How To Use Later to Schedule ALL Your Social Media Content

How To Use Later to Schedule ALL Your Social Media Content

Facebook, Instagram, Social Media, Ultimate Instagram Workshop No Comment

I want to tell you about my favorite (free!) app called Later that has helped me organize, schedule and post images to ALL of our social media. It’s the key to our consistency and to be present when our audience is (even if I’m not available). 

Why We Use Later and Features I Love

  • First and foremost, Later is free (up to 30 posts a month)! There are a ton of scheduling options for you, but this is one of the only ones that are free. (We use the $9/mo plan that allows for scheduling multi-photos, videos, 100 posts per month, and additional analytics)
  • Later has the distinction of being an official partner of Instagram. In addition to real-time text notification posting that’s been the traditional workout for Instagram scheduling, the platform allows for truly automated publishing on single-photo posts.
  • Drag and drop your photo onto the calendar and it will create a post for all three platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can tweak the caption for each platform too.
  • You can also schedule Instagram stories!
  • You can type your full caption inside the app on your phone or on your desktop. Pro tip: hit “enter” to create a line break when typing on your desktop and it’ll copy over on Instagram to help break up your paragraphs
  • No more typing whole paragraphs with your thumbs! It is so much easier to get all your thoughts out on a bigger screen and keyboard, so we try to schedule as many posts as we can from our desktops. 
  • We also love that when using the app on our desktop we can pull images from our computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive, instead of being limited to our phone’s camera roll.

Track, Tweak, And Repeat

If you’re super busy throughout the day and you don’t have many chances to try new times to see what the results may be, we get it. Later makes scheduling new times super easy. If you log into Later on your desktop, you’ll be able to drag and drop images to change what day and time to post.

Want to try 6:45 a.m. versus 7:00 a.m.? Just slide the image up a tad and the app will drop it in the new time slot. See your entire week or month at a glance to know when future posts are going out to make sure that you’re being consistent throughout the day (and don’t forget the weekend!). 

Preview Your Posts

You can “preview” what your account will look like. Say for instance that you’ve been feeling that your feed is getting too much of a certain color or photo type. You can preview your feed to see what images you could use to break up what you already have. 

Group Your Photos

Another feature that we’ve just started using is the ability to “tag” and group our media. So when you’re in the desktop version of Later you can view your “media library”. From here you can tag individual images so they’re easier to find later. For instance, we tag images “food” or “sunsets” or “local businesses”. So when our feed needs a shot similar to one of those, we can find one super quickly.

Post to 3 Platforms at Once

This is one of my favorite features of Later. You can choose one photo, drag it onto your calendar, and it will create a post for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

It will look like this:

Once you click next it will show it on all three platforms and you can adjust the caption for each. For example, Facebook allows links in the captions so I edit that to direct people to our Instagram or our website.

Another great feature is that it has crop settings for each platform so you just click edit and select which one you’d like.

Once you hit publish you can drag the photos around to publish at different times on each platform if you’d like.

Auto-Posting

Like I mentioned, Later has the distinction of being an official partner of Instagram. In addition to real-time text notification posting that’s been the traditional workout for Instagram scheduling, the platform allows for truly auto publishing on single-photo posts.

For multi-photos and videos, it will send you a push notification on your photo and all you have to do is hit “post, copy, paste” then add in your hashtags and you’re done. Easily posted in less than 30 seconds. 

There are other great scheduling tools out there and I’ve tried a lot of them, but none of them had all the great features Later does at this price. I used the free plan for a LONG time and I bet you could as well!