Starting today (January 30), we are launching three new features on the Instagram Graph API designed to help businesses better manage their organic presence on Instagram. – Facebook Developer News
With this, Instagram announced the much-awaited changes to its Graph API, enabling businesses to schedule organic posts on their Instagram account.
“Scheduling Instagram content has been the No. 1 request for our 16 million customers,” said Ryan Holmes, CEO, HootSuite.
Previously, business pages could either set a reminder or save the posts as drafts, in order to later upload it manually. This did not come as a much of a help.
Scheduling organic posts means businesses can now connect with a larger audience which befits time-zones and eliminates the complication of engaging with audience located in an entirely different time-zone.
The thing worth mentioning here is that Instagram doesn’t directly accommodate the task of scheduling the posts, instead, with the changes in its Graph API, social media support applications viz. HootSuite, Sprout Social or Social Flow now have access to its functionality.
Instagram has made the API available to all its Facebook Marketing Partners & Instagram partners.
Along with this, folks at Instagram are planning to shut down their Platform API through different phases over the next two years.
Businesses who have their Instagram account linked to their Facebook page will be able to schedule their posts in the following manner:
- On the Hootsuite account, go to Composer and prepare a copy, along with hashtags
- Attach an image, and make edits like resizing, framing, and text overlays
- Once done, you can preview your post to ensure it will appear exactly how you intend it to be.
- You can then schedule the post by clicking on the calendar icon and choosing the date and time when you would like it to go live.
- HootSuite will then automatically publish your post at the date and time of your choice.
Currently, this feature is limited to Instagram business accounts only. However, it won’t be so in the future, the company says.
According to Instagram, they are working on extending this support to non-business accounts also, which may roll out in early 2019.
