Planning & scheduling posts
Grid, Queue, Calendar and Ideas — plan it once and it publishes itself.
How it works
The Plan page has four tabs. Grid previews your feed as it will actually look: upcoming posts flow straight into the ones already published, and you drag an upcoming tile to reorder it. Queue lists everything upcoming in order of urgency: Needs attention (Instagram rejected it), On hold (waiting for a brand’s approval), Scheduled, and Drafts, with the posts you recently published from here underneath. Calendar shows the same posts by week or month. Ideas is where a post starts (see Ideas board).
Click New post to open the composer. Choose a format: Post (one photo), Reel (one video), Carousel (2–10 photos) or Story. Upload your media, write a caption (up to 2,200 characters, with live hashtag and @mention counters), and either pick a time to auto-publish or leave it blank to keep an untimed draft. A live preview shows how it will look on Instagram.
If your account has enough activity, a "Best times" row of chips (also shown as a banner at the top of the page) offers the hours your audience is most active, from the same data as Analytics → Audience → Best time to post. If you have set weekly slots, "Next free slots" chips put the post in your next open slot in one tap.
Each Queue row has Edit, Duplicate, Publish now (skip the schedule and post immediately) and Delete, and shows what is set on the post: approval state, first comment, DM funnel, brand deal and labels. A failed post shows Instagram’s error inline. Duplicate copies any post, published or not, into a fresh draft (media, caption, options, labels and DM funnel, but not the time), which is the quickest way to reuse something that worked.
A post you published from here keeps a row in the Queue: when it went live, a link to it on Instagram and to its Post Report, and what it earned (DMs sent, link taps, orders, revenue) once that is tracked. If a scheduled post fails to publish you get a notification straight away, linking to that post, while it can still be rescued.
How it flows
Set it up
- 1
- 2
Start a post
Click New post, pick a format, and upload your media, or start from an idea on the Ideas tab.
- 3
Schedule it
Pick a date and time, tap a "Best times" or "Next free slots" chip, or leave it blank to keep it as a draft.
- 4
Manage the queue
Drag Grid tiles to reorder, or use the Queue to edit, duplicate, publish now or delete anything upcoming.
Tips to get the most out of it
- Reordering the Grid only changes how planned posts preview against each other. It doesn’t reorder posts you’ve already published to Instagram.
- A video Reel that’s still processing on Instagram’s side shows "Publishing…" briefly; it goes live automatically once processing finishes, no action needed.
- Hover a published tile in the Grid to see what that post earned, and use Duplicate on your best performers to start the next one from what already worked.