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
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.