How to schedule posts on Instagram from Google Sheets 🤯 fast and free automation 🚀

hi this is greg from business automated today i'm going to show you how to create an automated content plan for your instagram account inside of google sheets okay so today we're going to be creating an automated content plan for our account called dapperdog outfitters and the first step will be to create google sheets inside of google drive we're going to call this spreadsheet instagram content plan and the next step is to create the names for the columns for the data that we'll be using i have already prepared the name for the columns over here so the first column is the name which will be a short name to identify our post or the number of the posts whatever you like the second step will be a url of a picture so we need the url of a picture let's start with this picture for example so you can see it's a picture of a cute dog next step will be the content of our instagram post which is the caption here i have also had predefined content so let's just make it slightly bigger we can wrap the content inside of single cell so it's easier to see and we can also edit remember that if you want to have a space if you want to have an enter inside of a cell you need to use ctrl and enter and that gives you an extra extra break line if you want to have bright line or if you want to add more content here you can see that i have already added some of popular hashtags for this particular category and what you need to remember that there are certain restrictions on the instagram in terms of what is the length of the characters that you can put and what is the number of hashtags that you can implement so we can have maximum 2 200 characters and 30 hashtags so to automatically see whether we have not exceeded those numbers we're going to use simple excel formulas you can check this formula here so you can see that we're basically checking the number of characters inside of the length of the text over here and basically adding for us as a reminder the maximum number of characters allowed so that we will know how many we have and the second one is a very nice formula for counting the the hashtag so you can see that we're counting here the number of hashtags the details of this formula will be in the description of the video so you don't you can basically copy it from over there you can see with this very smart formula uh you can quickly see the number of hashtags you can see that oh okay actually i can add one more so all right and the next column here will be for us to say whether this post is ready to be posted or not so let's put ready okay and this will be a two technical column so it will be date posted and it will be insta gram id okay so we have the first post ready we're going to have multiple posts like that and the ones that we would like to post there will be the ones that have ready so from our site we know that they have been completed and they are ready to be posted so now what do we do with that the next step will be to go to integromat and create a new scenario if you have never used integromat before then the description of integromat will be in the description of this video so you can find more information over there and here once we open your scenario we need to find the spreadsheets google google sheets and here rather than use the common watch rows that would react to whenever new row is added to our scenario we will use search search rows okay here you need to make sure that this is connected to your google account if it's not connected you need to create a new connection and then you need to find the spreadsheet and in this case it's going to be instagram content plan select the sheet we are using sheet number one and yes our columns contain headers and you can see that here already we can select which column we would like to use for a filter so we want to use the column status and this column equals to ready this way we will only find the records that are ready to be posted inside of this google spreadsheet okay and maximum number of return rows we don't want to return everything we want to return one at a time so press maximum number of return rules one okay and let's test this one okay you can see that integromat has found the row and this is the url of the picture and this is the caption that we have posted that we have inserted over there fantastic so then the next step will be to link this one into instagram so here we'll add another module and let's look for instant instagram we have to look for instagram for business because regular instagram will not allow us to post pictures so let's select instagram for business this means that your account also needs to be a business account and preferably if you're having any issues finding your account it needs to be connected with a facebook page so that it's visible in your business manager in facebook so what we are going to do we are going to select create a photo post we need to select our page dapper dog outfitters and then the next steps are very easy select the photo url so this is the photo url here and the next step is select caption so the caption will be the description here that we have placed okay so this would be ready but let's add one more step which will be update row and we want to have a confirmation that everything was posted successfully so here instead of selecting manually spreadsheet let's just map it to the spreadsheet that we had before so the spreadsheet this is id of the spreadsheet from this module and the sheet is this sheet and the row number it's also coming from there so we want to update that row number that came from there column range we can select that the same that doesn't really matter cz and now we need to update the column with the status so the column with the status was f so here we're gonna write post it so that we know that this picture has been posted and in the next column date posted we are going to add a date and in the next column we are actually going to use the post id of the instagram so that later we can for example find the number of likes and engagements on this particular post using a different scenario okay so then everything is set let's see how that works out let's let's press run once you can see that integromat has found one of the posts that one that was post marked as ready you can see that it's processing this you can see the confirmation with the post id means we have been successful and you can see the confirmation from integromat that the update to google has happened so you can see that the status has changed to post it and that the date has also been inserted for the current date and we got the instagram id so let's go back and let's see whether this post is showing up here here we are we can see and we already got two likes now let's see how can we post more pictures using your google drive so let's go back to google drive and let's create a new folder let's call it pictures and inside of this folder we are going to upload more pictures that we want to put on our instagram so you can see that the pictures are uploading to be able to use them we will have to get the link today to those pictures but that link needs to be available for everyone so rather than change it individually for each picture here we're gonna go to the folder settings and we're gonna make the whole folder available to anyone with the link so we're gonna change this and we're gonna change this to from restricted to anyone with the link let's click done and now all the pictures here are available to anyone with the link so that means that we can copy links individually for each one of them so we can copy the link and go back to the instagram and now there is one covet so instead of pasting it directly here we will paste it into a additional column i'm going to call it google doc url as you can see that url from google does not link us directly to the file that we can download it links us to a sort of a sharing url so if we would try to use this for sharing we see basically a preview not a link that we can download so for that we'll use one more formula and here is the formula which i already copied you don't need to know the details i'll copy it in the description below but basically what we're doing we are extracting the id from the google drive link so you can see that there is a hashed id inside and we are extracting this part between d and view and we are adding this to we are this with another text which is basically a simpler url that allows us for download so that you can see that right now this is um this also shows us a preview of the picture here which is kind of convenient and you can see that the moment when we post this into our browser it will start downloading the picture over here okay so let's go back over here and this is ready so let's see how posting over over here will work out let's run once again you can see we have got an error and this error was caused by us mislabeling the columns so i added additional column and the place of the ready column has changed so this needs to be updated over here so instead of the hashtag count this is g column right now status so we need to be sure that this is if you add additional columns over there you have to change it inside of the google sheets to make sure that you move the columns so now it will work but let's add one more filter to prevent execution if there is no ready found so this needs to be equal to one already exists okay and let's run it one more time all right so another picture got posted and now let's create a few more posts here so let's let me do that quickly and now just copy the formula and we can mark those pictures as ready now you can see that also we need to change which column is being updated with that with the status so here because of the additional column we just need to move everything by by one and we can mark which posts are ready and other posts can be for example waiting for some other changes or some other approval that we would need to do to them let's copy the formula for the photo url okay so now let's let's post another one and now you can see that this picture got properly updated and we also have this on our instagram and obviously we will not be clicking it one by one we would put our scenario on a schedule which means we could set this to post every day at the same time of the day or we could set it to post at regular intervals for example every six hours let's say 360 minutes or if we would like to do it every day but not exactly at the same time every day we could put um 1440 that is the same that's basically 24 hours but we could add 15 minutes so it would be every day but every day it will be later by 15 minutes so 1455 so we would set this to okay and then turn on and from now on we will be every day regularly posting one picture from our content calendar on our instagram i hope you find this video useful and if so please subscribe for more business automation tutorials till next time [Music]

Channel: Business Automated!

Views: 1,774

Keywords:

Id: _kHwPaxvlH4

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021