Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms, and is under the aegis of social media giant Facebook. It receives well over a billion monthly visitors and stands out from others with its focus on the visual aspect. This also makes Instagram a great place for promoting your business. Instagram allows advertisements in its feed as well as stories. Being run by the same company, Instagram also provides seamless integration with WhatsApp and Facebook, which delivers an added advantage.
Instagram does offer business tools inside its app natively. However, there are quite a few third-party apps and services that can further enrich your business promotions. It’s not only about buying advertisements, or the pictures themselves for an effective Instagram campaign needs everything together – right from hashtags to proper targeting. These nifty tools can easily help you make these choices.
Table of Contents
The benefits of Instagram marketing tools
Before we talk about the Instagram marketing tools itself, you must be wondering why you even need them. Here are a couple of reasons that should change your mind:
- Instagram categorizes posts according to hashtags given in the caption. Right hashtags generate more views by an appropriate audience. The marketing tools can suggest and generate non-so-obvious trending hashtags
- Suggest you the time of the day according to the region and time zone when a post is supposed to receive maximum views
- Instagram doesn’t allow post-scheduling natively, and some of these tools allow you to conveniently schedule your post
- Give you in-depth analytics and insights so you can grow more organically
- Effortlessly repost your content
- Edit your posts with attractive design templates and texts that are bound to garner more attention
When it comes to Instagram marketing, there are a few things to look for, such as the ability to schedule posts, in-built editor, presence of analytics tool, a wide range of sharing options, etc. The tools covered in this article contain most of these features, though some of them are dedicated towards a particular aspect, analytics, for example. So, we have created this easy-to-grasp comparison chart to help you know how these eight Instagram marketing tools differ from each other, and thus make the right choice as per your needs.
|
Instagram marketing tools |
Post scheduling |
Built-in editor |
Analytics tool |
Direct share to Instagram |
Hashtag support |
|
VSCO |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
No |
| Grum |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Repost |
No |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Iconosquare |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Socialblade |
No |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Promorepublic |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Socialinsight |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Word Swag |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
No |
VSCO
Being a visual-first platform, Instagram’s focus is on photos and videos. Marketers and businesses must leverage this fact to promote their products to the audience. VSCO helps you modify images with its variety of effects, elaborate editing tools and filters. This app has over 200 filters to choose from and special editing presets to give a vintage or classy look to your photos. This app far exceeds the limited native editing options and filter sets that Instagram provides.
If you want to create videos, then you can take a look at VSCO’s Montage feature.
Grum
As mentioned above, the time of the day when a post is published on Instagram can be crucial for getting more eyeballs, and thus, likes and comments. But unlike other social media services like Twitter or LinkedIn, Instagram does not provide the ability to schedule uploads. Considering it may not be possible for us to always wait for the opportune moment to upload content, Grum comes to the rescue. It’s a popular post-scheduler tool for Instagram that allows you to schedule images for up to a week. Grum also supports bulk uploads, unlimited Instagram account support and easy switching between multiple accounts. It also comes with a nifty feature of being able to schedule your post from a desktop computer without needing your phone. Other helpful options include in-built editor, the ability to tag users, and time zone support, among others.
Repost
Sometimes you need to repost your own posts or that of your affiliates for promotions. But there’s no official support for this feature on Instagram. This is where a handy app like Repost fills the void. It gives you a quick and easy way to repost yours and other’s content with hashtags on your account. It also provides a minimalistic watermark and mention feature to give proper credits whenever necessary. While Repost may not have the simplest process, it saves a lot of time instead of screenshotting and cropping an image, like the old times. It also preserves the image quality, thus making your post as good as the original.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an all-in-one business suite for your Instagram marketing requirements. It features a powerful industry-leading analytics tool that gives you insight into your target audience, your competitors and how to grow your follower base. It comes with a scheduler with multiple Instagram account support within one dashboard. The tool provides intelligent suggestions for tagging users and hashtags which can gather maximum views. Iconosquare also reveals the time of the day when the content will likely get maximum exposure. That’s not all, this powerful service also has few unique tricks such as the ability to provide you insights about your competitors and match you with influencers who can better promote your products. Additionally, Iconosquare analytics provide you with a breakdown of your followers, which can help you in planning more effective promotions.
Socialblade
Elaborate stats of follower base and its growth are helpful for any business trying to promote their brand or products on Instagram. Socialblade is a free analytics tool specializing in just that. Its dedicated follower analysis tool gives you real-time stats of your follower data including growths and unfollows. This can help you better understand the reaction of your audience and formulate better promotion strategies.
Promorepublic
Promorepublic is a social media marketing software that helps you effectively publish content that can reach the maximum audience. For any business relying on social media, having a post scheduler is a must, so you can plan the content for the entire day. In fact, this tool features a robust post scheduler with its own built-in catalog of over 6,000 nifty post ideas. Promorepublic features a personalized content calendar, content templates for specific promotion campaigns and other smart suggestions. Not only that, but it also has its own native editor and other handy analytics tools like monitoring specific mentions and hashtags. The feature-packed scheduler coupled with powerful social monitoring features makes it a mighty marketing tool.
Socialinsight
SocialInsight is an Instagram-marketing platform that offers several essential features which marketers need to grow and thrive on the Facebook-owned platform. For any business to grow, they must know their audience well, and make decisions accordingly. SocialInsight provides in-depth analysis of follower distributions, be it identifying, managing and organizing your followers, or monitoring follower growths and interactions, among others. You can apply useful filters like search by location or keywords, sorting out followers by ‘most followed’, ‘most posted’, and ‘last posted’, etc. This suite also comes with a native scheduler and post calendar for efficiently organizing your posts and gaining the maximum exposure.
Word Swag
Businesses often post images on Instagram which are meant to act as a banner with texts on it to promote their brands or range of products. However, getting the aesthetics right can be a tedious task. Instead of fiddling with heavy programs like Photoshop for hours, Word Swag can come up with trendy texts and typefaces for you. It intelligently comes up with font and text styles depending on the background, to make the maximum impact. Word Swag also has heaps of pre-set captions and quotes for you to choose and embellish your posts. With these valuable features, the service saves time while helping you create attention-drawing aesthetics for your campaigns.
Special mention: Adobe Spark
While all the products mentioned above let you make the most of all the features offered by Instagram, you can’t ignore the potential offered by Instagram Stories. In fact, stories are one of the best ways to create an intimate connection with your followers, and hence, it’s important for a business to focus on this aspect. Adobe Spark, which lets you create graphics and videos easily, also comes with Instagram Story creator. You can create stunning stories from a slew of templates offered by the app, and it also lets you create animations. The best part? The service is available for free.
Bottomline
In today’s day and age being on Instagram is no longer a choice for the marketers, it’s a necessity. Not utilizing Instagram, one of the largest social media platforms in 2020, can cost you a competitive edge. These Instagram marketing tools can assist you to make the most of Instagram’s features to boost your businesses further.
