Buffer’s New Instagram Updates Make Scheduling a Lot Better

If you’ve ever used a social media scheduling tool for Instagram, you’ll probably know the slightly frustrating routine.

You create the content. Write the caption. Schedule the post. Get everything organised.

Then, when it’s actually time to publish, you still have to open Instagram because you want to add the music, invite a collaborator or finish something that the scheduling platform couldn’t handle.

It’s not exactly the end of the world, but it does defeat part of the point of scheduling content in the first place.

Buffer has now released a set of new Instagram features that remove quite a few of those extra steps, and I think they make the platform considerably more useful for businesses, creators and anyone managing multiple social accounts.

We’ve spoken before about Why We’ve Partnered With Buffer and why I like its relatively simple approach to social media management.

These updates make that recommendation even easier.

So, what’s actually changed?

Add Music to Instagram Reels in Buffer

This is probably the biggest one for me.

You can now search for Instagram audio from within Buffer, preview a track and attach it to your Reel before it is scheduled.

Previously, music was one of those annoying final jobs that often meant scheduling a notification rather than letting the post publish automatically.

That creates a surprisingly big problem when you’re trying to work ahead.

There’s not much point spending Friday afternoon getting the following week’s social media completely organised if somebody still needs to remember to open Instagram at 11am on Tuesday and finish the Reel manually.

Being able to prepare the Reel and its music together brings Buffer much closer to the experience of actually creating the post inside Instagram.

For businesses trying to maintain a consistent content schedule, that matters.

You Can Now Invite Instagram Collaborators

Collaborative posts have become a really useful Instagram feature.

A business working with a creator can publish the same post across both profiles. Two brands running a campaign together can share one piece of content. A company can collaborate with a founder, employee or partner rather than uploading effectively the same post several times.

Buffer now lets you invite up to three collaborators when preparing a post, Reel or carousel.

Once accepted, the content can appear across the collaborators’ profiles while the engagement stays attached to the same post.

There are loads of practical uses for this:

• brands working with influencers or UGC creators

• businesses collaborating with suppliers

• event partners promoting something together

• founders collaborating with their company account

• businesses featuring another organisation or client

It also means one less reason to leave your scheduled post half-finished.

This is exactly why good social media management is not just about creating content. It’s also about having a system behind it.

As I covered in How to Build a Simple Marketing System for a Small Business, the easier it is to prepare content properly in advance, the less likely social media becomes another last-minute job somebody has to remember.

Trial Reels Can Be Scheduled Too

Instagram Trial Reels are another feature Buffer has now incorporated.

The idea behind Trial Reels is fairly simple: you can initially show a Reel to people who don’t already follow you, allowing you to test the content with a new audience before deciding whether to push it more widely.

That could make them particularly useful for testing things like:

• a different Reel format

• a new subject or content pillar

• a stronger opening hook

• more informal founder content

• educational versus promotional content

Rather than every experiment immediately going in front of your existing audience, you have another way to see how the content performs.

And now you can build that testing into the same content calendar as everything else.

I wouldn’t suddenly turn every Reel into an experiment just because the feature exists. The strategy behind the content still matters considerably more than which button you press when publishing it.

But for businesses already producing regular Reels, this gives you another useful option.

Multiple Instagram Stories Can Be Scheduled Together

Buffer has also improved Story scheduling.

You can now add several photos or videos to a single Story post and have them publish as a sequence.

This sounds like quite a small update compared with Reel music or Trial Reels, but it could genuinely save time.

A lot of Stories make more sense as a sequence.

You might have:

Story 1: introduce a problem

Story 2: explain the answer

Story 3: show the product or service

Story 4: add the call to action

Or perhaps you’re covering an event, sharing several products or creating a short behind-the-scenes sequence.

Being able to prepare that in one go makes Stories much easier to actually include in a planned content strategy rather than treating them as something you only post when you happen to remember.

Why These Buffer Updates Actually Matter

None of these features completely reinvent social media.

They just remove friction.

And I think that’s much more valuable.

One of the biggest problems businesses have with social media is not usually that they have absolutely no idea what to post.

It’s that the process becomes messy.

Content sits waiting for approval. Someone forgets to publish something. A Reel needs music adding manually. A collaboration was discussed but nobody remembered to invite the other account. Stories get ignored because everyone is busy.

The more of that process you can organise ahead of time, the easier consistency becomes.

That’s also why I generally prefer tools that make marketing simpler rather than adding another enormous dashboard full of features nobody actually uses.

Your social media is only one part of the overall picture anyway. As I covered in How Social Media, Email and Websites Work Together, the real aim is for each marketing channel to support the others rather than becoming a completely separate job.

Is Buffer Worth Trying?

I’ve recommended Buffer for a while, particularly for smaller businesses and teams that want a straightforward way to plan and schedule content without making social media management unnecessarily complicated.

These Instagram updates make it a stronger option again.

You can now handle significantly more of the Instagram publishing process without constantly jumping between Buffer and the Instagram app.

If you want to give it a try, you can sign up through my Buffer partner link here:

Try Buffer →

Full transparency: First Touch Marketing is a Buffer affiliate, so I may earn a commission if you sign up through the link, at no additional cost to you.

The software still isn’t going to decide what your business should talk about, create a good strategy for you or magically make boring content interesting.

But if you already know what you want to say, tools like Buffer can make actually getting that content out consistently a lot easier.

And these latest updates remove several of the biggest Instagram-specific annoyances from that process.

Have you tried any of Buffer’s new Instagram features yet?

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