Instagram Allows Third Party Posting

           One of the key tools businesses use to market and advertise their product or service is a type of third-party post managing app. Businesses on Facebook and twitter have taken full advantage of these apps to benefit their business in so many ways. Not only do these apps allow businesses to schedule posts and organize all of their platforms onto one app, it allows the business to see the analytics of each and every post. Analyzing the traffic on posts can tell you any detail you need to better market your business such as the best time to post, the length of post that gets the most views and type of content that gets the most likes, shares, etc. There is however one issue with these apps that aren’t hurting businesses, but it isn’t making marketing easy. These apps can’t be used on Instagram, or so we thought.

            We can’t blame this unfortunate flaw on the apps themselves but rather on Instagram. According to an article I found on TechCrunch called “Instagram now allows Business to Schedule Their Posts,” third party posting has been the number one requested service for Instagram said the CEO of Hootsuite, Ryan Holmes. The article states that on January 30^th, 2018, Instagram made “a long overdue change” to the app and service itself, allowing social media managers to schedule posts and track content that they’ve posted. This is huge for businesses trying to market their products more effectively without the hassle of manually posting and trying to remember to put out content regularly.

            Like I stated, this rids social media managers of the task to remember to post things on a regular basis and come up with new and improved ads after a certain number of posts. The TechCrunch article I found talks about Instagram’s only attempt at something like this to help in the past was the implementation of drafts, so content could be composed and ready to go at a moment’s notice and could go out on “schedule.” While this did assist social media managers, it was not everything they were looking for.

            With this new software, Instagram is allowing larger businesses to start out using apps like Hootsuite or SocialFlow to schedule their Instagram content. Access for smaller businesses has not been determined yet. The main reason for larger business to have this software is because they are creating over 100,000 posts a month, SocialFlow CEO, Jim Anderson told TechCrunch. In my mind, 100,000 posts in a month seems like an unreachable number and it also seems like we don’t see that many coming from a business account.

            There are some exciting new changes coming to Instagram and for now it is limited to businesses only but, Instagram told TechCrunch that individual access to their new API system is on track to be available in early 2019 at the soonest. This will give every day users like you and I to schedule posts if that’s something we are interested in and trying to get better at, but also to track statistics of our posts and better shape our content and ultimately receive better engagement from our followers.