Apps for Automatic Publishing on Instagram
While Instagram has the been the main social media platform for artists, there have a been a few things that made it difficult to use. Artists often need to send photos of their latest works to their phone and then post from there, but this can be time consuming. You either needed to use an app, email the image to yourself, airdrop, Dropbox, or just drop it altogether. The good news, is that Instagram has finally allowed third-party publishing apps to post directly to Instagram for you. Using one of the apps featured below, you can now schedule a post from your computer and it will post to your feed automagically. In order to take advantage of this new feature, you will need to have a business account.
Hootsuite
This popular social media management platform is designed to manage a variety of social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, and Instagram. The interface is not as minimal as the other two featured here, but that’s due the amount of features the app has. Scheduling, monitoring, content curation, analytics, and you can even extend the features with paid and free extensions. A free account will allow you to manage 3 social media profiles and share up to 30 posts per month.
Check it out here.
Buffer
Quickly na easily scheduling posts with this powerful app. Prior to the direct Instagram scheduling update, Buffer made it easy to schedule posts and then send them to mobile app to be published from there. It was one of the easiest ways to post images to Instagram, but now with the direct scheduling update it’s even better. Buffer allows you to set scheduled times, add your posts to queue, and even has analytics. The free plan allows you to connect 3 social media profiles and post 10 scheduled posts per profile.
Check it out here.
Later
Formerly known as Latergramme, Later is a visual planner and scheduler for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. It allows you to plan and preview posts in a calendar, and you even add an extension that will let you sell products from your Instagram account. As with the other apps it has analytics, direct Instagram scheduling, but Later let’s you do bulk uploads to save time. The free account lets you connect one social media service, and for Instagram it allows 30 posts per month.
Check it out here.
Pro-Tip: When preparing your images in your editor of choice, there are some restrictions for direct Instagram posting. Due to limitations with Instagram’s API, the direct scheduling will only work if your image is a perfect square, a 4:5 aspect ratio (portrait image), or a 1.91:1 aspect ratio (landscape image). To make it easy, just always aim to have your images at exactly 1200 pixels wide and between 629 and 1500 pixels high. Read more here.
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(Header Image: “The Tempest” by christianschloe)
