Between taking photos, editing them, writing captions, responding to comments, and more, it can take a ton of time to manage your Instagram account!
One way to save time is to schedule your Instagram posts, but if you want to be even more efficient, bringing on a team member can help not only to divide the work, but also create a better Instagram account and get more followers, faster! Here are 5 reasons why you should manage your Instagram account as a team:
1. Save Time with Your Instagram for Business
Every business owner knows that time is money. So if you’re looking to make better use of that ever-so-precious commodity, it makes sense for you to enlist the help of a teammate to manage your Instagram account. Working as a team is one of the best ways to save time, increase your productivity, and stay connected with your Instagram followers without getting burned out! Because we all know the Instagram burnout is real.
A great example of an awesome Instagram account run by a team is Montreal-based apparel company @betinalou, who runs the account with a team to help save time and build a beautiful and highly-visual feed.
Another great example comes from @jannaconner, an LA-based fashion and fine jewelry maker. Not only has working as a team helped Janna Conner curate a gorgeous feed, but it saves her time to engage with her community as well!
Whereas managing your Instagram account by yourself might take an hour or two per day, by creating a consistent workflow of creating, approving, and scheduling Instagram posts, and then dividing that work between two or more people, you can save yourself a ton of time to engage with your Instagram community!
Save Time & Schedule Instagram Posts
2. Focus On Your Strengths
Some people are great at curating a beautiful feed or taking really gorgeous photos, while others excel at optimizing their strategy or engaging with their Instagram community. Whatever your strengths, it’s important to find someone who can fill in the gaps in your skill set.
For example, if you’re great at the creative side but not so much the strategy, focus on creating the content and the aesthetics of your feed while your teammate writes the captions, optimizes your posting time, and builds key relationships with other Instagram accounts and influencers.
The fact is that the more you work together, the more you’ll become attuned to each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Later makes it super easy to manage your Instagram account as a team! By using an Instagram marketing platform, multiple people can manage all of the photos, videos, posting schedule, hashtags, and more. The best part? All your Instagram content is in one place, so you don’t have to send each other photos via email, text, or spreadsheets. Just add a team member to your Later account and you can all work on your Instagram, together.
3. Manage Your Instagram Account’s Community
Responding to Instagram comments and DMs is really important, but it’s also very time consuming. And unfortunately, a lot of people fail to grow their Instagram accounts because they don’t spend enough time communicating with their followers!
When people take the time to congratulate you, compliment you, or even just take notice of your great post, it’s important to comment back. Yes, it can be a pain when you have so much to do, but remember: if you want to build meaningful relationships with your audience, you need to communicate with them!
One of the great things about managing your Instagram account as a team is that you can have one of your team members be responsible for responding to your followers. It’s the best way to create authentic relationships, because one person will be able to actually create relationships with your followers.
Plus, your comments will come across as more genuine. When you’re busy creating or curating content, writing your captions, and working on your Instagram strategy, it can get easy to become lazy with your with your comments. When someone on your team is dedicated to responding to your community, they’ll have more time to write thoughtful responses that make your followers feel special, and keep track of the people who your brand is becoming Insta-friends with.
4. Share the Responsibility of Posting
Learning how to schedule Instagram posts is one of the best ways to save time, increase your productivity, and stay connected with your Instagram followers. And luckily, with Later you can connect multiple devices to your account so you can share the responsibility of actually posting
Posting consistently is a point that we like to hammer home pretty often. And with good reason! Once your Instagram community starts to grow, they’re going to expect to see a certain amount of “you” on their feeds. If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist and you’ll quickly fade into the background. Or worse, you might even get unfollowed!
Unfortunately, it can be really difficult to make a habit of posting every day (or however often is optimal for your account)! You might be busy dealing with finances, setting up an Instagram advertising campaign, or any of the many other things you have to deal with on a regular basis. The point is: getting into a consistent posting routine isn’t always easy.
That’s why we recommend enlisting the help of a free Instagram scheduler. Taking 30 minutes to an hour one day to schedule Instagram posts for the whole week will make your life less stressful, and it will save you a lot of time each day. In fact, if you bring on a team member to help, you might not have to actually “post” at all!
When you manage your Instagram account as a team in Later, you can connect multiple phones to your Instagram account, meaning that even if you want to plan the posts and write the captions for the week, someone else on your team can actually post them. So even if you’re on vacation, one of your team members can jump in and post for you! You can also divide the work of posting by having one team member post on weekdays while someone else posts on weekends, or if you’re posting in different time zones you can arrange that accordingly.
5. Collect User-Generated Content as a Team
Did you know that the average business on Instagram posts 1-3 times per day? That means you need to be creating 7-21 new images per week just for your Instagram! That’s a lot of valuable time spent taking, editing, and re-taking photos.
Creating your own Instagram photos and videos is great, but sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all yourself. That’s why a lot of brands rely on user-generated content (UGC) to save time! Rather than spending a ton of time flexing your creative muscle (setting up your shots, creating the right lighting, editing your photos, adding text overlays), you can leverage user-generated content to curate a beautiful feed.
And if you want to get even more efficient with your time, have one of your team members be in charge of sourcing Instagram content! Whether that involves monitoring your branded hashtag for awesome posts, engaging with all of the UGC, or adding photos to your content library using Later’s Search & Repost feature. Once you find a post you like, you can easily add it to your Later media library to use at a later date.
Search & Repost is way better than manually screenshotting a post, because not only does Search & Repost maintain the quality of the photo, but it automatically pulls in the caption and username of the original post.
As Instagram becomes a more effective and popular marketing channel, it’s becoming increasingly important that you create workflows to manage your Instagram account as a team. Hopefully these tips provide some inspiration to create your own Instagram team!
Ready to jump-start your Instagram engagement? Later makes it easy for you to plan, schedule, and manage your Instagram account!
