On average Instagram has 200 million monthly active users who share an average of 60 million photos per day. What’s more, the photos being shared are generating approximately 1.6 billion likes per day, so there is potential for high engagement if you post the right content. A lot of businesses are picking up on this and shifting some of their focus away from networks like Facebook, where engagement has been dwindling, and more to Instagram. If you haven’t started using Instagram for your business, it’s worth taking some time to strategize how to incorporate it into your marketing mix.
Luckily there are some amazing tools being developed specifically for Instagram that enable making managing and tracking the social network much easier. Below are a few I’ve found useful.
- ScheduGram – created by a consulting company based in Australia, it allows you to schedule posts, as the name implies. They do charge for the service – $13 per month for a single Instagram account, which isn’t bad, but it jumps to $40 per month for up to 5 Instagram accounts. Slightly pricey in my opinion, but it is an excellent tool if you manage more than one account.
- Latergramme – another web and app-based tool that allows you to schedule posts, but this one is free. You can quickly upload photos, write your caption then drop it into a calendar layout. There are a couple of limitations though. It doesn’t actually post to Instagram for you, instead it send an alert to your phone reminding you there is a scheduled post. Once you open it, it brings you to Instagram to complete the post. It is still easy and convenient, but does require that extra step. It also doesn’t allow you to manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard, so again if you manage multiple, you’ll have to log in and out.
- Iconosquare (formerly Statigram) – this is another free web-based tool that allows you to see and respond to new comments, check your feed and post history, and the most interesting feature…check the stats of your posts. You can get a detailed look at your most popular posts, follower growth rate, engagement among followers and non-followers, times of day and days of the week that got the most traction, and the list goes on.
- Instaport and Instagram Downloader – tools that allow you to download images from other users. Great for sharing photos posted by your community on other platforms (giving them credit of course).
- IFTTT – If This Then That is also great for setting up an automatic download of these images to a Dropbox file. You can drill down to only download photos taken with a certain hashtag, or in a specific region, or that referenced a specific name or user.
- Repost – a mobile app that allows you to repost content from your Instagram community. It gives them gives full attribution so you don’t have to worry about poaching content. Sharing content from your community is a great way to deepen engagement.
Of course these are just a handful. There are more and more Instagram apps and tools popping up frequently, but these are a few of my favorites at the moment.
