Recently I got a new social media client, and there were a few things I wanted to do differently. There were a lot of videos the client wanted to post on Instagram which were longer than one minute and therefore would need to be posted to IGTV.
As far as I knew, I had a lot of manual work posting from my phone coming up. However, that’s when I found the Facebook Creator Studio. In this post I will be talking about this relatively new business tool and why you should be using it! Cover photo by: Bruce Mars
Where Third-Party Posting Tools Fails
I absolutely love tools like Hootsuite that allow me to schedule social media posts into the future. Unfortunately, Instagram is very particular about scheduling posts in these tools. You can schedule regular image and video posts, but anything with multiple images or an IGTV video is impossible.
Even Instagram-specific tools such as Planoly are plagued by these limitations. When faced with these issues in the past, I’ve ended up logging into Instagram on my phone and manually posting. And of course, I had to set a reminder to post it at the specific time I wanted it to go live, and get the files onto my phone in the first place. So, basically, it was inconvenient. These tools are great for the basics, but anything else is much more difficult.
Discovering Facebook Creator Studio
In addition to other third-party tools, I experimented with Facebook’s own publishing tools. These tools worked great for scheduling Facebook posts, because they allowed me to work on a specific page. Then I saw something called Creator Studio, that caught my interest. This turned out to be the godsend that I was looking for. After all, doesn’t it make sense that Facebook would have the best tools for posting to their own platforms.
You can see published posts and detailed analytics on those posts, plus you can see your upcoming scheduling posts. It is fairly video-centric, with tools for crossposting videos, and the analytics are more focused on video performance.
Why You Should Be Using Creator Studio
If you’re posting on Instagram, then you should definitely be using Creator Studio. You can add all of the accounts that you manage, and look at them individually or together. As you make a post, you can select which account you want to post it to.
For Instagram, you can choose to make a normal feed post or an IGTV post. Then you can upload any content you desire, whether that be a single image, a series of images, or a video. You can also add a thumbnail to any video, whether it’s IGTV or a normal feed video, which is something that can’t be done in third-party tools. This is the closest to posting directly to Instagram that you can get without actually doing it on a phone. It’s also really great that you can upload content to Instagram that is already uploaded to your Facebook page.
Facebook’s tools are even more versatile. You can not only create a post with an image or a video, but also a story. Unfortunately, you can’t currently create Instagram stories from Creator Studio, and you can’t schedule the Facebook stories, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those features rolled out eventually. Some third-party tools currently support scheduling Instagram stories, but they are not perfect systems yet.
Should You Give Up on Third-Party Tools?
Does Creator Studio replace existing third-party content schedulers? Well, kind of. I can see a world of social media scheduling in which Creator Studio is used for Facebook and Instagram, and Tweetdeck (also free) is used for Twitter. While other social networks exist, this covers the big three.
While every scheduler offers some benefits, Creator Studio provides enough details and flexibility to make it worth using. As should be expected, your entire admin team can use the tool and see every scheduled or published post.
It is infinitely easier to make an Instagram post in Creator Studio than it is on your phone, especially when creating the kind of post that isn’t possible in third-party tools. For that reason alone, it seems like anyone with a lot of Instagram content should include Creator Studio as part of their content scheduling suite.
Compared to the regular publishing tools and business manager on Facebook, the analytics and tools in Creator Studio cover a lot of the same bases. Some things are located in different places, and this feature is likely to adjust a lot over time. I am personally a big fan of this new tool, and I think it will end up making some social media scheduling tools obsolete, especially in terms of Instagram features.
Let us know in the comments below if you’ve been using Creator Studio. If you haven’t, you can just navigate to the publishing tools in your Facebook page, and find the Creator Studio button to enter the interface and try it out. Or just click here!
Facebook is on the game. It’s beating a lot of third-party tools, and it’s keeping its user in its environment. It’s beneficial for Facebook as it can help its user grow in its platform much better. Yes, it took time, but we now have it. Yeah!!! Excellent article and sharing it so my friends can benefit from this.