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14 Comments

Do you use Instagram scheduling tools?

My wife has recently transitioned to part time to focus the rest of her time on growing her freelance business.

A large part of her funnel to getting new clients is Instagram. While we were on holiday I noticed that her process for getting posts up was really tedious and was impacting our trip. I know there are lots of scheduling tools out there - like plannr, buffer, later, etc. but they’re all pretty expensive and have a hockey stick scaling on price.

Do you use anything like this? What does it cost you and do you think it’s worth the cost?

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    I drive a lot of my engagement and signups through Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/paneljam) but I only publish one post a day (not counting stories).

    For this, I use Buffer's free plan as that's enough to schedule a week of posts in advance. Since all my posts are galleries, unfortunately, these posts can't be fully automated, but the reminder from Buffer plus the automatic copying of my caption are enough to speed up the process.

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      Thanks for the info. Looks like buffer are slowly chipping away at their free plan https://faq.buffer.com/article/827-publish-individual-plan-pricing-changes-in-march-2018.

      Also I couldn’t even figure out how to sign up for it as the only ones listed are paid plans.

      What would you do if they forced you to the $15/m plan ?

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        If that happened, I'd switch to Hootsuite's free plan. As for Buffer, the free plan is tucked right below their pricing table.

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          Gotcha. Thanks for the tip that one snuck past me.

          Do you particularly care about how your wall/page on Instagram looks? In terms of cohesion, or mainly just getting the content up there.

          thanks again for answering all these questions :)

          1. 1

            No worries!

            As far as cohesion goes, I'm in a unique position as my content is user-generated. So I care enough about the appearance in that I purposefully post comics with nice looking first panels, but otherwise, I don't plan out the overall look of my 'wall'.

  2. 1

    Wondering what she ended up using for her scheduling?

    I'd love for her to try the platform I built called Pallyy.

    It can schedule to Instagram, as well as all the other major networks and I've created the pricing to be very affordable - especially as you grow bigger.

  3. 1

    I've used Buffer and Hootsuite. I currently use Buffer.

    Whilst Hootsuite worked - it asked for all privileges to your Facebook pages, Instagram accounts and FB ad account - far too invasive for an app which is meant to simply 'schedule' posts.

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      Pretty sure you could just enable the Instagram & Facebook page management permissions as that's all they really need for scheduling.

    2. 1

      Thanks for the insight.

      I’m wondering if there’s a market for a no frills tool which is pay as you go. Something like 15c a post, all inclusive in terms of functionality. No plans or tiers. No fuss.

      And focuses on creative side, rather than a calendar driven focus, such as you can ensure the scheduled posts are cohesive with the rest of your current posts - that’s my wife’s biggest want.

      1. 1

        Not to my knowledge. You might be able to getaway with something similar by using Buffer's free plan, and hiring a VA to fill out the Buffer every X amount of days (e.g. 10 posts every 5 days) and negotiate rate/content plan based on that.

        1. 1

          Sorry, I meant I would build it.

          Was thinking of using concretesocial, since the new Instagram api is still locked to only their partner buddies.

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    I use Later Free Plan

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      Hey can you tell me a bit more about your usage? What’s the main things you use the free plan for?

  5. 1

    As someone with a tonne of social media accounts all of which may have one interaction per year I would LOVE to find an open source social media tool!

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