building your Instagram Routine
If you’re feeling exhausted trying to keep up with everything you “should” be doing to market your business on social media, it might be time for you to build yourself an Instagram routine. By stacking a few healthy engagement habits into a tidy block of time that fits your schedule, you can begin to see traction in your metrics and start having those conversations with potential leads rather than waiting for sales to come to you.
What’s actually included in an instagram routine?
When establishing your Instagram routine, it’s important to start with an overall social media strategy. You don’t necessarily need a formal document with a content plan, although I can help you with those if you’re looking for support in that area, but you do need to be super clear on a few things:
Have a goal in mind. It’s so much easier to move forward when you know where you’re going. Are you looking to build awareness of a specific offer or your business as a whole? Are you looking for more sales? Get clear on the results you’re looking for so you know what steps are ahead.
Have an idea of your ideal audience. Are there certain niches or types of businesses that would benefit most from your offer? Where do your ideal folks like to hang out on Instagram? Are there pages or products they follow where you could go connect with them?
Know your capacity. If you make a daily to-do list that will take you 3 hours but you have 15 minutes, you’re setting yourself up to have a hard time. By keeping your to-do list within a reasonable range, you’re going to build confidence and trust in yourself along the way because you’re completing the steps you’ve set out to do. I’ve learned this one the hard way and I’m working on building that trust with myself back up.
Once you have these things in place you have a great plan to help you move forward and build a consistent routine that works for you.
Components of an instagram routine
What do you actually do on Instagram? And I’m not talking the mindless Reels scroll at 2am when you should be sleeping. What tasks actually move the needle for your business on Instagram. I like to break it down into three areas:
Posting to the feed. I’ve heard this described as a digital storefront on Instagram. If someone clicks on your profile, you want to give them the best idea of who you are, who you help and how you can help them. By posting to the feed consistently and in a way that’s aligned with your goals, you’re starting that relationship off on the right foot.
Posting to Stories. This is a separate task from posting to the feed because these posts disappear after 24 hours. I always recommend keeping your stories active because it shows that you’re using your profile (with the little ring around your profile photo) even before someone clicks to see your profile itself.
Engagement. Social media is supposed to be social. It’s important to take the time to talk to your audience: both the people who follow you and the people you follow.
okay, but how much time will this take?
If you’re reading the list above and going to your Google calendar to figure out how the heck you’re going to fit all of this into your already busy day, take a deep breath friend. You can build an Instagram routine that fits into a 30 minute window each day and still covers the tasks you need to complete. You can also obviously work beyond those 30 minutes and do more if you have more time. One caveat to this is that the feed posts are probably going to take the most time, but once you learn to batch your content, you’ll be able to have more time to focus on the other things.
I would recommend getting started by coming up with the number of feed posts you want to post each week. If you’re not sure, I generally recommend three times per week and using one carousel, one reel and one static image with a longer caption. This gives your reader a variety of options so they can find the one that best suits their preferences while also giving you the opportunity to tell your message in multiple ways.
My process for batching content, if I had to put it in one sentence, is coming up with the idea, writing the captions, plan the visuals and post live when it’s time to post. It sounds simple, but it can be time consuming and it’s important to remember that you can split it up into multiple days if needed. Batching content takes time to learn, and I have a mini course within Content & Community if you’d like to learn there, but it will save you time in the long run. If you can dedicate an hour a week to batching your content, you’ll have more time throughout the week to maintain those connections with Stories and engagement.
Once your content is taken care of you can split those 30 minutes into blocks that make sense for you between Stories and engagement.
Instagram stories and engagement strategy
So you’ve heard of Instagram Stories and engagement, obviously, but do you know what you should be doing with each?
I like to start with Stories because it gives my followers something to interact with, and then I go engage after that’s ready. In your stories, I like to recommend inviting your audience for conversation for both business and non-business related things. You can talk about transformations from your offers or the “before” that your clients face, but you can also share relatable content that proves you’re an actual human. I find myself telling most of my clients this: share that you’re a human. In this world of AI and our friend chatty, bringing the human element to our social media is more important than ever.
As for engagement, there are so many ways to interact with people on Instagram. But first, a few rules! Don’t be spammy. If you do the same action too many times in a row, your account can be flagged by Instagram as a potential bot. So be aware of sending too many emoji replies or mindlessly scrolling and giving out likes. Be intentional. And, second rule, remember that there’s another human on the other side of the screen. Be kind, don’t tear people down, that was so high school and we’re way past that as adults. My community is all about building each other up and firmly believing in community over competition, and I invite you to join me in that mission. Oh, and consent based selling! If the conversation gets there, ask if they’re interested in hearing more rather than just sending a copy and paste message to everyone.
Now that you know the rules, it’s time to engage! Here are a couple ways to get started with engagement on Instagram:
Reply to stories! These replies go directly to their inbox and it’s a great way to start a conversation. Their stories also give you a great way to have a human first approach of “omg your dog is adorable!” or “what kind of coffee did you get?! it looks amazing!”
Intentionally scroll the feed. Go leave comments, like thoughtful, answering prompts comments on people’s posts. You can do this in your home feed as you scroll, or you can also do this on the accounts of big names in your niche. I’m not saying this to poach! Go be a kind contributor to the conversation. You can also go comment on posts for the people who follow you who you might not follow back. I generally recommend checking your followers list from time to time because maybe someone you might vibe with snuchk in there, so you should go say hi.
Putting it all together
Once you find a few types of Stories that you like to share and a few ways of engaging with your audience that work for you, it’s time to build your routine. Set a timer for 30 minutes and see how much you can get done with these two things. The more you practice, the easier it will get.
If you’re looking for inspiration in this area, you’re going to want to join my Everything Else challenge that starts on August 1 to help you with everything besides posting to the feed on Instagram. You’ll get 30 prompts for engagement and posting in your stories, plus guides to help with the foundational elements like bio, highlights, etc. The goal of this challenge is to give you ideas on how to engage and share in stories so that you find a few ways that work for you in hopes of building a sustainable routine.
We start August 1st, and you’ll get the Slack invite and challenge materials the week before. Plus you’ll have a chance to win fun prizes along the way! There are 2 ways to join: Join the standalone challenge for $50, or join Content & Community and it’s included in the membership (along with all the other goodies that come with it!) for $35 per month. Hope to see you there!
