How To Plan Instagram Posts with Trello

Are you looking for a method to organize your Instagram posts? It took me several years, but Trello is my favorite tool! You can quickly find your original pictures from months ago, create a list of pictures you are yet to post and visualize if you’ve posted enough posts during the month!

Continue reading this article to find out how I created this board for my IG account!

Why Trello to plan Instagram posts?

Trello is a very visual tool for managing projects. As you can see in the image above, each photo has its own Trello card and is identified with a colored label that mentions the subject of the publication.

I put all my photos on my Trello board. Even when I don’t prepare a publication in advance (which happens very often), I take the time to add my publication and my photo on my board to keep track of all my pictures and posts.

Easily find your original photos

I may want to find an image that I published on my Instagram account a year ago. It is sometimes difficult to find the original quality photo in my files … Having all your photos in one place makes things much easier! I only have to download the photo directly from Trello.

Keep track of the pictures you haven’t published yet

My “Pictures to post” list contains all the photos I took during a photoshoot but that I have not yet published. One of my big problems before using Trello to plan my posts was that I would forget to publish some photos from my photoshoots.

A photoshoot takes so long to do, it was important for me to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any photos!

Visualize whether or not you have published enough photos during the past month

Also, it is very useful to be able to visualize the frequency of my publications. In an ideal world, I would like to post a photo every day. However, this is not always possible. So, I update all my photos as well as the date I published them, which in turn, allows me to have a calendar view and analyze whether or not I was active enough during the past month.

For example, in March, I would say that I did not publish enough photos…

So, in April, I hope to publish more photos. In order to help me do this, I found topics that I would like to discuss in the coming days and I have set dates for publication:

How to create your own Trello board to plan Instagram posts

If you do not know Trello at all, I recommend that you read my article explaining how Trello works before continuing, it might help you.

To start, create an account on Trello. And then duplicate this public board that I am providing you. In order to do this, click on “Display the menu”, select “More” and “Copy the table”. You will then have your board which you can edit as you wish.

1- Create your lists

If you chose to start with the public board that I shared, this step has already been done for you.

• Ideas: I created cards for all my ideas for future captions that I could be interested in covering soon.
• To do (to prepare this week): This list contains the cards that I want to work on and publish next (think this following week)
• To Post: Cards in this column means that they’re all ready, and all that is left is left to do is to post the picture
• Done: Published posts are stored in this list!
• Pictures to post: Whenever I have a picture that I want to post to my account later on, I immediately add it to this list. I create a card with a phony name, and I add the photo which I will publish as an attachment.

2- Create your labels

The next step is to create labels that represent the themes of your Instagram posts.

Think about the different themes you are tackling on your account and create the labels accordingly. I also use color-coding in order to better visualize the subjects on the calendar view!

There are different ways to create labels. Here is one way:

1. Click on “Show menu” in the top right corner
2. Click on “Labels”, then “More” and “Labels”
3. You can then create your labels and select a color

As an example, here are my labels for my Instagram account:

3- Cards

Each card is a picture that you want to publish on your account.

• Title: A key sentence (or the first sentence) about the publication. This is very important to catch the reader’s attention!
• Label: The theme of the post
• Description:
  In the description, I write the caption that will be published with the photo, the hashtags, and the publication number. The hashtags are between two special characters, like this `# hashtag` so that it is formatted more nicely. I write the number of the publication from a few weeks ago, as Instagram started deleting hundreds of photos from my Instagram account. I have no explanation for this, but from now on, I try to keep track of the number of publications in order to keep track of them if Instagram ever decides to delete my photos again… You can also add the folder where the original picture is stored on your computer or Google Drive so you can find it easily again.
• Due date: I write the date when I want to publish the picture

Et voilà, that’s it!

All that is left is for you to adopt this method to your needs!

Related | How to Create An Editorial Calendar with Trello

How to schedule a post?

Now that you’ve planned several posts for your Instagram account, you might wonder how to schedule them to be posted during the week without you having to worry about posting them manually.

I rarely schedule my photos in advance for my account. I prefer spontaneity. But sometimes it is useful! The only tool I recommend to you is Facebook Creator Studio. It’s offered and created by Facebook. For me, it’s the only reliable resource for scheduling photos in advance.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped you create your own Trello board to organize your Instagram account! Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, it will be my pleasure to help you.