I LOVE having systems in place for my business. If I did not have workflows in place and various aspects of my business being automated, I’d be drowning in all the work I’d have to do! Things would be falling through the cracks! One of the best things I started doing for my business about two months or so ago was to do all of my social media prep on Fridays. Each Friday I sit down with my social media content planner and I get to work! Some things I can’t take care of right away (like a wedding or a session I’ll be shooting over the weekend) but I can most of the time get 95-100% of my media (Instagram, Facebook, and my blog) planned and scheduled for the next week!
The tool I use to help me do this Planoly! It’s a free service (for 30 posts a month), but I currently upgraded to a paid monthly subscription because I’m using it SO much!
I was using a different service before, and I switched to Planoly about three months ago and I’ve loved it so much! Here is what I like about this service:
- It’s VERY aesthetically pleasing. I love things that look super clean and simple, and this is weird, but I like that the fonts are not times new roman. I like things that have rounded edges.
- It’s incredibly user friendly. It is super easy to upload photos, enter captions and then schedule them.
- You don’t have to schedule every photo. You can upload a bunch of photos you want and then just leave them for a different time if you’re not quite ready to put a caption on it yet! It breaks down your feed into all of your posts, just scheduled, or just the unscheduled photos.
- It shows you what your feed will look like. I don’t post in real time anymore and haven’t for a long time so I like that I can see what my Instagram feed will look like with a whole week’s worth of content. I don’t really follow a theme so much in my feed, but I like to make sure I don’t post things that are too similar back to back!
- It shows you your stats. I love being able to log on and see how a post did in terms of engagement. It makes it easier for me to analyze my old posts and see what times of day get the most engagement from my followers!
- You can schedule multi-photo posts as well as your Instagram story! This is a feature that I really enjoy using 🙂 Especially my stories because then I can upload photos of Lily or my blog posts and they’re great quality!
- There is a desktop site for you to use. I don’t like using my phone if I don’t have to be. I also hate typing out long captions on my phone because it’s easy to make mistakes and lose my train of thought. I like that I can upload photos on my phone if I need to, and then later log on my computer and then type in my captions there and edit them. That’s always been a deal breaker for me. If a social media planning app didn’t have a desktop version for me to use, I didn’t use it.
- There are a lot of tools to use within the app. There’s a way to respond to your comments on your posts – which is helpful if you want to check how your post is doing but don’t want to get sucked into Instagram at the moment – as well as options to analyze your posts and look up hashtags! I haven’t done much with this yet but I’m going to!
Overall, using Planoly has actually given me so much time back! I love logging off for the weekend and knowing that I don’t have to work over the weekend to get things ready for Monday! Throughout the week I’ll get a little push notification when it’s time to post to Instagram and I just copy the caption and it’s done! It’s very very easy to post on your phone and I really do love this app! Since I started implementing my Social Media Fridays, I’ve also been able to use my other work days during the week to get some quality work done during my limited work hours.
If you’re a small business owner who is on Instagram, I HIGHLY recommend using this program!! It’s so so wonderful!
Linda is a Maine-based photographer specializing in weddings and creating family legacies. You can see more of her work online at lindabarryphotography.com, on Instagram, or on Facebook. If you want to reach out directly: linda@lindabarryphotography.com
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