Finally Released: A Program That Allows You To Schedule Instagram Posts

One of the big things lacking in my workflow was the ability to schedule Instagram posts. I have a personal Instagram as well as two work focused Instagram accounts and remembering to post on each one is time consuming and frustrating. About once a month I'll check to see if Hootsuite has added the ability to schedule instagram posts, but unfortunately it still does not. This month, my Google search led me to Latergramme and I was instantly smitten.

I use Hootsuite to schedule and post to Facebook, twitter and other social media sites, but Instagram posting is not enabled. There is a program called Iconosquare that Hootsuite partners with that allows you to view and search for photos, view and add comments and likes. It also allows you to do this through multiple accounts. Posting within this program was still lacking until I found and signed up for Latergramme. It was is exactly what needed to be added to a social media workflow since it takes away so much of the hassle. Here's how it works.

First, sign up for the service. It will prompt you to link your instagram account, then add the application to your iPhone. As far as the Android application, it has not been released and has no official release date. With the free account you get up to 30 uploads and can link two Instagram accounts. For me, this might not end up being enough since I have multiple accounts, but if you're only pushing to one account, once a day might be enough. Within the upload you can set the caption and hashtags. It doesn't force you to keep the @latergramme tag in there, so feel free to replace it.

We use square format on our instagram, but if you would like the white border, you can add it to your photo in photoshop. It will give you a notice if your photo is less than 612 x 612, which will most likely occur when you save photos on your phone for posting from twitter or Facebook. Pick your desired crop, and press save.

You can then drag and drop your photo to the date and time you want it to be published. If you want to schedule it at the same time every day, or sporadic, it's up to you. We post multiple images from a single wedding, so this allows us to pull the photos from our folder on our desktop that has our blog post images in it. This is so we can use an entire week for one set, while linking the full post in the profile of our Instagram. The fact we don't have to add the photos to dropbox, upload them to our phone, set a reminder to post, etc., makes our life so much easier. 

Once you have the posts scheduled, you will get a notification to your phone. Sadly you have to set up push notifications, or else you won't get notified it needs to post. If you were trying to get around the lack of android application using your iPad, that wont work. You need access to the app at the time it's set to go live for your approval, so if you're out of your house without your iPad the post won't go up. You also need to be logged into the instagram you want to post from. I wasn't logged in, and it gave me a notification. Also, if you're logged into a different account, it will open in that account, it doesn't care which account you are logged in to. 

It then will open the application and you will approve the post. Yes, it's not a fully automated system since it requests your approval for posting, but it takes out a lot of the hassle. You can also push posts you have scheduled by swiping to the right on it. 

It will prompt you to open the post in instagram, then you will go through the approval of submitting it. The caption will already be filled out, which is great if you previously looked up people that you worked on the project with. Press share and you're good to go.

As with anything, there are pros & cons, and to me the pros extremely outweigh the cons. This program allows you to post content from your computer, which has been a touchy platform for posting to Instagram in the past. It also takes the hassle out of remembering to post work. I would forget to post to my work instagram for weeks at a time, then I'll remember to post four days in a row. You're not going to build a solid following on Instagram with spotty posting. This allows you to step up your game on a platform that has a growing client base. As far as cons go, it's not completely automated like hootsuite would allow you to do if they hosted it, which is somewhat of a blessing, because it keeps people active on instagram. It also compresses the photo slightly and sharpens it a little, so the end product is not exactly how you uploaded it, but you can probably get around this by uploading something exactly at 612 x 612. 

Latergramme is a fairly new application, so i'm sure with their growing platform they're only likely to get better. Check them out on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.