Today, there are 800 million active Instagram monthly users and around 95 million posts are shared every single day. Approximately there are 25 million business accounts and 96 percent of fashion brands use Instagram.
If you own an e-commerce store, most likely you use Instagram to promote business, you can increase Instagram followers which has a tremendous impact on your business. For this, you’d need to schedule many posts in advance, so you can have more free time and resources to work on other things.
Thus, using a reliable Instagram scheduler app is crucial to your Instagram marketing campaign. In fact, with the right app, you can even hack Instagram marketing with these 60 tactics.
What are the characteristics of a good Instagram scheduler?
- Allows you to plan and schedule many months ahead
- Provides grid or list-arranged calendar
- Includes access to Creative Commons free images
- Comes with a free image editor
- Warns users of hashtag rules
- Reminds users of post content discrepancies
- Publish the posts on your behalf automatically without manual publishing via mobile app
The thing is, most Instagram schedulers send a notification to your mobile app, where you must push to publish the post that has previously been uploaded to the scheduler. In other words, most schedulers require manual intervention, which can be time-consuming when you must deal with tens of posts per day.
Below are top-performing scheduling apps that automatically publish to Instagram for you.
Based in Melbourne, this app publishes each post on behalf of your mobile app. What does it mean? Instead of you personally pushing the submit button to post an Instagram post, their phones would do it for you instead. Thus, you don’t need to have an Instagram Business Account to enjoy auto-publish from a scheduler.
Among the features include unlimited users, no upload limits, image and video scheduling, multi-page post scheduling, Canva integration, and image editor. It also comes with a mobile app, so you can choose to schedule via desktop or mobile.
It’s another no-push notification Instagram scheduler that gives you complete freedom without needing to manually publish each post. It’s simple to use and priced very reasonably for unlimited posting, analytics, and stories scheduling, in addition to images and videos.
It claims to be a hands-free scheduler so that you can schedule posts even months in advance. Also, it comes with intelligent analytics and actionable metrics. You can start with a free trial.
You’d need to use Instagram Business Account to publish directly to the scheduling app. Thus, it’s ideal for small-medium businesses and solo entrepreneurs. It comes with “Visual Instagram Planner,” so you can arrange each post perfectly for aesthetic purposes that fits your overall theme. You can start with a free trial.
You can use the free account that schedules 2 accounts and publishes 30 Instagram posts. It can be used for other social media accounts as well, like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. The analytics, search and report, and unlimited media search also included in the free account.
When you’ve converted to a Business Profile on Instagram, you can use Buffer to directly publish scheduled posts. If you use a regular account, you’d have to manually publish each post, since Buffer only sends you a notification to the mobile app that reminds you to publish.
Also, Buffer can be used to schedule Facebook Page, Facebook Profile, Facebook Group, Twitter, LinkedIn Page, LinkedIn profile, Google+ Page, Google+ Profile, and Pinterest. Moreover, the trial account is always free.
An Instagram Business account provides more options for customers to contact you, as it includes a phone number, email address, and physical address. It also includes analytics to see how the posts are doing and insights on followers.
In conclusion, it’s an unprecedented time to use Instagram as a promotion app. The sheer number of users is good enough a reason to leverage its strengths. However, promoting products on Instagram posts requires more than just creating beautiful photos, videos, and stories. You’d need to plan and be strategic.
With the right Instagram scheduler, you can do so with more confidence and convenience. Thus, it’s recommended to use one that fits your business needs and budget.
About the Author
Jennifer Xue is an award-winning author, columnist, and serial entrepreneur based in Northern California. She also works as a digital strategist for Oberlo. Her byline has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Business.com, Business2Community, Good Men Project, Addicted2Success, Positively Positive, and others. She is the author of White Paper Writing for Business (BookBoon, 2016). Her blog is JenniferXue.com.
