For a long time now Instagram users and marketers have had to find ad-hoc ways to schedule content onto the platform. It’s been a bloody nightmare to be quite honest.
They’ve been so protective over their API that the very best you could do was create a post in a scheduling platform, which would send a notification to your phone for you to manually copy and paste it over. Not ideal as you can imagine – especially with most of the key times to post falling out of office hours.
So the news that Facebook (who own Instagram) are launching a scheduling tool through Creator Studio is music to our ears. It will allow you to plan your content and IGTV broadcasts ahead of time and post them out automatically.
But before you get too giddy, it’s not arrived for everyone…yet. It’s slowly rolling it out to users as I type. We’re yet to see it ourselves, but are waiting with bated breath!
To see if it’s available for your company, you’ll need to have an Instagram Business account linked to a Facebook page. Head over to Creator Studio and click on the Instagram icon at the top of the Creator Studio dashboard. From there you will be able to manage, post and schedule all of your Instagram and IGTV posts (once it’s rolled out).
As well as being able to select a posting date and time, adding tags and locations, you will also be able to crop your images before posting and even upload multiple photos to a carousel post. Just like a normal scheduling platform, Creator Studio will display all posts in your queue so you can review and edit accordingly.
There’s an insights tab that will help you better understand your audience and how they are interacting with your content. But be warned, apparently, it will only give insights from the past 7 days.
The only other downside we can see is that it doesn’t look like you can manage your content visually, like you can, for instance, with an app like Later. This functionality proves extremely valuable if you are an order geek who likes the grid to look like a work of art in itself! Another thing it doesn’t seem to do is manage comments, which again many of the apps out there will allow.
Anyway, that’s it for now, we’ll keep you posted as soon as we hear more. In the meantime give our social channels a follow via the links here: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and of course Instagram.
