How To Automate Your Instagram™ Account To Run Itself When You’re On A Break
Instagram never sleeps, but we do.
We also take vacations, holidays and weekends off. Not to mention those times we don’t plan for: medical emergencies, personal reasons, helping family and much needed mental health breaks from Instagram.
So I thought the holidays were a perfect time to chat about a super important topic, that anyone using Instagram for business should know and implement. Whether you’re a social media manager or a business owner DYI-ing your IG management:
How to automate your Instagram account so it can run itself for the holidays
[or anytime you need to step away for an Instagram break for some time].
1) ADD A LANDING PAGE TO YOUR BIO
Replace whatever you have in the link in bio with a simple landing page with a the buttons people may need: your shop, services, content form, blog, lead magnet, waitlist etc.
2) AUTOMATE YOUR CONTENT FOR THE NEXT WEEK OR TWO
If you're following our Top 10 Countdown strategy and have it all set up, you should be good to go. If you’re using this break strategy outside of the holidays, you can just take your highest performing posts and reuse them exactly as they are.
But if you're not, just schedule a few feed posts to auto-publish for the holidays/your break . After that, review your captions to make sure all CTAs (calls to action) send people to the link in bio where they will find everything they need.
Speaking of calls to action, if you need help with captions, we have some solid Caption templates written by professionals with calls to action to engage, promote and sell your products or services? Check out our 125 Captions Templates for Instagram here.
Now I know what you're gonna ask! Yes, you can take a break from Stories, Carousels and Reels, so you don’t need to manually post anything.
Alternatively you can plan for a few simple stories and carousels and use the Facebook Business Suite to schedule for auto-publish, as long as they don’t have stickers or animations.
3) AUTOMATE YOUR DM REPLIES
Set up an Instant Reply or Away message for your DMs using FB Business Manager, so you don’t leave people hanging in DMs. You can let them know when they will be answered and direct them to the link in bio in the meantime.
Here's how you do it:
BOOM - you’re free!
Remember engagement is much lower around the holidays and it’s okay if you post less than usual and take longer to answer to people in the comment section.
Enjoy the holidays!
PS: this also works for any vacation, personal time off, maternity leave etc. So bookmark or pin this page to be able to come back to it later!
Want another way to do less and get more engagement?
Jump into the Collab Feature. Learn all the pro tips here!
Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and content shop to help social media managers and Instagram savvy women entrepreneurs to beat the algorithm and grow their organic engagement (yes, even in 2021). This year she also launched Your Template Club, a Canva Template subscription to provide social media managers and Instagram savvy business owners with content template designed for engagement in their inbox.
Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2017, Manu started Your Social Team with the mission of helping women entrepreneur and social media managers grow engagement and sales through Instagram without the overwhelm.