Instagram Marketing – Create Better Content with NEW, TIME-SAVING Features

As we all know, Instagram marketing significantly depends on creating captivating visuals to grow your following, drive engagement and get better results. For this, digital marketers need to make intelligent and time-saving decisions. Eventually, the most helpful thing in this regard is Instagram’s most recent built-in features to help them quickly create quality content. 

According to Statista, Instagram is one of the most popular social networks worldwide, currently sitting at more than 1.38 billion monthly active users, as shown in the image below.   

Popular global social networks ranked by number of active users (in millions) 2021

HubSpot’s Instagram Engagement Report, 2021 states that; 

These figures clearly denote that Instagram is not only for personal use anymore. Now, it’s a global platform that allows businesses to humanize their branded content, showcase products, inspire the audience with valued services, and even recruit new talent. 

Brands are driving massive revenue by their presence on Instagram because people are not just active on this unique platform – they are engaged.  

Want to restructure and streamline your Instagram marketing strategy and workflow? Are you in search of new ways to improve your marketing efficiency and drive better results? First, you need to produce better content quickly. 

In this article, you will learn about the new Instagram features that will help you save time by developing creative and persuasive content.   

Let’s take a look at five built-in, and time-saving Instagram features to get you ahead of the competition. 

Publish Your Posts From Desktop 

Instagram was the only mobile-first social media application which means it never had a desktop publishing feature. As a result, it often becomes difficult to post content from mobile devices. You would instead publish more content from your desktop browser. In late June 2021, Instagram had gradually started to roll out this feature, allowing people to publish their posts from the desktop. 

This feature is still rolling out. For now, this option only applies to Instagram feed posts. However, it means you can post images and videos from your desktop browser. 

The desktop publishing option for native Stories, IGTV, and Reels is not available yet. 

How to access this tool? 

1. Log into your Instagram account from a desktop 
2. Click the plus icon from the upper-right corner 
3. Create and post the content from your computer 

If you still don’t have access to this option of posting from your desktop, you can use the following tools. These free native tools will allow you to post the content on Instagram from your browser.  

Facebook Business Suite: 

Here’s the quick and straightforward process: 

1. Open your Facebook Business Suite 
2. Click on the account from where to post 
3. Expand the available list of tools 
4. Select Page Posts from this list 
5. Add an image or video 
6. Add captions and publish the post
7. Or, schedule the post for later or save it as draft
   

Creator Studio: 

Here’s the quick and straightforward process: 

1. Open your Facebook Creator Studio 
2. Select your Instagram account 
3. Click on Create Post button 
4. Select Feed or IGTV
   
   
5. Publish or Schedule the post
6. Or, save it as a draft for later use 

Hot Tip: You can use third-party tools like Buffer, HubSpot, and HootSuite that allow desktop posting on Instagram.  

Linking Out From Instagram Stories:  

You may get a verification badge for your Instagram account with little effort, but achieving the benchmark of 10,000 followers is the real struggle. It’s essential to have a more considerable following on qualified accounts to use advanced features. You must be using these higher-level features like the Swipe Up option in Instagram Stories to reach your business goals – continuous audience growth and accelerating brand awareness. Besides, it gives the content creators easy access to more lucrative brand deals. 

Instagram officials have recently revealed that they are testing link stickers in stories replacing the swipe-up feature. Since stickers are pretty popular with users, linking them to stories can bring more advantages for brands and content creators.  

• Users can have more control over how their stories appear. 
• Viewers can engage with stories through replies and reactions. 

This new feature of linking out stories from this social channel is perceived to have many positive implications. 

• Every single account can link out to encourage their audience for more browsing. 
• You can access this feature to establish a linking strategy at any point, any time.  
• You don’t have to experience a complex manual verification process to activate your account’s linking capabilities.    
• CTAs (Call to action) will be more prominent because stickers have enhanced visibility and can be placed anywhere on the story.   

Add Link Stickers: 

Here’s how you can add link stickers to your stories (similar to adding any sticker)   

1. Open your Instagram app
2. Press plus sign (in the bottom center) 
3. Tap on Story (instead of Post or Live) 
4. Create your Story (use camera or media) 
5. Click on Sticker Icon (in the top row)
6. Select the Link Sticker
7. Add your Link 
8. Send it to Your Story 

Kudos! You’re Done

The best thing about this feature is that it will be available to every user – unlike the swipe-up gesture – and not just verified accounts with a big following. So you can benefit from this feature right from the beginning. 

Create & Manage Your Stories Draft 

Instagram stories have always been a great way to create and post content in a moment. However, the story publishing process was unnecessarily complicated until they introduced this new draft feature. It makes the story planning and publishing process significantly more straightforward and quicker.

Now, you can create and edit your drafts and publish them at the optimal time. You can save your incomplete stories (to be updated later) as drafts. You can Save, Delete, or Keep these drafts.    

Here’s the simple process of creating, editing, and manage your Instagram Stories drafts.   

• Open your Instagram app
• Press plus sign (in the bottom center) 
• Tap on Story (instead of Post or Live) 

(Or, tap the story button on your Instagram Feed at top left corner)

• Create your Story (use camera or media) 

You can add text, images, videos, and other elements to your story. 

After this, you will have multiple options to perform different actions. 

Tap on X (upper left corner) to pause your work. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to discard the draft and changes you have made. 

You can tap on Save Draft and preserve your story and pick this work for further editing and final posting later.  

At this point, you will be notified about the story draft expiry. Drafts will be permanently deleted after 7 days you first save them.  

Within this timeframe, get back to your draft and repeat the workflow, and instead of creating a story from scratch, tap the Gallery icon on the screen (lower-left corner). 

Once your image gallery loads, you will see a Drafts tab on the top of your screen. Tap on it and continue developing your story from where you left it. 

You can see the number of days your draft will be available for editing at the bottom of each draft, as shown in the image below.  

Again, Tap X to save your edits, and a new prompt will give you the options whether you want to Delete or Keep the draft. 

Tap on Keep Draft, and all new changes will be retained and saved over the original version. 

By clicking on Delete Draft, the initial draft will be removed from your storage.

Remember that this feature is not a team-friendly feature because the drafts will be saved on your device and are not shareable, and that’s genuinely a limitation to your Instagram posting and marketing workflow. Multiple users cannot collaborate on planning and drafting the stories through native Instagram tools. 

Hot Tip: You can use third-party tools to apply your team-friendly approach while planning and scheduling your stories and publishing them at the right time.        

Feed Posts with Auto-Captions  

After rolling out auto-captioning or automated subtitles feature for IGTV last year, Instagram has recently introduced this option for its Stories. This new update to Stories allows users to add subtitles to their videos.

Here’s the simple process to follow and transcribe audio within your Instagram stories.  

1. Open your Instagram Story 
2. Tap the Three Dots (bottom right corner) 
3. Go to Story Settings 
4. Scroll down to Accessibility  
5. Tap the Toggle beside auto-generated captions

Creating auto-caption videos for your stories is a time-saving feature for Instagram marketers. You can do it from your Instagram stickers.

Add “(CC) Captions” sticker to your video story that will automatically convert your audio into captions.

As shown below, Matt Navarra, a famous and high-in-demand social media consultant, has provided the first glimpse of the feature. 

NEW! @Instagram has added a ‘Captions’ sticker for Stories

You can now auto-caption videos in stories with a range of different styles… pic.twitter.com/cijk7nWGC3

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) March 9, 2021

This feature isn’t available yet, but it will be incredibly beneficial for brands, content creators, and marketers in several verticals. A few includes:

Enhanced Accessibility:
Take all those followers in the loop who prefer consuming content with the sound on. The deaf audience would love you for this because they can better understand your message.

Increase Engagement:
You give your followers more opportunities to engage with you. Video transcription means better engagement rates, more likes, and insightful comments.   

Clarify Your Message:
Voice notes may not be understandable in your videos. So, if you want to get your message across truly, transcribe your audio with automated subtitles to give more clarity to your listeners. 

No Hassle, Time-Saving  
Be more confident with your creative investment on your Instagram account because auto-captions would save you significant time and hassle.    

Wrap Up:

Many Instagram features help marketers plan their social media calendar and achieve the set goals for brand awareness, conversions, and revenue generation. Now, they can leverage these new and time-saving features to get the most out of their business accounts, particularly as soon as they are available in their part of the world.    

Do you want to learn how to diversify your Instagram marketing strategy or get ahead of the fierce competition? Just book a call to talk to our experts. ArhamSoft (Pvt) Ltd. is determined to make businesses grow.