🤖 10 IG automations that save 9 hrs/week

I’ve tested and curated this list of 10 tools and use cases to help you get back more $$$ for the time you spend on Instagram.

If you post 5x per week, these tools will help you save ~8 hours and 50 minutes weekly.

So if your hourly rate is $30, that means you’d save $265/week on labor costs alone.

1. Create engagement loops that generate sales

• Tool: ManyChat

• Time savings: 100 min/week (if replying to 50 comments/DMs)

• Labor savings: $50/week

Tell viewers to comment a keyword to get an automatic DM with more info on your product.

This helps you 1) get more comments & reach and 2) send links directly to customers instead of directing users to your link in bio.

Pro tip: Use ManyChat to send affiliate links.

2. Automate your entire posting calendar

• Tool: Post Planner’s Posting Plans

• Time savings: 60 min/week

• Labor savings: $30/week

There’s absolutely no reason to be logging into each social platform and hitting “post” for every single post.

Bulk create Instagram posts (all types) and add to a calendar that auto-publishes everything on time.

All you have to do is:

• Set your posting times

• Select the TYPE of content you want to post at those times (with buckets)

• Create your posts in bulk

• Queue them up

Pro tip: Create your posts in batches for the following week — or month.

3. Find top-performing post ideas

• Tool: Post Planner’s Content Streams

• Time savings: 40 min/week

• Labor savings: $20/week

Struggling with what to post? 

Discover top-performing content in your niche by simply searching keywords and filtering by engagement.

Create your own custom Content Streams by adding your fav social media pages and RSS feeds.

Then, during your planning sessions, you can scroll through your Content Streams to find trending ideas OR post formats that you can recreate and make your own.

Pro tip: Save time by curating content once a week — search for what's trending in your niche and queue up winners in bulk.

4. Auto-generate Reels

• Tool: OpusClip

• Time savings: 150 min/week

• Labor savings: $70/week

Reels can take a long time to make — just for only some of them to get a boost from the algo.

Upload long-form videos to get 5+ fully edited Reels generated automatically. 

OpusClip picks the best highlights, adds captions, and cuts your videos to make them as engaging as possible.

Pro tip: Focus on creating unique long-form videos and podcasts — just outsource the Reels editing to AI.

5. Recycle your top-performing posts

• Tool: Post Planner’s Post Recycling

• Time savings: 30 min/post

• Labor savings: $15/post

Let me let you in on a little secret: Not everything you post has to be an entirely new post.

Milk your old posts for more engagement by recycling those posts automatically.

Post Planner's Post Recycling feature lets you either:

1. Set new posts to recycle a set # of times every time period.

2. Filter your old posts by engagement to recycle top-performing posts.

Pro tip: Recycle evergreen content every few months, not every week.

6. Create a personal AI social media assistant

• Tool: ChatGPT Projects

• Time savings: Unlimited

• Labor savings: Unlimited

Create an AI clone of yourself for automating content plans, post ideas, and content drafts.

You’ll need to download these as PDFs and upload them to a Project:

• Your website’s pages

• Customer reviews

• Copywriting frameworks (like PAS and open loops)

• Examples of your best-performing content

ChatGPT will now generate ideas and content hyper-specific to your business.

Pro tip: Create multiple Projects for different use cases. For example, create separate ones customized for post ideas, planning, and content drafting.

7. Generate captions effortlessly

• Tool: Post Planner’s AI Content tool

• Time savings: 75 min/week

• Labor savings: $37.50/week

You never have to come up with a witty caption by yourself again.

Generate up to 5 caption options at a time based on your prompt (or choose from the prompt library).

Just type what your post is about, and Post Planner will suggest catchy, on-brand captions you can use instantly.

Pro tip: Use the AI-generated captions as a base and tweak them with your voice to make them more authentic. Save your favorite prompts for the future.

8. Generate hashtags in seconds

• Tool: Post Planner’s Hashtag Generator

• Time savings: 20 min/week

• Labor savings: $10/week

Finding the perfect hashtags can feel like a time-wasting rabbit hole. 

Just enter your post caption or type a keyword, and the tool will generate a tailored set of hashtags.

Pro tip: Use this to test different hashtag sets across posts and boost your discoverability. Save your favorite hashtag groups as Snippets to use again later with one click.

9. Add the 1st comment to your posts automatically

• Tool: Post Planner’s First Comment tool

• Time savings: 10 min/week

• Labor savings: $5/week

Commenting on your own post is perfect for CTAs, hashtags, or cross-promos.

When you schedule posts in Post Planner, you can add first comments to automatically schedule with your post.

Pro tip: Encourage more comments by asking a question.

10. Cross-post Reels to all platforms

• Tool: Post Planner

• Time savings: 45 min/week (if posting to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Facebook Reels)

• Labor savings: $22.50/week

Don’t let your Reels go to waste by only posting to IG.

Cross-schedule your Reels to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Facebook.

Just select the platforms you want to publish to when using the Composer.

Pro tip: Tweak captions for each platform to make sure your hook isn’t cut off.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

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