An often-requested feature that had been absent in Instagram for the longest time has finally been implemented, and it has become the buzz for social media managers around the world.
There used to be no way on how to schedule a post on Instagram. But now, it can finally be done for Instagram business accounts.
Before this update, third-party tools were limited to being used to set reminders for when posts had to be published. Besides that, there was no other way to post on Instagram in a timely manner other than doing so manually.
While the new feature will make things much easier for prolific Instagram business users who post regularly on a schedule, it doesn’t extend to ads, and the feature is not present in the app itself.
Support for the feature is being implemented through Instagram’s API, which means third-party social-media applications like Hootsuite, SocialFlow, Sprout Social, and so on can finally be used to access this functionality once it has been implemented.
The API is available to all Facebook Marketing Partners and Instagram Partners, according to Instagram. With that, Hootsuite became one of the first to implement the API to let its business users finally be able to learn how to schedule a post on Instagram effectively and consistently.
Another drawback to Instagram only releasing an API for this functionality is that most individual users may not be able to make the most of it. This is mostly meant for businesses and content creators who rely heavily enough on timely posts for their social-media marketing strategy that they would use something like Hootsuite to manage their social media accounts.
This update comes as a part of a larger revamp of Instagram’s API platform. The older API is planned to be systematically replaced over the next two years, starting on July 31 of this year. The new platform also has a Graph API that will include better analytics and metrics, so businesses can better analyze their performance on Instagram, as well as moderate comments and access mentions.
Aside from that, there will also be a new business discovery feature that will let users view other business profile information and media, thus giving them more ways to be seen by audiences. While these features may only be usable by businesses and larger organizations for now, Instagram does plan to roll them out to all users eventually.
Support for non-business profiles is currently set for release in early 2019.
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Originally posted on Inc.com