How To Use Creator Studio for Facebook & Instagram

In this tutorial Shaun Whynacht demonstrates how to access and navigate Facebook Creator Studio, which now also supports Instagram Business accounts. He explains how to reach Creator Studio via the publishing tools on a Facebook Business Page, and recommends bookmarking the URL. The interface shows separate Facebook and Instagram icons for easy switching, with largely similar settings but some platform‑specific features. Shaun walks through creating a post, covering content entry, audience targeting (public, restricted, geographic, top‑fans), scheduling options (future date, backdating, drafts), and the “stop newsfeed distribution” toggle for time‑sensitive content. He shows the Content Library where published, scheduled, draft, expired, and expiring items are listed, and demonstrates rescheduling, publishing immediately, or deleting posts. The differences between Facebook posts and Instagram Stories are highlighted, including format (vertical vs square), lifespan, and strategic use for events. He then switches to the Instagram side, revealing the calendar view, ability to schedule Instagram feed posts and IGTV videos, and the limitation that only Business Instagram accounts linked to the Facebook page can be used. Shaun attempts to pull existing Facebook content into Instagram, noting occasional upload hiccups, and demonstrates uploading an image directly. He touches on advanced settings like accessibility and comment control. Finally, he reviews the Insights panel for performance metrics, the Inbox for messages, the Live Dashboard for ongoing broadcasts, and the Monetization section for eligible creators. The video ends with a call‑to‑action to subscribe and a link to his marketing site.
Chapters
In today's video, we're going to be walking through Facebook Creator Studio. So there's been several updates to this since I did the last video, um, just over a year ago, and the updates are really quite helpful for how you can manage your Facebook account. And now you can also manage your Instagram account with this as well. But first, you may be wondering, how do you get to this? I'm going to show you that. So first, you're going to have to have a Facebook business page, and then once you Get to your Facebook business page, you're going to go over on the left side and you're going to look for publishing tools. Once you click on that, you're going to go into the next page and this is where you're going to be able to find the link for Creative Studio. So wait for this to come up and here under tools, that's where you can find it right there. You can click on it and it will open up the tab. Highly recommend that you bookmark this URL that comes up so you can go directly to it in the future. So I did mention about being able to manage your Facebook and your Instagram. So snuggled right up here at the top, you're going to see the Facebook icon and you're going to see the Instagram icon. Simply click on that and you can flip between the Creator Studios for both platforms. A lot of the settings are pretty much the same in both, but there are some other features in Facebook that you don't see in Instagram. Now what I love about this is it allows you to have a nice clean interface. It's not clouded by a lot of the other stuff you would see on your page, Facebook business page, but it gives you a lot of the insights as well. When you come in here, you can see your recent posts. You can see some insights about view times, but also you can go ahead on the left-hand side and navigate to your content library, your insights, your inbox, uh, monetization. If you've got Instant Articles, we're not going to cover that in this video, but that's there, and some creative tools as well as your settings. In most cases, what you're going to be doing in your business is scheduling content to go out. So posting something is easy as clicking on this, and you're going to get a lightbox popup that comes up, slides in from the right-hand side where you can actually build out your post right here. So just like you would in a regular page, you can put in there, you can do Facebook Lives, you can do offers and jobs. All the different features that you could put into the post are there as well. If you want to schedule, all you need to do is make sure there's some kind of content in here, and then down below you've got some options. So you can post this publicly, you can restrict your audience, which maybe you've got certain people that you want to exclude exclude from that. You can exclude it. You can also target with newsfeed. So maybe it's, it's people in a geographic area. So let's say your business has multiple events and you cover, let's say, an entire province or an entire state, but you have geographic areas where this event is actually being held. You could target just people in those areas so all of your audience is not seeing it. Or you can do your top fans. And top fans are those people who have been engaging with your content, liking it, they will be listed as top fans. In most cases, you're going to have a public post. Then you can go share now, or you can drop this and go to schedule or backdate. Backdate would be, let's say you're posting something, you know, maybe you had an event and you wanted to post photos from that event. That event happened last week. Well, to be able to have things come up in memories moving forward and have a proper timeline, you might want to backdate that post for that. So that's where it falls in the timeline., it will still be notified to those people who like your page that it was a post you just put out, but the date is associated with that. Or maybe you're just going to create some posts and save them as drafts waiting for approval. You can go ahead and do that. If you want to schedule, you're going to then pick that date and time that you want to have that scheduled. Now, a lot of questions come in about what this distribution scheduling is down here. Stop that newsfeed distribution. The idea behind that is let's say you're doing a post, and we know that if we did a post today, there are times where it's going to start to show up in other people's newsfeeds. Not necessarily just today, but ultimately other days in the future, tomorrow, a couple days depending on how it's going out. So if you want to have something that's very timely, maybe, you know, it's just today, then you can go ahead and you can turn this on. You can say, okay, stop this from being distributed news feeds on, you know, Thursday. So if somebody was scheduled to see it, then they're not going to see it. It's going to stop showing it out there, but it's going to remain on your wall. You can go ahead and you click share and it will actually just go ahead and schedule it. So I'm going to discard that post. Another way that you can do this is you can go ahead and go into your content library. Now in your content library, you're going to see all the different pieces of content, all posts, all published, scheduled, draft, expired, or expiring. So if you have a bunch of scheduled content in here, you can click on this and you can see them. Now I currently don't have any scheduled content in here., but what I'm going to do for the sake of this demonstration, I'm going to create a post and I'm going to schedule it. So we're going to go ahead here and go create post just like I showed you moments prior, and we're going to go, this is scheduled. We'll just do that. We're not actually going to let it roll out. We're going to drop this down. We're going to go to schedule and we're going to say, okay, let's schedule this to go out on the 15th, and we're going to click schedule. And then one last step you have to do is you have to click the schedule post here. Even though it says later, you still have to click schedule post to lock it in. So it'll take a few moments for it to show up there. It's got to go through the queue and then be ready to go up in that scheduled. So it may, may not show up right away and we'll come back to that in a few moments. Now the difference between posts and stories is you can go into your story side here and you can actually add to your stories from this. You can turn on your stories insights. I don't have mine turned on,, but we could say add to stories and then we can pick the page that we want here. And then we can go through and start to build either a photo story or a text story that's in there. Now, if you don't know the difference between that, stories are really used for moments. You know, a post would be something that you wanted to stick around where stories show up on the top of the page and top of the app and people click on it and it goes through and it's, you know, it's, it's kind of raw-ish kind of content. Usually when they watch it, then they don't really watch it again. It doesn't stick around and every day you get a clean slate. What's a new story. A lot of times if you're doing events, multi-day events, stories are a great way to get that content out. And stories are a hot piece of content right now. So you really kind of have a different strategy for stories. The content for stories is usually vertical, whereas posts I recommend you do square. You know, the horizontal or landscape format is not as popular anymore. Square is because it's an Instagram format. You've got other options in here for playlists. You can create playlists. Series, clips, and all this kind of stuff. We're not gonna cover that in this video. Okay, so now that we're here in the scheduled side, so we have this scheduled post, it shows up here under scheduled, and we see the date. We can go ahead and go into this, and we could change the content that's here. We'll just discard that part there. If we wanna click on it here, what we can actually do is we could go up and we can reschedule. So let's say the date of this is not when you want it to go. You can say reschedule, pop up, pick a new date, and then you'll be able to do that. If you want to publish it, let's say it's scheduled and you're like, no, we want to get this out right now. You can click on it, click publish, and it will go instantly. Or you can delete it or cancel the schedule. If you cancel it, it still goes into a draft mode so that you can always get back to that content. Or if you know that it's absolutely something you're not going to want, you can go ahead and click delete, which I'm going to do for this one and get rid of it. Now some of the other elements that are here on the left side are your insights. A great way to see how your, your posts and your, your videos and all your content is performing. You can see your top-rated videos and different top content down below. You can see your loyalty. So your loyalty is going to be your following activity, your audience, a lot of different insights. We're not going to cover those and what they all mean in this video, but that's where you can go ahead and find that. Your inbox is where you're going to see any of the inbox messages that come in, very similar to when you are on your page and you look at your inbox. This is where it is all going to be portrayed. Now under creative tools, what we've got here is live dashboard. So this is going to show you anything that's live and currently going on with your, your page. So if you're doing, you know, Facebook Live, so let's say you're doing a live broadcast, you want to go in and see how that is performing, or you have another team member, they can go in here to the live dashboard and get all that. Now let's hop over to the Instagram side at the top by clicking on the Instagram icon. Very similar, you see your posts in here, but the difference is you're going to see also a calendar. So you can go in here and create your calendar of content that is going to go out or has gone out in the past. You can click on this content and see what those posts were and any engagement that has happened on them. One of the cool things about this is this allows you now to go in and actually schedule your Instagram content, which you couldn't normally do prior to this update and having it rolled in here. So you can create a post into the Instagram feed or IGTV, which is basically, basically their video format. So if you're doing a lot of videos, you can go into that, that platform. So we're going to go in here, we're going to pick the account, put in your content. You can do all the different elements here. You can add your, your content. Let's just go and put some content in there for now. I don't know if it's going to let me do it without an image. Probably will need an image. So let's go from Facebook page. And because it is integrated, you can now pull up content that has already been posted over on your Facebook page, which is really a great platform to, to be able to do this because you shouldn't be posting the exact same thing to both, especially if you've got certain links in your content on Facebook. You know, you can't link to those in Instagram, but you want to have your creative. So maybe you want to pull over that creative element into this. And you can go ahead and do that by clicking on it. Now I don't know why that just didn't happen. So let's go ahead here. Maybe I had to click on that. There we go. Let's try this. See if that'll come over. No, for some reason that wasn't gonna come over. So I don't know why that's not working. Let me just see one more time here. Let me pick one that's square. That might've been the issue. Nope, for some reason it's just not wanting to pull over, but it may just be my browser at the moment. But you can go ahead and create that content and put it in there. And then you actually, here, let me try one more thing. While we're here. Let me go to Downloads and let me pick a photo here. See if it's going to upload it for me. Yeah, so here we go. Here's a, here's an image that I had. We're going to upload it. And if I wanted to post that, I could hit Publish right away, or if I can drop this down, I can actually go ahead and schedule it, which was another great feature that we didn't have before. For that. You got some advanced settings in here for accessibility, turning comments off if you want. You can go ahead and do that. But ultimately, this is a great element to be able to go ahead and create your Instagram content, uh, rolling out. So I'm going to go and discard that. And you can see, you know, just the likes and the comments on those posts. So if you were in one of these, now these are showing obviously some other Instagram accounts here. So I'm going to take that off. So let's just say, you know, I want to go look at this post here. I can go in and see, you know, how many people have engaged with that. I could actually click and say go to the post, which is going to take me right into Instagram so I can see that in the platform. With the insights, just like before, you can see other actions that are happening, monetization. So you can go in here and see if you've got some some posts that you're, you're at that level where you can start to generate money based on it. You have to be almost at that influencer level. I'm not 100% sure what that threshold is right now for that, but in most cases you wouldn't have that there. And then Instagram accounts, if you've got other business accounts associated with your page and your content, you can go ahead and add them in here. Note, you cannot add a personal Instagram account to this. It has to be one that is linked to your business page for that to work. So that is the Creative Studio for both Facebook and Instagram. If you like this content, please subscribe to our channel and we'll be creating more content like this moving forward. It's been a pleasure. If you want to find out more about what we do, go to bluecowmarketing.ca.
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