Tag Archives: Instagram

Create content for your Blog easily


You need not be a great writer or spend hours creating content on your blog. You can think creatively to use other means to create content that do not require a lot of effort

In this fantastic recent article by the magazine Entrepreneur http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233823, there are a lot of good ideas to create content.

We would like to add our experience on the matter, and give you some hints about the applications that you can use in order to create such content:

1. Create an image gallery

Using Instagram in conjunction with tint-up is one idea, but you can also create your own gallery as we discussed in this post.

2. Select a list of songs related to a theme

You can post something like this: http://mashable.com/2014/06/02/summer-songs-since-1962/, that contains all summer hits since 1962.

In Spotify there are a lot of curated lists of almost anything. And in YouTube you can also find funny lists such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWTQqIxxbSk songs about rain

3. Put quotes

I like for example to look at quotes about the universe, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/universe.html

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

4. Make a list of links

Like this very same one, you mean? 😉

5. A collection of videos following one topic

Again, this is curating, like links or images… nothing new here. In Vimeo you can find lists of videos about interesting topics.Like this awesome collection of videos filmed with the GoPro on Vimeo

6. Audio interview

This is the classic journalists work. You can nowadays use your mobile phone as a pretty good sound recorder. And share your interview using Soundcloud. Here is a guide about how to use Soundcloud for journalists: http://help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/1209788-soundcloud-for-journalists

7. Podcast

A podcast is like recording a radio program, and making it available as a sound file on-line.

8. Video Interview and 9. Video Q&A

There are good tools out there to make a video session with questions and answers such as http://www.qstion.com

If you feel like video or audio is complex and requires edition, post-production and some tension during the execution, try first a simpler tool such as a webchat where you can publish the Q&A easily. Dilmot is a web publishing tool that will allow you to have your own site and share the interview with your readers so they can also participate sending questions, check it out at http://www.dilmot.com

10. Slide deck

A classic way of sharing your slides on-line with slideshare, but also Google Docs offers great tools for sharing.

Ok, this is the bulk of it. Hope you found it useful! let us know your comments and findings

How to post automatically images from Instagram in your blog or website


Managing your on-line marketing efforts can be a nightmare if you don’t use the productivity tools out there.

We have talked already about tintup.com, that allows you to embed social content in your site easily. Today we are going to explore if it is possible to automatically post on Instagram.

Instagram feed of Spanish&Surf. Courtesy of spanishandsurf.net school

Instagram feed of Spanish&Surf. Courtesy of spanishandsurf.net school

Looking at the discussion in this post http://www.warriorforum.com/social-media-marketing-forum/859029-there-way-schedule-posts-instagram.html, it is very true that what is the point of automating posts in Instagram if this network is thought to drive engagement and therefore if users don’t visit it and it becomes full of robots (automated scripts) then it would not make any sense. In this other post in StackOverflow they also discuss if Instagram makes this available via API, and the answer is again, no. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21641298/how-does-posts-so-post-directly-to-the-instagram-api. Although they find some workaround for programmers.

But the discussion makes a lot of sense, since there are some networks that do allow scheduled posts such as Twitter. For example, if you use the social network manager Hootsuite, you can autoschedule posts, as explained here: http://blog.hootsuite.com/autoschedule/.

So, coming back to the question that titles this post, is it possible to automate Instagram posting?

Yes and no. Instagram is not putting this option in its API, but

If this then that

I have checked this amazing tool to see if there is any recipe available that posts to Instagram automatically. And I have not found it. When looking at the Instagram related recipes, there are a lot, but all of them will use instagram as the source of an action (this links shows what I mean https://ifttt.com/recipes?channel=instagram
There are other ways of doing it such as ifttt.com (If this then that).

Latergram

This service allows you to schedule posting images in your Instagram account. It is free and at this moment it is available both as a web application and as an iOS app. http://www.latergram.me/.

It is not fully automated though, because you have to authorise the moment of publishing the picture. Probably the Instagram API is not allowing this degree of automation, but at least you can get a warning about when to post.

Post.so

This service used to make it possible to post to Instagram at certain hours automatically. But today it is not possible. Only posting to Twitter, VK and Pinterest. Check out https://postso.com/

If you read this post, https://boostlikes.com/blog/2013/12/automatically-post-instagram-account, it seems that it is possible, but truly it is not anymore.

Schedugr.am

They do offer this possibility. Check out http://schedugr.am/. It is not a free service, but it may be interesting for you if you are posting into Instagram professionally.