If you’re a blogger, or someone who wants to grow their instagram following, then you need to be scheduling your instagram posts. Scheduling your instagram posts ensures that your business never misses an opportunity to push promotions, coupon codes, new blog posts, product launches, freebies and more out to all of your followers.
For your business, it’s so important because no matter what time of day or night it is, if you have the right tools at hand, you can post to your followers on any social media profile. Whether they’re sleeping or awake doesn’t matter, because there are social media scheduling tools out there that will allow you to reach your followers before they even see it.
Sked Social
Supported Platforms:
- Instagram [primary]
- Google My Business
- YouTube
Cost: Free 7-day trial and plans start at just $25 per month.
May we be so bold as to put Sked Social first on this list? We might be a little biased, but we think Sked offers tons of the features you’re looking for in an Instagram scheduling app, and for your other social media accounts too!
Visual Instagram Planner
Our visual Instagram planner lets you drag and drop your posts to get your grid looking just right. It’s important to get the right Instagram grid aesthetic – we’ve even got some creative Instagram grid ideas to get the juices flowing.
Unlimited users included for no extra cost
Sked includes unlimited users for no extra cost with most plans. We don’t want you to share logins between team members (security issues!) or feel constrained from collaborating easily between team members internally or externally.
But to make things better, our higher plans also include extra collaboration features.
In particular, you can set up post approval processes (including a super easy-to-use approve/reject workflow for clients!) and internally comment on posts and drafts.
Con: Sked Social doesn’t currently schedule content for Pinterest and LinkedIn. However, we’re always looking to find new ways to assist our users and will be exploring these capabilities in the future.
Sked also doesn’t offer engagement tools to engage with your audience – this is best done from the Instagram app itself!
Buffer Publish
Supported Platforms:
- Twitter [primary]
Cost: Buffer offers a free plan that covers three social media accounts, 10 scheduled posts and one user, but paid plans start at $15 per month.
Buffer is another one of the top social media scheduling tools. It doesn’t place as much emphasis on the visual elements and bells and whistles, but it’s a solid option for people who want one place to schedule content and monitor the results.
Buffer offers both a browser extension and a mobile app so that you can schedule social media content anytime and anywhere.
As it’s almost the OG queueing-social-media-posts tool, Buffer has a pretty advanced queue feature, particularly for Twitter.
Buffer recently also launched a link in bio tool, but it’s still quite early in its features – we expect it to quickly improve though!
While Buffer is enough to cover the basics, they’ve also rolled out some added services like Buffer Reply (which is a paid option starting at $15 per month). This pulls all of your comments, pings, and social media conversations into one dashboard—so you can reply and engage with your users without hopping in and out of accounts.
Cons: Unfortunately, Buffer doesn’t allow for multiple users on their free account and you’ll need to log in with an Instagram Account’s credentials, making this a compromising position when contractors are granted access to confidential information.
Buffer also doesn’t offer Instagram Story (unless you have a Premium account) or Carousel scheduling or product tagging. For Social Media Managers, these functions are a bare necessity for client accounts. Here’s their quick graphic explaining where they can post directly (automatically) vs sending you a reminder:
Buffer does however offer hashtags in your first comment! This was recently launched and supports single image or video posts.
As Twitter is their primary channel, Buffer doesn’t have a visual feed planner.
The whole point of a social media scheduler is that you don’t need to manually post a thing. However, with Buffer, you’ll still need to go into Instagram and add your tagged accounts and upload Stories.
Later
Supported Platforms:
- Instagram [primary]
Cost: Later offers a free plan that caps your number of social profiles and posts. Paid plans begin at $9 per month.
Later supports Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. But throws most of its energy and attention into planning, managing, and scheduling content for Instagram.
In terms of functionality for that platform, Later doesn’t disappoint, placing it as one of the top Social Media scheduling tools. Of course, there are features you’d expect—like easy-to-use scheduling and analytics.
But there are also some other tools and features that might come in handy.
Later offers:
- A visual planner to map out your Instagram grid
- The ability to find user-generated content and save it to your own library
- Pretty comprehensive Instagram analytics
- A Link in Bio tool (find out about Instagram link in bio tools)
Later’s file storage is also worthy of note. This tool makes it easy to import media from anywhere and keep it organized in your library using different labels.
Cons: Posts of certain dimensions or file sizes can’t be uploaded on free accounts, and videos are only included on some plans.
Later lets you schedule Instagram stories or carousels – but it won’t post them for you. You will get a reminder to post on your phone and you will need to post them manually.
Later also does not support product tags for eCommerce businesses.
Free plans also don’t allow you to view posts two weeks prior or have access to any analytics. Analytics serves as an integral tool for tracking results, and unless you want to manually input data from Instagram’s inbuilt analytics on a weekly basis, having analytics integrated with your social media scheduler is basically essential.
SocialBee
SocialBee is a social media scheduling tool designed to make your hectic Instagram life easier.
Designed to save you time, SocialBee allows you to schedule images, videos, Carousels and Stories to your Instagram profile, with the latter two via their mobile app.
You can schedule posts to be published once or re-queue it to be published again in the future. You can set posts to run indefinitely or expire them based on the date or number of times published.
You’ll see a preview of your post before you can schedule or publish, as well as a grid view mode which will show you how your post will look on your Instagram feed.
The best part? SocialBee doesn’t just support Instagram. You can also schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business.
One great aspect of SocialBee is that there are no features hidden under higher priced plans, which means that even if you’re a solopreneur, small business, or an agency, you get access to every single feature.
Standout scheduling features:
- Publish images and videos (direct posting), as well as Carousels and Stories (via reminders).
- Schedule the first comment on your Instagram posts.
- Grid view mode to see how your account would look in real time.
- Create a hashtag collection and add them directly to your posts easily.
- In-depth analytics to check views, reach, impressions, growth and history.
Other features:
- Import posts via RSS or content curation platforms such as Quuu or Pocket.
- Integrates with Canva and Xara to create visuals in SocialBee.
- Dedicated workspaces and users for your team, and for different projects.
- Category based scheduling.
- Advanced scheduling functionality including Zapier integrations, and more.
Pricing
SocialBee has 3 subscription plans: Bootstrap, Accelerate and Pro, starting at $19/month. The differences between each plan are the amount of workspaces, profiles, categories and scheduled posts. Discounted yearly plans available upon request.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse gives you the option to schedule single image and video posts directly to your Instagram business profile. Or schedule Carousel posts and Stories via push notifications on their mobile app. Plus, if you’re working in a team, you can even select who receives the reminder.
You can increase your reach and engagement on scheduled posts by tagging users in single-image posts, adding your location to single-image and video posts, and including hashtags on your posts.
Agorapulse also allows you to bulk upload posts from your desktop or RSS feeds for Instagram scheduling. You also have the option to schedule posts via queues at a given time-slot or load your evergreen content into queue categories that make sense for your Instagram content strategy.
Whichever way you’ve scheduled your content, you can oversee everything at a glance in the color-coded calendar view.
Agorapulse can also assist with your other social media management tasks. It includes a social inbox, analytics, social listening, and more.
Standout scheduling features:
- Schedule unlimited single image and video posts directly.
- Increase your reach and engagement by tagging your posts.
- Schedule Carousel posts and Stories via push notifications.
- Bulk upload posts from your desktop or RSS feeds.
- Load evergreen content into queue categories.
- View scheduled posts in the color-coded calendar.
Other features:
- Create, edit, and use groups of your best-performing hashtags.
- Track the success of your Instagram posts and Stories.
Pricing
Agorapulse offers a range of subscription plans, starting from $99/month (or $79/month billed yearly) for 2 users, and 10 social profiles. Their free plan offers 3 social profiles and one user with limited scheduling.
Conclusion:
Instagram is a visual platform. And pictures are worth more than a 1000 words, so it makes sense to schedule your posts ahead of time. But scheduling posts on Instagram doesn’t always go as planned. Things come up or you simply don’t feel like posting anything at the scheduled time. This has led to the creation of tools to help us with our Instagram scheduling.