To have a good presence on social networks, you need to plan and organize. Your content should be published at the best time on each social network you manage, not at the time you can pick up your mobile and do it manually.
Scheduling your publications will help you to organize yourself better so that your publication comes out at the best time regardless of what you are doing, you can even plan (and I recommend it) to schedule all the content of the month and thus you will only have to confirm that it has been shared and interact with your community.
Tools to program on Instagram
With these tools you will be able to schedule your publications and know that they will be published on the indicated date without having to do anything else, unless the tool has an error (in that case they usually notify by notification or email so that you can check if it has been published or not ).
These tools allow programming in company or creator accounts , not personal ones.
Facebook Business Suite
Facebook has been updated in 2021 to give way to a new design that allows not only to schedule content on Facebook and Instagram and respond to comments and messages (as you can already do with Facebook Creator Studio), but also to schedule stories for Facebook and Instagram .
It is a totally free tool, but at the moment it is not yet available for all accounts , but it is being implemented little by little, although surely you will already be able to use the mobile app with the same name (it is available for both iOS and Android) .
Creator Studio
Since August 2019, Facebook allows the option of scheduling content from its Creator Studio tool . You just have to access it from your Facebook page, give it permissions to access your Instagram account and start scheduling your images, videos or carousels for the feed or your IGTV videos .
It also allows you to add hashtags, locations, and tags .
It is completely free and you also have access to the statistics of your account and of all the content you share.
Planoly
It is the tool that I used to schedule the publications of my Instagram profile since it is a very visual tool, which allows you to upload several images and see how they would look in your feed before publishing them (so you can organize them better).
Its free version allows you to upload up to 30 content (images or videos) per month, so if you are not going to publish every day it is a good option. You can also create carousels, add hashtags and locations, and tag people in the post.
In addition, it allows you to see which are your best publications, of the week and the current month, and see a comparison of likes, comments and followers of the current week and the previous one.
Metricool
It is one of my favorite tools to analyze metrics in social networks, since it gives you many interesting statistics from both your social profiles and your website. In addition, it has a section that I use a lot to know the best time to publish on Instagram, the Planning section , where it appears colored each hour of the day according to the users who are connected to your network and where it also allows you to schedule content for Instagram.
With this tool you can schedule your images or videos of up to 1 minute to self-publish on Instagram, add hashtags or locations and tag users.
The downside is that it does not allow you to schedule carousels, IGTV videos, stories or reels to self-publish, although you can do it so that it alerts you through a notification or email and you finish doing it manually.
Later
It is a tool similar to Planoly, which also allows you to see how the publications will be in the feed to allow you to organize them in the way you like the most.
It has a free version in which you can share up to 30 publications per month (in image or video) and it also allows you to connect your Later account with your Dropbox or Drive account to be able to choose the images directly from your cloud.
SocialGest
It is a very original tool, with very complete statistics, which allows you to program your content on different social networks.
On Instagram, you can add hashtags and tags to your publications, as well as being able to add the first comment directly (very useful if you are one of those people who like to include hashtags in the first comment of the publication instead of in the description).
In addition, you have the option to preview how the feed will look with the content that you have scheduled for Instagram.
This tool has a free version with which you can publish only images on Instagram (videos, carousels, stories and the option to add locations are for paid accounts).
Of course, like the rest of the tools you can program to self-publish content with an image or video of less than 1 minute, but carousels and stories are not self-published .
Iconsquare
This tool does not have a free version, but you have 14 days to try it for free and decide if you want to invest in this tool or not.
It is a very complete tool, especially if you are looking for a programming and analytical tool, so it is worth trying it before deciding whether or not you want to invest in another tool.
When creating the account, you will have to wait a while for it to collect information from your Instagram profile. At the end, you will be able to see a lot of interesting statistics and you will be able to compare your results with the average results of your sector .
You can also collect all the analytics in a report that will be sent to you by email in PDF or XLS format.
In addition, when you go to the calendar to schedule your publication, you can see with a star what are your best times to publish, based on your account history.
You can schedule it to auto publish images or videos of less than 1 minute, but carousels and stories will not auto publish.
This tool has a very interesting thing and that is that you can send the publication to your clients to approve or reject it before it is published (they will notify you of the change of status by email).
