For the longest time, one of the maddening limitations of Instagram was the inability to schedule posts in advance. Many, many marketers turned to third party tools such as Hootsuite and others to get around this limitation After all, who is available at all hours every day of the week to make sure that posts go up on time? Truly, no one.
Things have changed, though. Thanks to the eagle eyes of one of our clients, Facebook (the owner of Instagram) has quietly launched the ability to schedule posts through the new “Facebook Business Suite”. This new suite is designed to allow business owners to manage their accounts across both Facebook and Instagram simultaneously. This is great news for businesses who have business accounts on both platforms, making it easier to manage both accounts from one single dashboard.
Schedule posts on Instagram through Facebook
However, there are some limitations. If you’re already using the Ads Manager to manage your business advertising through Facebook/Instagram, the Business Suite is not currently available for you. Likely in the future, Facebook will migrate all users to the platform but at the moment, you have to have it rolled out to you – there is no way to opt into it unless Facebook offers it to you.
In the long run, the good news is that Facebook is listening. Scheduling posts on Instagram has long been requested by business users and it’s clear that Facebook is responding to that need. It’s also likely that once they have all the backend pieces hooked together, they will migrate all business users to the Business Suite, thus opening up Instagram scheduling to everyone. Until then, if you aren’t automatically migrated to Business Suite, fire up your favorite third-party tool and schedule away!
