In a move that many have been waiting for, Instagram is allowing users to schedule their posts, the company said on its Business blog.
Post scheduling has never been available on Instagram, and only present through third-party social management tools, which allowed users to create pre-write post captions and send out push notifications to remind users to post at given times.
The closest Instagram previously did, was the adding support for Drafts, which allowed social media managers and other users to prepare a post and save it for later publication.
Here, Instagram moves forward, and finally starts allowing users to schedule their posts. This feature should bring joy to many social media managers as well as influencers.
However, the feature is initially limited to business profiles on Instagram, and works only for photos and not videos. What this means, those that want to get their hand on the scheduling feature, needs to pay for subscription services that work as a Facebook Marketing Partner or Instagram Partner.
Unfortunately, the official support for post scheduling also doesn’t extend to ads, nor directly available with the product itself.
This is because the support is added to Instagram’s API.
What this means, Instagram is merely giving social media software applications like Hootsuite, Sprout Social or SocialFlow the access to the functionality, which they can then add to their own products.
And as before, the API is available to all of Facebook’s Marketing Partners and Instagram Partners.
Other updates to the Instagram Graph API also include Business Discovery, which allows users to view profile info of other businesses, and Mentions, which allows business profiles to view posts they’ve been tagged in.
The change was introduced as part of a larger revamp of Instagram’s API platform that also included a plan to deprecate the older Instagram API Platform. The newer Instagram Graph API includes the ability to analyze metrics and insights about the business’s performance on Instagram, moderate comments, and access the business’s mentions as well as adding responses to those.
These features won’t be limited to businesses in the future, the company notes.
Instagram took this long to allow schedule posts, because the platform has been busy in encouraging users to share photos and videos. But since the race to get more users continues, and as competitors like Snapchat doing improvements on their own, the trend is shifting from real-time sharing to scheduled posts.
As long as people stay on the platform and keep posting, parent Facebook should be pleased.