7 Instagram Scheduling Tools For Busy Entrepreneurs

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Do you want to save time on using Instagram for business?

Don’t know what Instagram scheduling tool to choose?

To grow your Instagram community, it is important to be consistent and post at the right time. In social media marketing, the automation of some processes always helps to save time and be more productive.

There are several services for Instagram scheduling, but the question is which one will serve you better.

For this post, I’ve tested and compared seven of them.

The scheduling steps are similar for all the tools:

Adding image, description and setting the publishing date through the computer or mobile device.
At the scheduled time you get a notification on your phone, that you need to post an image.
Select ‘Open on Instagram.’ Edit the picture if you need in the Instagram editor and paste a description.
Share the post.

Source: Buffer

A few tools even will post images without actions from your side.

The tested services have a variety of features and prices. Some of them have plans for agencies and large enterprises; however, we’ll go through benefits, pros and cons, which are useful for individuals and small business owners.

Instagram scheduling with Buffer

buffer.com

Buffer is the scheduling service for all the key social media networks.

As the several other services, Buffer only sends the notification to your phone, and then you need to publish the photo by yourself. The reason is the Instagram limitation of what can and can’t be automated. As they say:

We built Buffer for Instagram this way to keep our community safe. We’re keen to make sure every account that posts through Buffer is doing so with Instagram’s consent and never gets shut down.

Free plan:

5 social media accounts, but only one account for each network, which means that you can add only 1 Instagram account.
Scheduling up to 10 posts per social profile at one time.
Only one posting schedule.

Paid plans starts from $10/month (Awesome plan):

10 social media accounts on Awesome plan and up to 25 on Small Business plan. There can be several different profiles of each network.
Scheduling from 100 (Awesome plan) to 2000 (Small Business plan) posts per profile for one time.
Several posting schedules so you can add the individual schedule to different days.
Analytics feature.
On Small Business plan, adding up to 5 team members and get more detailed analytics.

Pros:

It allows you to set the schedule for all the week or each day separately.

It shows the list of previous images with the statistic of engagement, even if they were posted not through Buffer. There you can see how many likes and comments got every post.

You may re-share any of that images again on Instagram as well as on other social media profiles connected to your buffer account.

If you want to repost other user’s pictures you need to copy its URL and open it in Buffer app on your phone. Once it opened, Buffer will recognize that you copied the URL and will ask if you would like to repost the image.

For each profile, you can set up its time zone.

On paid accounts, you have the calendar view of all the posts, where you can reschedule any posts manually or drag and drop them to the new day/time.

Also, paid account gives you the access to additional analytics. You can sort posts by those, which are most popular (have most likes or comments) or those, which are least popular (have least likes and comments).

There, look at the posts, which performed well. Was it because of the posting time? Did you use specific hashtags? What content did you post? See what worked well for you and implement it in your Instagram strategy.

Cons:

No options for searching and monitoring hashtags, users, locations, etc.

No ways to engage with followers other Instagram accounts.

No bulk uploads.