Instagram content producers rejoice!

Instagram has finally pushed the button on Story Drafts, which are now available for all users.

Initally announced in March, the much-requested feature will let users save Insta Stories as drafts within the app – negating the need to use painful workarounds.

Saving a draft will be straightforward. The option to share your Story as a draft will pop up when you exit out of the Story composer. Although be warned, anything in your drafts will be deleted after a week.

Despite the time limit, it still provides communicators with additional time to craft more thoughtful, comprehensive Stories that can be shared at the optimal time with audiences. This should resonate with social media managers, who will be able to post Stories at more popular times.

Before today, you could save stories as drafts using three techniques:

1. Archiving within the Insta mobile app.
2. Downloaded stories to your phone.
3. Saving them via a third-party app.

While those methods did work, they weren’t native to the app and weren’t as convenient for creatives. It disrupted the flow of ideas – but now users will be able to use Insta’s full suite of features in the creative process.

Instagram drafts and post scheduling

Previously, users could only save a post meant for the Feed as a draft.

Feed drafts worked by going through the upload process as usual, but before posting, users had to go back to the filtering and editing step and hit the back arrow in the top left of the screen. An option would then come up that allowed it to be saved as a draft.

However, if users fail to edit the post, tag people or add a caption or location, they cannot save the post as a draft.

The new story drafts feature could combine nicely with story scheduling features recently released within Facebook Business Suite.

At the moment, Business Suite appears to be available for some users, but not all.

“Facebook Business Suite, a single place across mobile and desktop for businesses to access the tools they need to thrive across Facebook and Instagram.

Currently, Business Suite includes tools such as posting, messaging, insights and advertising capabilities, improving the experience of managing a business across our apps.”

Story scheduling, alongside being able to save drafts, is a popular new Instagram addition. To schedule your Instagram Stories, all you need to do is:

1. Select where you want your post to land – Facebook or Insta, or both.
2. Upload your media and customise it as normal.
3. Preview your finished creation.
4. Click publish story or schedule story.

Popular Story production tools & apps

Instagram provides several tools to users as part of the story creation screen, but marketers who need a little bit of extra firepower should look for apps out there that add more than just bells and whistles to any creation.

StoryArt

Highly rated across Apple Store and Play Store, and provides 200+ free templates and design options.

Microsoft Hyperlapse

Allows you to create time-lapse videos that can be shared on Stories. They need to be short as the maximum time limit is 20 minutes, while you can speed up time x32. It also supports high-res videos.

CutStory

A pretty useful app for people who want to post videos longer than 15 seconds to Stories. CutStory creates a stream of 15-second videos that you can post as Stories, so your video can be seen in full by your audience across several different Stories.

Unfold

Comes with free and premium features and helps users create minimalistic photo and video Stories. You don’t need an account to use Unfold, which is handy, but it only features 25 free templates.

Canva

Good ol’ Canva is a photo editor that is packed with hundreds of templates that you can use for Stories – but a good collection of stock images, fonts, texts and filters.