Hootsuite is a “Social Media Management System” or tool. It helps you keep track and manage your many social network channels all in one place. It reduces the need to visit several different web pages to manage your social and constantly log in and out of accounts if you have multiple on one platform.
In my opinion, Hootsuite excels at management for Twitter but it’s also really great for posting pictures from your computer with Instagram without violating the Instagram terms of service.
How Hootsute’s Instagram Scheduler Works
- You connect your Instagram account to Hootsuite
- You select that account and upload a picture and text to schedule as you normally would
- Hootsuite sends you and alert on your phone at the day and time you had scheduled
- When you click that alert, it takes you to Instagram app where the photo you scheduled is already uploaded
- You apply filters to the photo if you wish and select next
- You are taken to the screen where you enter text. The text field is blank but the text you scheduled is automatically copied to your clipboard. All you have to do is paste it in.
- Hit publish
I thought that needing to be ON your phone to post to Instagram at the scheduled time defeated the purpose of using a scheduler in the first place. Then I found out how handy it can be.
3 Awesome Reasons to Use Hootsuite to Manage Your Instagram Account
- Image Transfer Feature: No more downloading an image from your camera to the computer, then emailing it to your smartphone phone, waiting for it to come through, dowloading it to your phone, and then uploading it to Instagram. The more “snaps” you have saved on your computer, the more time this this tool will save you.
- Scheduling Feature: Instagram is hot right now and a lot of brands are hosting contests there. There are a lot of instructions, rules, disclosures, etc. that you have to peck out on your phone’s virtual QWERTY keyboard during a contest. And you have to do it EACH time you post about the contest. In the Hootsuite Instagram scheduler, you can type up to 2,200 characters. When it’s time to publish your scheduled post, entering all of that text on your phone is only a press and click away.
- Social Monitoring Feature: All of those regram accounts and hashtags you like to follow? Now you can see them all on one page using different streams. If you are *ahem* spying on your competitors or, those you want to mimic, you can view them side-by-side with each other and your own profile. You can also like and comment on the photos from the Hootsuite dashboard.
The best thing is that using this scheduler is free. Most other Instagram scheduling tools charge between $5 and $20 a month. The free version of Hootsuite lets you connect up to three different social media accounts so you can connect a combination of Twitter and Instagram accounts or three Instagram accounts (which comes in really handy if you are managing an Instagram account for a client).
Have you tried managing your Instagram account with Hootsuite? What did you think?
