How to Schedule Instagram Reels with Metricool

Posting Reels live looks simple until you add it up: filming, editing, captioning, picking a cover, finding the right audio, tapping through Instagram’s posting flow. Do that two or three times a week and the small steps add up to a chunk of your week.

Scheduling Reels from Metricool puts all of that into one batch. This guide walks through how to schedule a Reel, what you can auto-publish, how trending audio works, and the options worth knowing about before you hit publish.

Why Schedule Reels with Metricool (Instead of Meta or Instagram)

If you only manage one Instagram account and you’re already comfortable posting live, the native app does the job. The case for Metricool gets stronger as soon as any of the following is true:

• You Post to More Than Just Instagram: Meta Business Suite covers Facebook and Instagram. Metricool covers TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, X, Bluesky, and more, alongside Instagram. One calendar instead of five.
• You Want Cross-Platform Analytics: Metricool consolidates performance data across every connected platform, so you can compare how a Reel performed against the same clip on TikTok or Shorts without exporting from each one separately.
• You Manage Clients or Work With a Team: Approval workflows, client-specific dashboards, and white-label reporting are built into Metricool. Meta Business Suite isn’t designed for agency or team setups.
• You Schedule in Batches: Metricool’s planner is built for sitting down once a week and laying out a month of content. The Best Times to Post feature pulls from your specific audience’s activity rather than generic recommendations.

What You Need Before Scheduling Reels with Metricool

A few things need to be in place before you can schedule Reels from Metricool:

• A Professional Instagram Account: Business or creator. Personal profiles can’t be scheduled to via the Instagram API. If yours is personal, switching takes about a minute inside the Instagram app.
• Your Account Connected to Metricool: Two connection types work, but Facebook-based connection unlocks every feature, including full analytics, trending audio, and the advanced publishing options. Direct Instagram connection works but limits some features and metrics.
• A Facebook Page Linked to Your Instagram Account: This is a Meta requirement, not a Metricool one. All Instagram API permissions flow through Facebook.

How to Schedule an Instagram Reel in Metricool

To schedule Instagram Reels in Metricool, everything lives inside the Planner. You can upload your video, write the caption, generate hashtags, add trending audio, and pick a cover from a single screen, then queue the post to publish whenever fits your calendar.

Here’s how:

1. Open Metricool and go to Planning
2. Click Create post
3. Click the Instagram icon and choose Reel from the dropdown
4. Add your video, generate hashtags, write your caption, and preview the Reel
5. Choose Schedule, Publish now, Save as draft, or Send for review

That’s the core flow. The options worth knowing about before you hit schedule are below.

Adding Trending Audio to Scheduled Reels

This is the newest piece, and it changes the workflow for a lot of people.

Until recently, scheduling a Reel from any third-party tool meant losing access to trending audio. You’d schedule the video without sound, post it, then jump back into the Instagram app to add the song manually. Instagram has now opened up audio access to scheduling tools like Metricool, so you can pick a track inside the planner and have the audio attached when the Reel goes live.

Here’s how to add audio to a scheduled Reel:

1. Inside the Planner, create a new Reel as usual
2. Under Instagram Presets, click Add Audio
3. Search by song name, browse trending sounds, or upload your own audio file
4. Adjust the levels between your video audio and the added track if needed
5. Finish your Reel and schedule

Two things worth knowing:

• The Library Is Smaller Than In-App: Only audio cleared for third-party use comes through, so the available catalog is more limited than what you see directly in the Instagram app. Trending sounds and most widely-used tracks are there. Some specific commercial songs may not be.
• No Audio Preview Before Publishing: Once scheduled, your Reel publishes exactly as configured. You won’t see a video preview with the audio mixed in beforehand, so set your levels carefully.

If the audio you want isn’t available in the Metricool library, you can switch to manual publishing for that specific Reel and add the song in-app at publish time. More on manual publishing below.

Instagram Presets and Scheduling Options

When you’re scheduling a Reel, the Instagram Presets panel gives you a few options worth knowing:

• Show Reel on Feed: Off by default. Turn this on if you want the Reel to also appear in your main feed grid, not only the Reels tab.
• Add Collaborator: Tag up to five collaborators. The other accounts have to approve the request inside the Instagram app for the collaboration to apply. If they don’t approve, the Reel still publishes, just without the collab tag. Private and age-restricted accounts can’t be added as collaborators.
• Boost This Post: Promote the Reel as an ad directly from Metricool, alongside organic scheduling. You’ll need your Meta Ads account connected to your brand for this to work.
• Add Audio: Choose your trending audio directly from Metricool. 
• Tag Audio: Edit the name displayed for your audio. By default it shows as “Original audio.” This is separate from the Add Audio feature, and the tag won’t apply if you’ve used Add Audio on the same Reel.

A few more options sit under the three-dot menu on the video attachment:

• Tag People: Tag public Instagram accounts in the Reel (not supported on video carousels or stories).
• Tag Products: Available if you have product tagging set up.
• Upload Video Thumbnail: Custom cover image, recommended at 1080 x 1800 pixels.
• Select Cover: Pick a specific frame from the video as your cover.

Auto-Publishing vs. Manual Publishing Reels

Metricool auto-publishes most Reels. A few exceptions need manual publishing through notifications:

• Reels using audio that isn’t in Metricool’s library
• Reels with interactive stickers (polls, questions, quizzes, sliders, countdowns)
• Anything that doesn’t meet the auto-publish technical requirements (see specs below)

To switch to manual mode, toggle off the Autopublish option when scheduling. At publish time you’ll get a notification (in the Metricool mobile app or by email) that downloads the video to your device, copies your caption to the clipboard, and opens Instagram so you can finish the post natively.

The mobile app notification is the smoother option here. It’s worth downloading if you’ll be doing this often.

It adds a few taps, but it lets you use any audio and any sticker without losing your scheduled calendar.

Trial Reels

Trial Reels publish only to people who don’t follow you, so you can test how cold audiences respond before sharing with your followers. Public accounts with at least 1,000 followers can use them, and they work especially well for A/B testing a single variable like a new hook, audio track, or posting time.

To schedule a Trial Reel from Metricool:

1. Go to Planning and click Create post
2. Select Instagram and choose Trial Reel as the format
3. Upload your video and write your caption
4. Turn on Share with everyone automatically if you want Instagram to push the Reel to your followers when it performs well in the first 72 hours
5. Pick your date and time, then schedule

Two limits to know: collaborators can’t be added to Trial Reels, and the feature has to be enabled on your account by Instagram. Rollout is gradual, so the option may show up in Metricool before your account actually has access. When the analytics come back through Instagram’s API, Trial Reels appear alongside your regular Reels because Instagram doesn’t tag them separately.

Instagram Reel Requirements

For auto-publishing to work, your Reel needs to meet Instagram’s specs:

• File Size: Up to 500 MB
• Duration: 3 seconds to 15 minutes
• Container: MOV or MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), no edit lists, moov atom at the front of the file
• Aspect Ratio: 9:16 recommended, to avoid cropping or blank space
• Video Codec: H264, progressive scan, closed GOP, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling
• Audio Codec: AAC, 48kHz sample rate maximum, mono or stereo
• Frame Rate: 23 to 60 FPS
• Maximum Width: 1920 pixels horizontal
• Video Bit Rate: VBR, 25 Mbps max
• Audio Bit Rate: 128 kbps

Most videos exported from common editing tools (CapCut, Premiere, Final Cut, Adobe Express) meet these specs by default. If a Reel fails to auto-publish, this is the first place to check.

Preview Your Instagram Feed Before Anything Publishes

Reels show up in your profile grid as well as the Reels tab, so the order, covers, and visual flow of your scheduled content all matter. Metricool’s Feed Preview lets you see how your grid will look with the scheduled Reels in place, before any of them go live.

From the Planning view, click the three dots and select Preview feed. You can switch between iOS (vertical) and Android/Web (square) views to see how the grid will look on different devices. The opacity filter shows which posts are still in draft so you can tell what’s scheduled versus what’s already published.

For accounts that care about grid cohesion, this is the easiest way to make sure your covers and order actually work as a whole before anything publishes.

After Your Reels Publish

Once a Reel goes live, Metricool tracks it automatically. The Reels analytics section gives you:

• Organic Summary: Engagement rate, total interactions, average reach, video views, and number of Reels in any time period.
• Interaction Breakdown: Likes, comments, saves, shares, and Reels published over time.
• Individual Reel Performance: Each Reel with publish date, reach, interactions, engagement, watch time, view rate past three seconds, retention percentage, and reposts.

The Instagram Reels analytics guide breaks down each metric and what it tells you about how your Reels are landing.

Make Metricool Part of Your Reels Routine

Reels reward accounts that show up consistently, at times their audience is actually online, with planning behind each one. That’s hard to do when you’re posting from the Instagram app, holding your phone, hoping the upload doesn’t fail at 11pm on a Sunday.

With Metricool, you can edit a week of Reels in one sitting, schedule them across your best posting times, add trending audio without leaving the planner, and track how each one lands from the same dashboard. The work that used to live in five tools and a Notion doc now lives in one tab.