With more than 1 billion active users on Instagram, it is important to create your own identity and brand, with your own peculiar brand qualities.
In the previous post on Instagram – Feed, And Story – we discussed what is the difference between Instagram Feed and Sory. So in this article, we will see how Instagram is different than other social media platforms and how to automate your content, so you get better interaction with your audience.
Instagram is different than other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. Instagram is a very active platform and it encourages interaction with your audience. The more you are active on the IG, the more visibility you gets from it.
Therefore it is important to constantly in touch with your audience by posting regularly your stories and posts. So if you are super busy, it will be really difficult to regularly create content for social media platforms. Here come the Automation tools in the picture. With automation tools, it becomes super easy to create content and stay in touch with your audience on a regular basis.
Another reason that you need to be regularly posting on Instagram, is other platforms like Youtube push forward your old content also if that’s what people are searching for. It is very common that you will find a two or three-year-old video ranking on Youtube, but it’s not so with Instagram. If you are not posting regularly on Instagram, it will never push your content to your followers. It only shows up the latest content.
Automation tools come very handily in this situation where you can create your content in advance and schedule it over time.
Don’t Be Robotic
Automation Tools give you the ability to schedule your content well in advance even for a year also. But while creating content you should take into consideration your audience and what they are searching for.
Don’t come across like a Robot to your audience. As I said earlier every social media platform is different and operates on different patterns. Instagram has become popular because of its visual appeal and it’s unique and different ways of using hashtag and emojis while interacting.
Instagram Stories have become very popular for the fact that it can connect you more easily with your audience. people feel connected when you share your insights directly with them in a short span of 5 to 15 seconds.
There is various kind of content that you can use to stay in touch with your audience like post, story, IGTV, Live Videos.
With automation tools, you can create content as a post type as well as in the video format. You can create different videos and can post on IG as a post or story well in advance.
Mix Automation & Organic
Even if you are using an automation tool for Instagram, you can mix your content with automated and organic content and can create your own style.
It is important to humanize your brand by posting instinctive videos on your feed or in-store. Latest updates or visit to different places, travel snippets can be a great help for humanizing your brand.
Particularly in an Instagram story, you can post screenshots, videos, self videos, opinion or post-announcement.
It is also important to have SOP – Standard Operation Procedure (set of guidelines) which will help you through the process of content creation and automation of your content.
Popular Automation Tools
Automation Tools are very popular because of its usability and capacity to save a ton of time of the user. It has the ability to schedule your activity for an entire year.
You will find some great free and paid automation tools for social media scheduling.
Promo Republic
The Promo Republic is one of my favorite tool for scheduling my content on social media. It has many cool features.
The Promo Republic has more than 120,000 users and around 100,000 post ideas from which you can easily create new content.
PromoRepublic also shows upcoming events so that you should not miss an event to connect with your audience and create very targeted content.
The Promo Republic has its own editor so that you do not need to leave the platform to create and edit images for content.
It also has the ability to monitor content across all platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google My Business and Linkedin. It gives you all the statistics regarding content.
The Promo Republic helps in:
- can find content suggestions, curate them using inbuilt editor.
- can schedule my posts in advance, no need to use this daily if you are busy.
- Amazing collection of post ideas.
- Mobile app for Instagram posting.
- Post ideas categorization makes it easier to filter by Niche or industry or event.
- Stats are available within the tool.
- Add team member, so that VA can work for you.
- if you have all this in one place what else do you need?
The Promo Republic has very reasonable pricing. It has Solo and Standard accounts, $9 and $39 respectively. It also has a 14-day free trial.
Tailwind
Tailwind is the official partner with Pinterest and Instagram. Tailwind has also all the major features which you will need to automate your social media content.
One of the major features of Tailwind is creating content in al lightning speed, as it curates the content from the website, around the web and from Instagram itself.
Tailwind has a “schedule” button which really helps to instantly create content, whenever you hover over an image the “schedule” button shows up and in a click, your image is ready for scheduling them straight to your Tailwind queue.
Tailwind also offers insights and analytics for each post, so that you can figure out which post is doing well and which does not.
Tailwind pricing starts from $9.99 onwards, it has a free trial, no credit card required.
Later.com
Later is official partner with Instagram, so it is one of the safest social media automated tool.
If you are just starting out with social media and need a powerful tool, Later is the best option as it has many pricing plans from Free to Brand, priced $0 to $49 per/mo.
Its free plan has many features as it gives you 30 posts per month per profile. Later also gives you the ability to post for 1 social profile per platform, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. In short, you can post 30 posts for each of these platforms.
But it is important to remember that Later counts your scheduled posts and not published posts. Also, it does not have any restriction on what content format you are posting, posts or video content. Some platforms do not allow video posts in the free plans.
Linkin.bio by Later
Instagram does not allow links other than your bio, so till now, one can able to add only one link in their description. But with Linkin.bio, it is way easier to add links in each post. Since it is the official partner with Instagram, it is safe to use Linkin.bio to add links in each post. This feature is only available to business plans in Later.
Other popular content automation tools are Social Insider, Content Studio. You will find many promote free automated tools on YouTube and Instagram videos. But it is important to check out before installing or adding to your browser.
Many are promoting Instafollowers.wtf, Gramto, and Growbot, for free automating Instagram, but these websites are not legal and can harm you in the long run. Always look for legal pages like privacy policy and terms conditions on any webpage. It is legally binding to all website owners.
So if you do not find these pages, be careful while dealing with such websites. Many sites have given the email address to contact and support, but if you try to verify the emails you will find that the emails are fraud and fake.
Conclusion
With its growing popularity, Instagram has become the focal point of attraction to all the major businesses and so the competition. To get visibility on Instagram becomes difficult day by day. Another reason is the way the Instagram algorithm works. As the name suggests Instagram is all about Insta, instant news, latest posts on a regular basis. So for some reason, if you were not able to post on Instagram say for a month or so, Instagram literally punishes you by giving few likes on your post.
Automation Tools come handy in this situation, you can create and schedule content for a week or a month, and save a ton of time. there are many automated tools are available for free and paid plans. Choose which is suitable for your social media strategy.
If you are new to social media, I would suggest Later, as it has a free plan, which is good even if you are just starting out. But just remember, that you need to download Later App to your phone. If it is not available in your country or on your device, you can not use Later.com platform.
If you are an advanced user, I would suggest the Promo Republic, It’s my favorite automated tool for content creation and promotion. It has an amazing collection of data with 100,000 post ideas, so even if you have no idea what to post, Promo Republic gives you a ton of content ready to publish.
Friends, let me know in the comments below, which is your favorite automated tool for content publishing. If you have any suggestions and queries, let me know I will be more than happy to guide you in the right direction.