BBP 022 How to Batch Instagram with Allison Baggerly

Tools and Resources Mentioned:

• Later: https://later.com/

About Allison Baggerly

Allison Baggerly teaches women how to budget, save money, and pay off debt. She has built a community of loyal followers who turn to her for support and guidance. Learn more at https://inspiredbudget.com/

Shownotes

Hey Boss, welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. 

Today we’re talking about batching Instagram content, and in particular how to batch Instagram Stories, this Instagram knowledge is coming from Allison Baggerly who was one of our fantastic 2020 Summit speakers. 

Remember if you want to make sure you get notified when registration opens for the 2021 Summit, be sure to joining the Blogger Breakthrough Summit newsletter and the link to that is included in the show notes.

Now, let’s dive in…..

[00:00:36].580] – Allison
So the first thing that people always ask me is do I really need to be posting consistently? Do I have to post every day? Do I have to be in my stories every day? And the answer is, I think you should be consistently posting, just like you’re going to be consistently creating content for your blog. You need to be consistently posting to your Instagram. So I post every single day and I’m in my stories every single day.

[00:00:59].330] – Allison
And the way I do that is I batch all of my posts, I batch everything. I even sometimes will batch my stories out.

[00:01:08].580] – Liz
OK, how do you mean you batch out? So obviously I understand like batching and creating images, right for Instagram. You can even there are schedulers for that if you want. But batching stories, I, I don’t think I’ve ever even done a story or those more. Those tend to be more videos and kind of live can you explain how you batch those?

[00:01:29].640] – Allison
OK, so when it comes to batching my stories, what I actually do is I plan everything out, so I’ll brainstorm what I’m going to talk about, because if you’ve ever tried to jump into your stories, especially if it’s after a long day, if you’re still working regular [9:00] to [5:00], then you sometimes get home and you’re just like, I don’t even know what I want to talk about. You’ve nothing to talk about. And then you put it off and then you start to resent and dislike Instagram.

[00:01:53].630] – Allison
And so what I actually do and I’ll show you, is I plan out things I can talk about.

[00:01:59].480] – Allison
So I have a calendar and I literally write down my post ideas, my Instagram stories ideas. So I have an idea of something I can always talk about. That way, if I want to talk about it, I can. And the way I sometimes batch my stories, I don’t do it all the time. Yeah, it’s I will actually do a story, change my shirt, do another story, change my shirt and I just save them.

[00:02:23].900] – Allison
I download them to my phone and then on that day I upload them. There are places where you can pay like I know Later if you pay for the platform that you can schedule your stories out. I personally don’t do that because I’m cheap, so I don’t want to pay for something. But it’s definitely a really great way to say, like, OK, I know I’m going to have a really busy Sunday, but I want to at least show my face a couple of times. Let me record something on Friday or Saturday.

[00:02:53].660] – Liz
Can I ask a super novice question?

[00:02:55].810] – Allison Sure.

[00:02:56].390] – Liz
This is really going to show how little I know about Instagram…

[00:02:57].860] – Allison It’s OK.

[00:02:58].740] – Liz
You record your story, so you record them in the Instagram App and you don’t post them and you download them. Is that what you’re saying?

[00:03:03].390] – Allison
Yes. So what you do is you pull up just like you’re going to record a normal story and then there’s a little arrow button to save it. So what I actually do is because I work from home full time, but I like posting my stories in the evenings. So what I actually do is I will record my stories, caption them, download them to my phone, and later on that night I will actually just upload them super quickly whenever people are more likely to be on the app.

[00:03:30].980] – Liz OK, gotcha. Yeah.

[00:03:32].680] – Allison
So just a little stories hack, if you will.

[00:03:36].020] – Liz
Yeah. Yeah. OK, all right. So you batch your content or you kind of have an editorial calendar for it, which I use an editorial calendar because it always gives you something, even if you’re like something comes up that day that’s more inspiring that you’re going to talk about. You just didn’t have that idea for another day. Like, you don’t have to stick hard core to your editorial calendar or for anything.

[00:03:57].290] – Allison Exactly.

[00:03:58].790] – Allison
And I personally batch my Instagram post seven days in advance. And I, I, I brainstorm all the content, then I take all the pictures and do all the images at once. Upload it all at once, caption it all at once. So that’s what I’ve been doing since the beginning because I, I’m, I now work home at home full time on my business. But I was a teacher for two years of it and so I would do that every single Saturday during during that time.

[00:04:27].170] – Allison
And I think that that’s something that most people it throws them off is the time that Instagram can suck out of you. But if you batch it and if you if you batch and you can still be consistent and it doesn’t take as much time as everyone thinks it does.

[00:04:41].900] – Liz
Yeah. So a couple follow up questions that a) what tool are you using to batch and then B) how many posts are you doing per day?

[00:04:51].730] – Allison
OK, great question. So I use Later.comto batch. It was the first one I ever use and you can schedule thirty posts for free and I like that, now I do set it to notify me. I don’t have the one where it automatically posts because I get a notification for the time I want to do it, I do one last read over for spell check because there’s always something you miss, right? I do one more read over. Make sure if I have a link in my bio, it’s there and then I hit publish.

[00:05:19].850] – Allison
So I do that. And then what was the other question you asked me?

[00:05:23].000] – Liz
How many times a day do you post?

[00:05:24].240] -Allison
Oh, I only post one time of day. The only time I’ll post more than once a day is if I’m going through a big launch and I feel like my feed is too heavy on me talking about something I’m promoting.

Wrap Up

Okay, hopefully this little snippet helped inspired you to be more consistent with Instagram. Be sure to join me next week when I’ll be sharing some Pinterest Monetization strategies from Hannah Johnson. I hope you’ll join me then.