Save time by scheduling your Instagram posts. I am a huge advocate for batching your social media so that it doesn’t become a time-wasting procrastination technique. In this post, I provide a break down of my favourite and popular software options. I have used or tested all of these tools over the last few years.
Note that to take advantage of the auto-publishing feature of these tools you will need to switch your Instagram account to a business one. It is free and easy to do. Read more about the advantages of switching to a free business profile here.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post may be “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, at no extra cost to you I will receive an affiliate commission.
Later:
Key features: Bulk upload, feed preview, calendar, saved captions, hashtag suggestions, auto posting for Instagram business accounts and avilable both online and app.
The free account gets you 1 social profile per platform, photos, basic analytics, and the ability to search and repost content. The free version allows 30 Instagram posts a month (use this referral link when you sign up for 10 additional posts a month)
Upgrade for Hashtag suggestions, best time to post, multi photos per post and video.
Tailwind:
Key features: Bulk upload, feed preview, time shots schedule, auto post, shuffle queue, schedule hashtags to post in the first comment, powerful paid plan with easy snapshot analytics, trending posts, and hashtag monitoring.
The free account gets you 31 posts and basic analytics.
Upgrade for reaction score, engagement score and engagement rate. Full (paid) accounts are needed to access the trending posts, peak days and time, and hashtag monitoring.
Plann App:
Key features: Reply to comments via desktop, strategy creation/planning, Bulk upload, feed preview, schedule based on when your audience is online or when your posts have the best engagement, save hashtags. They have a forever free version or upgrade for just $7 a month to access
I love the strategy planning tool and the resources they provide to take your Instagram to the next level. Plann also has some great analytics build in that are much more powerful than the basic stats you get in Instagram. Unfortuanlty for me they don’t have all the features available for Android just yet otherwise I would be switching to this tool.
Hootsuite:
Not as powerful or user-friendly for Instagram however a viable option if you are using Hootsuite for Twitter (where it is feature rich) and don’t want to have multiple programs to manage your different accounts. For me the lack of a visual feed preview is a deal breaker as I want to view my posts next to each other before posting.
Buffer:
Again this program is not as user-friendly or feature rich for Instagram as other options but does the job if you want to combine with your Twitter scheduling. As with the previous program, the lack of visual feed makes this one a poor option for me. It does allow you to schedule hashtags to post in the first comment.
