It’s beyond difficult to post on a day-to-day basis without a plan, a strategy, and a schedule. It took us a while to get it all planned and organized. We know a lot of you out there who are struggling too and we want to share our strategy with you.
For months now, we’ve been using Plann. And let me tell you, we’ve tried our fair share of Instagram scheduling apps. Plann is our favorite and we won’t be looking back.
Now before you click the X and say, ugh, another ad! Another scheme to get me to buy something… This isn’t that. This isn’t a sponsored post. This isn’t even a collab. This is us sharing with you what we love about this app and how it can boost your social media strategy. Plus, we currently use the free version!
Here’s how we use it:
Plann’s website is really easy to navigate. Everything you need is on the righthand side: Your posts, stories, your overall strategy (which is my fav feature), your account’s results, hashtags, replies, and an overall content calendar.
You can use Plann in a lot of ways, but we primarily work with the grid on the righthand side of the website. Here, you can rearrange how your posts and stories look on your feed, schedule, write out your captions, or save drafts for later. My fav thing about this feature is you have the option of choosing to schedule yourself, the best times Plann knows for your account, or when your audience is most active. How cool is that?
When you start out scheduling, you’ll click on either posts or stories on the righthand side. You can either put media directly in the grid or draft a story/post right there, or you can click “Manage Media” up at the top. Here, you can make collections, add all your different media so it’s all in one place and you can schedule it out more strategically.
Okay, my favorite thing about Plann is their Strategy feature. This is awesome because you can plan exactly what you want to post every single time. You can create a grid with everything your brand is about so you are hitting those posts every week and it’s strategic.
For example, for Thrive, we have so many things we do, it’s hard to keep track of it all. So in our posting strategy, we have podcast info, education, products, quotes, community, and conference posts in our strategy. After you build this strategy, you can add it to your grid. There, you can see everything you need to post, in order for the week. So awesome and SUPER helpful for creating and maintaining a solid strategy.
Results is another awesome feature where you can see how your posts are doing, where your followers are primarily based, what they like seeing, follower growth, the best times to post, the best hashtags, etc. It’s awesome and gives you an overview of what you need to keep doing and what you need to alter.
Okay, the hashtag feature might be my second favorite feature because it’s so helpful for making those hashtag lists and saves you a TON of time and searching. So basically, you start a hashtag set, name it, and start searching for hashtags based on your brand.
It will tell you what hashtags are way too oversaturated and won’t get you much traction, which aren’t being used as much and will work better for you, and which aren’t being used at all and won’t get you any views. It’s amazing and saved us so much hashtag research time.
Now that you have everything scheduled out, strategized, planned, and organized, your social media game is going to improve like crazy. Plann has helped us implement a solid strategy to where we always know what to post and where our vision is.
We’ve gained so many new followers, improved our engagement, and pushed our brand further into the spotlight because of Plann’s awesome features.
We highly suggest you try it out and let us know what you think. If you want to know even more about the awesome features of Plann and how to get some money along the way, you can check out our FREE InstaThrive course in collaboration with Plann and ShopYourLikes!
It’s an amazing resource to nail down how to improve your Instagram strategy and start making some money while doing it! We’d love to hear about if you tried Plann, what you loved about it, and everything it’s doing for your social strategy in the comments!
THE AUTHOR: NATALIE MATESIC
Natalie is the content strategist here at Thrive. Currently, Natalie works on the side as a virtual assistant and sings in her free time. She is known for her energetic and fun-loving personality. She channels her creativity through ceramic making, hiking, writing music, and yoga.
