5 Reasons You Need an Instagram Editorial Calendar

What is an Instagram Editorial Calendar

An Instagram Editorial Calendar is essentially a social media planner for your Instagram account. The idea of creating an editorial calendar might sound frivelous at best. However, if you’re investing time and energy into growing your Instagram account this is definitely a task worth conquering. Not unlike any other Calendar an IG editorial calendar helps you pre-plan posts. Pre-planning will help Instagram account owners or  managers consider special events, holidays, launches, and alleviate the pressure of having to find time each day to create visual content and captions.

Let’s dig deeper and explore the different benefits of an Instagram Editorial Calendar

Reason #1 : Staying Organized

Posting on Instagram without any direction is a stressful situation. Planning your posts in advance will help keep you organized and on target. There’s a great deal of turn around time required to properly plan your feed. In this sense an editorial calendar clearly outlines different aspects of feed planning including:

• Sourcing media
• Designer Turnaround time (The amount of time it takes to create visually appealing posts)
• Caption Creation time (The amount of time it takes to write and plan captions for each post)
• Team approval

After all these activities are said and done the feed is then ready for scheduling. You now have enough resources to make the best use of visual assets. For example, Ampfluence uses our IG editorial calendar to create enough headway to observe motifs beforehand. We can then put on our creative director hats and include or exclude items that are not the best fit for the feed.  Staying organized gives us this flexibility. More importantly, we’re not shuffling around or making decisions under pressure.

Reason #2 : Consistency Breeds Authority

Having a consistent theme or post subject matter gives you the opportunity to share well-thought content. Posts with a consistent theme creates brand awareness. More importantly, consistency exudes authority. Becoming an authority on Instagram is the simplest method to attract the right audience. For example, Gary Vee is no stranger to consistency. Everyday he posts at least 3 – 4 IG posts. This is well outside the standard 1 – 2 Instagram posts a day. However, we’ve come to expect this frequency from Gary’s account. His ability to remain consistent allows us to regularly engage with his content. While we can’t all be GaryVee he’s surely a great example to follow.

Reason #3 : 4-1-1 Rule

If you’re not familiar with 4-1-1 rule, this method started on Twitter but later on adapted to other social media sites too. Originally coined by Andrew Davis author of ‘Brandscaping’, the 4-1-1 rule is a sharing concept consisting of 4 self-written pieces, 1 shared post, and 1 self-promoting post. This rule is highly recommended to social media accounts for businesses. Having an Instagram editorial calendar allows you to actually execute this type of strategy. For example, some marketers use content buckets, tribes, or reposting apps to provide variations in their feeds. When using an editorial calendar for Instagram you can plan for these types of content in advance. This gives you enough time to curate pieces that match your quality standard.

There are some major benefits to following the 4-1-1 Rule. These benefits include:

• Decreases the cost of creating content
• Fosters engagement with other influencers
• Provides a medium to share thoughts on industry opinions
• Allows you to easily repurpose content in a timely manner

As mentioned above to execute this strategy properly you must have a calendar in place. Even if you’re using a simple Google Calendar to plan your posts. Without a calendar, your feed can easily become a mess. For example, you might posts 6 curated pieces in a week without posting any content created by you. Below is a spammy method of posting content using all reposted images. This type of posting strategy gives your audience the wrong impression. An IG editorial calendar will help you add value in an interesting manner without diminishing reputability.

Reason #4 : Time-Saving

Planning your posts ahead of time will actually save time in the long-run. The obvious benefit of creating an Instagram Editorial Calendar is the ability to recover time daily you would normally spend obsessing over your next Instagram post. To be quite frank, on average it should take a social media manager no more than 10 hours a month to plan an Instagram feed for that month. However, actually achieving that 10-hour benchmark requires some honest planning. When a process is in place planning and production can be easily executed. To ensure planning does not occupy erroneous hours or resources create a simple process before you begin planning the feed. Ask questions like:

• Are my creative assets ready?
• Can I use a creative template to decrease design time?
• What tool(s) should I use to plan and schedule my feed ?
• Are scheduling tools really necessary ?
• What process will I use to store the images ?
• Can I create a naming convention for images to make them easier to post / schedule ?

Answering these questions in advance will help you meet that 10-hour productivity mark. More importantly, block out some time at the end of the month to prepare for next month’s feed. If you can manage to spare 10 hours in one sitting that’s great. If not, plan accordingly by breaking down the steps in manageable intervals.

Reason #5 : Manage Time-sensitive events

Never miss an opportunity to keep your followers updated with upcoming events. Guesting is a golden ticket for boosting your brand’s image not only in person but also in the social media world. For example, you might be a pediatrician speaking at a seminar, promoting your speaking gig on IG is an awesome opportunity to add credibility to your online profile. We see this very often in the social media or tech conference world. If you have an event you plan on attending during the month pre-plan a prompt before the event. Be sure to block out a slot for post-event pics as well. The better you become at planning the easier it will be to compose timely posts.

Here’s a cool real-world example of  Social Media Famous Liza Koshy @lizzzak posting thanks to her crew for welcoming her on a visit to Australia

What Does An Instagram Calendar Look Like ?

You don’t need to look for a specific calendar just for your pre-planned posts, in fact, any calendar will do! As long as you employ some organizational skills then you’re in for a good start! If you haven’t picked a particular calendar yet, then why not use Google Calendar? Yep! you read it right! Google calendar is a great way to start your planning. This calendar can be adjusted on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly view. However, if you’d like to use a professional planning tool you can use apps like:

• LaterApp
• Planonly
• Hootsuite
• Plann
• Preview

Final Thoughts on Creating an Instagram Editorial Calendar

You now have a list of reasons you should be using an Instagram Editorial Calendar. It might seem hard at the start (because hey! Nothing’s easy from the start!). However, once you get this processed perfected you’ll become and Instapowerhouse. You can take your newfound time to create more compelling content, grow and engage with others on Instagram, or even start an IG Channel series. There’s so much to gain from perfecting this process. So what are you waiting for get out there a start creating your calendar today!