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Michael Eckstein

Instagram Stories Scheduling from Buffer - Plan, preview, and schedule Instagram Stories with Buffer.

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Plan and schedule your Instagram Stories ahead of time, so that you have everything ready to post with a single push notification. Storyboard your posts, add Notes, choose a time. Buffer will send you a reminder with everything you need to share your Story.

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Michael Eckstein
Maker
Hello everyone! Mike from the Buffer team here. I’m excited to share this new Buffer feature with you all and would love any thoughts or feedback. As we all know, Stories have completely changed how people and brands use Instagram, and they are now a vital channel to distribute marketing content. We spoke to a lot of consumer brands about their process for creating and publishing Stories, and we learned how long and messy it can be, especially when audiences are craving Story content at such a regular pace. With Stories scheduling, we hope to make it a lot easier for brands to plan Stories ahead of time, and give marketers more confidence that they’ll be posting the best versions of their content, consistently. Here’s a quick rundown of the features: - Schedule on web or mobile. - Bulk upload images and videos. - Drag and drop storyboarding. - Add notes, which can be copy/pasted as captions. - Story previewing. - Reminder notifications to complete the post in Instagram This is our first dip into Stories publishing, so we’re excited to see how people use this feature! It’s available to try on our Publish Premium and Business plans. You can learn more about the plans and start a free trial here: https://buffer.com/pricing/publish Let me know if you have any questions and thanks as always for the amazing support.
Ali Inay
How's it different than Later?
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@inayali Hey Ali! Thanks for checking it out and for the question. I think Later and other tools also offer story scheduling but we handle things a bit differently. With Buffer, you can create your Stories on the web *and* from both our iOS and Android apps. We also support additional networks like Linkedin and have a different workflow for how to create and schedule your Stories that makes it easier to see what you have coming up and leave yourself reminders and notes as it relates to each story (so you don't forget to add the right sticker, poll, CTA, etc). We built this workflow based on what we heard from our interviews with marketers and customers similar to yourself and hope you like it if you give it a try! Thank you again for taking the time to reach out and ask :).
Pat Walls
This is a game changer. Can I use the Buffer API for stories or not yet?
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@thepatwalls Thanks Pat! 🙌. We don't have support for it via *our* API and would perhaps point you to our mobile apps if there's a way those can help you on the go! If you have another specific use case for using the API for this, I'd be curious to hear it, feel free to shoot me an email to: super at buffer . com! 😄
Liam Roberts
gg on this one! Well done - much wanted feature and always a great design solution from Buffer!
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@liam_roberts Thanks much Liam, will pass along the good word to our design team 😄.
Yevhenii Peteliev
Awesome! How I lived without it before? Сongratulations!
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@peteliev Thanks Yevhenii 😄
Brian Peters
Another great product launch from Buffer! Keep up the great work, team ✨
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@brian_peters1 Heya Brian! Thanks so much 😄
Ben Brausen
Once again the Awesome Plan users that helped build Buffer in the early years are left out in the cold. Seems more and more they'll keep all new features to the higher-dollar plans targeted at businesses.
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@benbrausen Hi Ben - sorry to disappoint you here, definitely not our intention to have you unhappy with your plan! I know we've chatted in the past too and we don't take it for granted having customers like you who've been with us for years 😄. In this specific case, we are overall hoping to help businesses with this feature where consistently posting Stories can become a huge driver of reach and community engagement. We're hoping to add more and more power like this to our Premium and Business plans so our customers there get a very clear ROI on their investment in Buffer. Sometimes these features line up better with our Pro plan and other times for our Premium/Business plan but we're trying our best to find the balance there! Your feedback and thoughts are always helpful as we think about crafting our features and plans. Thanks so much for sharing.
Prateek Keshari
This is amazing!
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@prateekkesharii Woo! Glad you like it Prateek!
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@lachlankirkwood Thanks Lachlan 😄
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Just to be clear, I still need to manually publish the scheduled storie? As there is still no way to do it automatically?
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@jorgecerda Hey Cerda, that's right, there's no way today to post Stories automatically to Instagram with any product that's following their rules (Instagram doesn't allow it). If Instagram changes these rules in the future, we'll add in support for posting automatically! For now, we hope we've made it as easy as possible where you can get a push notification when the time comes to post, open it up and have all your media and notes in one spot. Thanks for checking it out 😃.
Kyle Thacker
This looks driven by real user needs, understanding how instagram is actually used by people. Its really interesting from Instagram's side what types of integrations they decide to make available. On one side it would be nice to automatically publish the stories, but as a consumer I appreciate that it's actually more difficult to automate.
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@kylethacker Thanks for the kind words Kyle! I totally agree with you, I think Instagram very deliberately and thoughtfully balances the needs of businesses to share their content and promote their brands against the real concerns of spam and automation diluting the experience on the platform for consumers. It's a tricky one for sure!
Bao Nguyen
Great product so far
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@bao_nguyen6 Thanks for the kind words Bao - so glad you've had a great experience so far!
HiramFromTheChi
If only Buffer allowed VPNs, I’d consider switching to the service :(
Suprasanna Mishra
Maker
@hiramfromthechi Hey Hiram! Could you share more what you mean? Are you unable to access the product when behind a VPN? You should be able to do so, I'm happy to look into it for you :)
HiramFromTheChi
@suprasannam I can access Buffer on desktop, but on mobile if I'm on a VPN, it can't reach the server. If I turn off the VPN, then it works. So maybe it's just a mobile issue.
Andrew Yates
Maker
@hiramfromthechi Hey Hiram, are you seeing this in our iOS or Android app? We do have some security measures in place (SSL Pinning to prevent Man-in-the-middle attacks) which may be breaking when connected to your VPN. Do you mind sharing who your VPN provider is? Would love to see if I am able to get things working smoothly for you and other VPN users or at least reach out to the VPN to see if they have any insight.
Latoya
i love Buffer, this must be good.
Vishnu S. Mgr
this is the gret product