Schedule Instagram posts, reels, and stories

With Buffer’s Instagram scheduler, you can plan, collaborate on, and publish content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for you or your brand. You can organize your content ideas, schedule posts for the optimal times, manage your comments, and analyze your performance.

You can schedule Instagram image posts, video posts, carousel posts (up to 10 images), stories, and reels with Buffer.

Yes, Buffer offers both automatic publishing and notification publishing. With notification publishing, Buffer will send you a notification when it’s time to post, so that you can finish the post yourself on Instagram.

You sure can! With our platform, you can plan, edit, draft, and schedule Reels to Instagram, for free. We’ve got you covered when it comes to maximizing your Instagram Reel strategy.

Yes, you can schedule carousel posts to be published automatically to Instagram with Buffer.

Yes! You can schedule your Instagram Stories to publish automatically at your desired date and time.

Scheduling Instagram posts through Buffer is super easy. Here’s how:

• To get started, log in to your Buffer account.
• Select your Instagram account on the left-hand side of your dashboard
• Open the composer at the top of your queue
• Choose to schedule your post as a Post, Reel, or Story

Read our full guide on how to plan, schedule, and publish to Instagram.

Instagram Stories are a powerful channel to build your brand and engage your followers. With Buffer, you can plan, prepare, and schedule your Instagram Stories. Here’s how:

• To get started, log in to your Buffer account.
• Select your Instagram account on the left-hand side of your dashboard
• Open the composer at the top of your queue
• Choose to schedule your post as a Story

Read our full guide on how to plan, schedule, and publish to Instagram.

If you’re a creator, small business owner, or social media manager, there are many benefits to scheduling your Instagram posts. Here are a few reasons why people prefer to schedule:

• It saves them time and mental energy
• It ensures that they post consistently (and keeping a consistent schedule helps you maximize engagement and reach)
• It allows you to easily schedule to other platforms at the same time
• It gives you better control over your Instagram content
• It enables you to plan and post to Instagram from your desktop

With Buffer, you can schedule, plan, analyze, engage, and much more. Get started with a 14-day free trial, connect your Instagram channel, and start scheduling immediately.

Some Instagram Reels and Stories switch to notification-based posting when Instagram’s API can’t support full auto-publishing. Common triggers include using a personal account, adding music, stickers, links, or collaborators, or using unsupported sizes or lengths. In those cases, Buffer schedules a reminder so you can finish posting manually in the Instagram app.

You can use Buffer with a personal Instagram account, but personal accounts only support notification-based posting. For auto-publishing and features like advanced analytics, locations, and replying to comments in Buffer, Instagram requires a professional account (Business or Creator) linked to a Facebook Page.

Buffer’s Instagram analytics come from Meta’s API, but differences in date ranges, time zones, metric definitions, backfill limits, and how certain formats like Reels and Stories are counted can cause numbers to differ from Instagram’s in-app Insights. Aligning the same time range and definitions usually explains the mismatch.

Buffer’s best-time recommendations are based mainly on your account’s recent Instagram performance. Analyze’s Answers feature looks at when your posts historically get the strongest engagement and suggests days, times, and posting frequency that tend to work best for your audience in your selected time zone.

You can schedule the media for Instagram Stories in Buffer, but Instagram does not allow third-party tools to auto-apply music, stickers, polls, links, or other interactive elements. To use those, schedule the Story as a notification and add the interactive elements inside Instagram when you post.

Use Buffer’s Ideas space in Create to store rough Instagram concepts, hooks, notes, and media before they are ready to schedule. You can organize ideas and later turn the best ones into scheduled posts without rewriting everything from scratch.

Yes. If your Instagram is a professional account connected through Facebook, you can reply to comments on posts and Reels in Buffer’s Community inbox. You will not see DMs or Story replies there, and some gaps can occur due to Instagram API limits or permission issues.

Yes, but with limits. Without a Facebook Page and professional account, Instagram only allows notification-based posting for personal accounts. To unlock auto-publishing, analytics, locations, and comment management, Instagram requires a professional account linked to a Facebook Page through Meta’s systems.