If you feel like Facebook and Instagram are always changing, it’s because they are.
Sometimes, these updates force you to reassess your marketing strategy.
But other times, times like now, the change will better equip you to make the most of these platforms.
Enter Facebook Creator Studio. This tool may not be brand new, but a recent update to its Instagram abilities has our Social Media Manager, Shannon Goodell, really excited (unreasonably excited, actually, but don’t tell her I said that …) and she took it upon herself to give you the scoop on what’s good—and bad—about this update.
Check out her video update on the new Instagram capabilities inside Facebook’s Creator Studio (we’ve also included the complete transcript below).
And if you want to learn more about how you could be stepping up your social media game by downloading our brand-new, FREE guide to Facebook’s Creator Studio.
Facebook’s NEW Instagram Capabilities in Creator Studio
Full Video Transcript
Instagram creators, listen up. I think you’re going to love this update.
You might be familiar with Facebook’s Creator Studio. It was launched last Fall as a way for creators to more easily manage their content, but it was just Facebook only. But now you have the ability to schedule IGTV videos and Instagram feed posts within Creator Studio.
Why is this such a big deal? Well, let’s start with IGTV videos first. Using the app has been terrible to schedule IGTV videos. First of all, it’s very difficult to find the little plus sign to add your video; it’s just clunky. So I’ve been using the desktop, and it’s worked well. You can even add a custom image, but you cannot schedule. You just had to do it on the fly and take time out of your day.
Well now with Creator Studio, you can schedule your IGTV videos. You upload your IGTV video, you add the title, description, you choose that custom image so you don’t get cut off, and you can either publish right away or schedule.
We’ve been testing IGTV videos and getting good results. This is going to help make IGTV more of a part of our strategy moving forward, as we’ll be able to easily plan and schedule out the content in advance.
Now to feed posts, this is the update I think everyone will be the most excited about. So you can now schedule your videos, your images, and your carousel posts within Creator Studio. Now you may be thinking, “Oh, well I use a third-party scheduling tool for that, and it works just fine.” Sure.
But I don’t know if you’ve had this experience. You upload your video with them, that third party tool, and you publish it to Instagram. Then you go to your feed and you notice that the cover of the video is all messed up. It’s not what you had in mind.
So I was doing that and I just couldn’t handle it. It just didn’t look right. It didn’t display what the video was about when people are scrolling. So I’d actually go into the Instagram app, upload our video, and choose the cover image there. Well, that’s a huge time waster. But now, with Creator Studio, you can actually upload your video and choose a video still as your cover image or upload a custom cover image.
This is huge. This is probably the update I was most excited about, because we’re really upping our videos and Instagram, and this is going to be a huge time saver for me. Now you can upload your video, add your caption, add a location (which is great if you own a local business or doing conference marketing) and then choose that custom image, or a still that you want, to be your cover image for your video. And then you can either publish now or schedule.
I’ll definitely be scheduling all of our Instagram videos using Creator Studio instead of the third-party tool we were using before.
(NOTE: Learn more about how you can make the most of the Instagram update to Creator Studio with our FREE download.)
So now the second huge update you need to know about scheduling feed posts is the changes to carousels.
You may already be using carousels; they’re a great way to reach a variety of your audience. Some people learn better by videos, some people learn better by text. Some people prefer infographics. But before, in a third-party tool, you couldn’t do dynamic carousels, meaning you couldn’t, let’s say, post a video and a quote image and a tip image all within one scrollable post.
Creator Studio solves that problem. You can now create dynamic carousel posts, and schedule them, and they’ll post to Instagram and look beautiful.
I’m loving these new Instagram updates, but there are a few downsides that I think you should keep in mind.
First, you cannot edit a scheduled post, which is a major bummer. You can with Facebook, that’s always been a part of Creator Studio. But with Instagram, once you schedule that post, you really have the option to view it, publish it right away, or delete, and that’s it. So if you typically schedule out your Instagram posts for, let’s say, a month in advance, and then you like to go back and make edits, this is going to be a major limitation for you.
The second limitation is that you can’t repost previously published posts. I like to do this with our Facebook videos. I’ll look at our top performers and create a new post with that video. But you can’t currently repost other Facebook posts, like links or text or images, just videos. And you can’t repost any previously published Instagram posts. So that’s a little bit of a bummer. But the biggest issue, I think, is not being able to edit scheduled posts. But hopefully, since you had that capability with Facebook, that it will be coming for Instagram soon.
One last thing, there’s some post level insights I want to dive into quickly, that I’m loving.
You can see your published Instagram posts and you can sort it by time. Let’s say you want to do all of July, you can set that timeframe and look at all of your published posts. You can also sort by video, or image, or carousel, or even stories. And you can quickly see how many comments and how many likes each post generated.
And then the real magic happens when you actually click on a post. You get some amazing post-level stats, including how many website visits you’ve got from that particular post.
This is an awesome new tool that I definitely want to dive into. The ability to look back at your posts, and see, “Why did this particular post perform so well? And what were the actual ROI on that post? How much traffic did it deliver? How many profile visits did it generate?”
And I don’t know about you, but with some of the third-party tools, the Instagram analytics aren’t great, and it’s really difficult to get an overview of how each post performed. So this is something that I think you’ll definitely use moving forward. I know I will.
As far as analytic limitations, there’s an Insights tab for Instagram within Creator Studio, but it’s just going to give you a broad overview of the past 7 days; just very basic stats. This is something that’s fairly new, but given Facebook’s focus on Instagram, I have to think that this insights tab will be improved, and you’ll be able to get more data for a longer period of time.
Despite the limitations, I’m super excited for these recent updates to Creator Studio, especially the ability to schedule IGTV videos, upload feed videos, and change the cover image so that it’s more visually appealing, and the ability to create dynamic carousel posts that mix videos and images.
Have you checked out Instagram and Creator Studio yet? If not, I suggest you dive in, play around with it, start scheduling some posts, and see the post level analytics that I think are very powerful. Let me know what you think of the new Instagram updates within Creator Studio.
And don’t forget to download your FREE guide to Facebook’s Creator Studio.
