Photo sharing platform Instagram has recently added a new feature that allows businesses to schedule posts in advance.
The company’s latest move will enable business profiles to schedule posts ahead of time via third party social media management tools such as HootSuite and Sprout Social. It will also work for companies that are an Instagram Partner or a Facebook Marketing Partner. At present, the tool only works for photos, and not yet video.
The post scheduling feature was announced via the Instagram Business blog on Tuesday.
Up until now, post scheduling of any kind was unavailable to Instagram users, despite the best efforts of third party organisations. The only tools available had been those that allow users to pre-write the captions for their post and have the third party app send out a notification to remind them to post at a particular time. Within the main app, however, the closest thing to a scheduled post users could do is to save a post as a draft for later publication.
The feature is currently limited to business accounts, although Instagram has said that the update will be made available to regular users of the app in the near future, giving a deadline of early next year.
Instagram has been around since October 2010, and the platform has always encouraged its users to share their content in the moment, but has introduced this feature as its competitors continue to adapt their own apps. For instance, Snapchat has now removed the white border around photos uploaded from the camera roll to encourage users to film and capture images through the app itself, meaning that these apps are starting to shift away from real-time sharing.
In other news, it has been rumoured that the platform is testing another new feature that could change the way its users interact with the app altogether. The new feature would allow users to have video chats with each other through the app, similar to the functions already in place in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and even Snapchat.
The introduction of this feature would signal a huge change in direction for the network, which has always primarily focused on photo and video sharing. It was first noted in an unpublished version of the app by WABetaInfo, when a video call option was spotted in the navigation bar of a chat in the Direct Messages section of the app.
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