain word to you.

Use it sparingly. An automatic reply pretending to be personal is spotted immediately.

If the menu is missing

Social media is on by default, but it can be switched off per workspace. If you can’t see the row, go to Settings → Features and turn on Social media.

Tips

• Three posts a week you can keep up beats seven for two weeks and then silence.
• Write the caption the way you’d say it. Instagram isn’t a press release.
• Check Statistics once a month, not every day. A single post tells you nothing; ten posts tell you what your audience actually wants.
• Put your inbox time at a fixed point in the day. That’s the difference between running social media and being eaten by it.