How to Schedule Instagram Posts and Stories?

Adil Yousaf
4 min readSep 28, 2021

Instagram Web version does not offer so much to content creators.

Publishing posts and scheduling them was a big concern for the social media managers.

Do you also looking for a way to schedule Instagram stories without third-party tools?

In this article, you’ll discover how to use your Facebook Business Suite to manage and schedule Instagram posts AND Instagram stories.

Cross-promoting media posts between Facebook’s 2.89 billion monthly active users and Instagram’s 1.074 billion monthly users is part of many businesses’ content marketing strategy, but the process hasn’t been smooth in the past. Many brands relied on third-party tools to accomplish this feat.

Facebook Business Suite is still a fairly recent rollout designed to integrate admin tasks between Instagram and Facebook business pages in one seamless experience. This allows business owners and brands to:

  • Manage all comments, direct messages, and notifications in one centralized platform.
  • Keep up with policy changes, new guidelines, and terms of service updates.
  • Use analytical insights to monitor campaign performance and audience demographics.
  • Cross-post on both platforms.
  • Manage commerce stores and the ad center.
  • Control page settings.
  • Strategize content marketing strategies with a calendar to schedule posts and stories ahead of time.

Facebook Business Suite is a game-changer for companies and professionals operating on a tight budget, who now have access to all of these tools for free.

Connect Business Suite:

Inside Facebook Business Suite, click the toolbox icon at the bottom of the screen and then select Settings. Within your settings, you’ll find Instagram. Tap Connect.

On the next screen, tap the blue Connect Account button.

A confirmation screen will appear asking if you want to allow access to Instagram messages in your inbox. You can change this choice later in your settings if you need to.

Once you confirm, you’ll be prompted to either continue with Facebook or log into Instagram with your username and password.

Next, choose your Facebook account or log into a different Facebook account to complete the setup.

Schedule Post on Instagram and Facebook:

Facebook Business Suite offers a ton of helpful tools for managing both your Instagram and Facebook pages. This article will focus on the Posts & Stories feature.

You’ll find Posts & Stories in the toolbar on the left side of your screen. Once you click it, you’ll be taken to the Posts page — although you can toggle between posts and stories easily at the top of the page.

Create an Instagram Feed Post:

In the Published section of Facebook Business Suite, you can create a new feed post for Instagram, Facebook, or both.

Start by clicking the blue Create Post button in the top-right corner.

Inside the new window, check the boxes for Facebook and/or Instagram, depending on where you want to post.

You can choose to add text for both platforms in the box on the left, or toggle between your Facebook and Instagram posts to customize the text for each one in a secondary text box located in the middle. This is a huge benefit that Facebook Business Suite hasn’t always offered. Now you can put your hashtags and @mentions on your Instagram post without cluttering up your Facebook post.

When you upload your media, Facebook Business Suite allows you to tag products and make edits, including adding filters.

Scheduling Instagram stories used to be impossible, even through paid third-party apps. Facebook’s decision to make this feature accessible in Business Suite has been met with resounding applause from marketers and business owners alike.

In previous versions, there was only one text box available, which made the option of scheduling both Facebook and Instagram posts at the same time hard to pull off.

Trying to tag and @mention other accounts for two separate platforms in the same text block was a nightmare, and while hashtags were a must for Instagram, they just never took off on Facebook.

That led users to schedule their Instagram and Facebook posts separately to accommodate for tags, mentions, and hashtags, which defeated the purpose of streamlining activity.

With Business Suite, you now have free access to the new evolution of cross-marketing from a centralized platform.

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Adil Yousaf

Digital Marketing Professional | Blogging | Write about Digital Marketing and Trends here