Quite some companies have an Instagram account and will be very happy with this news. Hubby and I also manage an Instagram account for our webshop So Baggy. So I was excited when I received an email from Hootsuite – the tool which I use to schedule content (mostly Twitter and LinkedIn) – with the news that they enabled scheduling of Instagram posts. Of course there were already tools like ScheduGram, but for me that meant going to yet another tool (and an extra amount to pay)… and to be honest I’m becoming a fan of one-stop-shops. This will save time, and time is money 🙂
So what does this Instagram-integration within Hootsuite means: :
- You can post directly on Instagram via Hootsuite or schedule your posts to be automatically published on a specific date in the future
- You can easily manage multiple Instagram accounts (while on the Instagram-app on your smartphone you still need to logout to be able to switch to another account; dreadful!)
- For companies this change will make it easier to prepare a long term instagram content strategy (instead of go with the flow / day-by-day)
- And last but not least: just like for the other social media channels you’ll be able to set-up search queries to monitor users, hashtags or keywords (allowing you to for example track your competition)
Want to start straightaway? Just connect your Instagram profile(s), create an Instagram dashboard, monitor whatever you like in streams and start scheduling your content.
Before this full integration there was already an Instagram app available within Hootsuite soley for monitoring purposes. Be aware that this app will be deleted within 60 days. So if you only use Hootsuite for monitoring be sure to connect your Instagram account and recreate your streams cause those linked to the app will soon vanish 😉