Instagram now finally allows custom scheduling of posts. Well, sort of. For now, the only type of users who can do this are business accounts, and they can't do it directly on the Instagram app — they have to use special social media managing software such as HootSuite.
Business users can also only schedule photos for now, not videos. Even still, the addition of post scheduling would make a lot of social media managers for celebrities, artists, and enterprises happy, because it has never been available until now.
Instagram Outs Post Scheduling
Before, the only way to pseudo-schedule posts was pre-writing captions and setting up push notifications to remind users to post them at a specified time. While the feature is only available to business users for now, Instagram has confirmed that it'll also be coming to regular folks by early 2019.
That's quite a long wait for such a simple feature, though perhaps the Facebook-owned company is still ironing out some kinks, especially with regard to scheduling videos. It also makes sense that this feature wasn't there to begin with because Instagram has always encouraged its users to share photos and videos in the moment.
But with Snapchat removing white borders found on posts that came from the camera roll, it seems social media apps are slowly shifting away from real-time sharing. It's hard to imagine real-time matters much nowadays, though, if users keep posting anyway.
Anyhow, those who want to get started on scheduling posts should begin by working with one of Instagram's Facebook Marketing Partners or Instagram Partners.
"The scheduling and publishing of Instagram content has been the number one request for our 16 million customers," said HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes. "Now, they can manage large volumes of content, multiple team members and multiple Instagram accounts with ease and security. Hootsuite is excited to partner with Instagram to make this happen."
Instagram Graph API
Along with the announcement of post scheduling, Instagram has also revealed that it would be ending support for the Instagram API platform by early 2020. This is apparently to give developers time to transition into the new Instagram Graph API, which boasts features such as viewing organic insights and moderating comments.
"These added features allow for better content planning and secure account management, removing the need for employees to share login credentials to gain account access to insights or create a post," Instagram said in a blog post.
