Instagram: Schedule and PUBLISH!

I can hear the sound of Social Media Managers cheering all over the world.

What a time to be alive, fellow Marketeers! For the first time in their existence, Instagram has announced that they’ll now be allowing 3rd party applications to post content on users’ behalves. Finally we can Instagram schedule and PUBLISH.

Yep, you read that right.

Social media management tools will now be able to post FOR you!

Up until this point, Instagram’s API would not allow external applications to post content to the platform. Despite their best efforts to assist content creators in their planning, these apps could only be used to plan and map out content. Once the time came for a post to go live, the user would receive a push notification reminding them to publish their scheduled post which they would then have to push to the social sharing platform themselves.

With the updated Instagram Graph API, Instagram Partner applications will have the ability to plan, manage, and post content to users’ accounts automatically. Any Social Media Marketer knows that this will be a HUGE time saver!

The feature is currently limited to business profiles and can only be used to schedule pictures, not videos. To start playing with these features, users will have to pay a premium for subscription services such as HootSuite, Sprout Social, or any other Instagram Partner or Facebook Marketing Partner listed on their official website.

Although there’s limited access to this new feature, Instagram has confirmed that the update will make its way to everyone’s profiles by early 2019.

Have you started using your favorite app to schedule and auto-publish to Instagram? Tell us about your experience in the comments! We want to hear from you.