Can ‘Later’ help boost my following and efficiency, for free
We all know how much time and persistence it takes to grow your Instagram following and therefore there are many tools to help. In this post, I look at one tool designed not just to help grow your Instagram following, but also your other social accounts too. I have a bit of an addiction, I keep trying out lots of new apps, there are so many great apps available to help you manage your social media and create content for posts. Actually, this is something I really enjoy doing, but I am conscious that spending too much time playing with a new tool, is a risk to productivity!
Instagram is by far my favourite Social Media platform, and I changed my personal account to a business one – long before I had a reason to market anything on Instagram – just because I wanted to play with the stats and analytics capabilities. I am currently running 4 Instagram accounts but there are not enough hours in the day available. I have been using SEMrush social poster and Buffer for my social media automation and my approach is that I post regular content on a relevant theme through the automated Tools and then post manually intermittently- well currently only buffer offer automated posts, and only since this year has that been more than just a reminder. The free buffer account is limited to only 10 posts scheduled so stretching that means a weekly or more session of planning and preparing posts. So I knew I needed another option, but I kind of didn’t want yet another tool (nothing fresh and exciting consistent way of posting).
I then stumbled across later! I was actually looking for an Instagram analytics tool, I love that data! While the free Later plan is probably not going to satisfy this need one thing did jump out at me!
Yes, in their Free Forever plan not only helps grow your instagram following but Later covers the other essential Platforms; Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, too. Allowing one profile per platform, for one user but sadly, no Video posts. The step-up ‘Plus’ account adds Video posting and pro-Instagram analytics on a $9 subscription model and more monthly posts. but still no video posts or Hashtag suggestions.
However 30 Instagram scheduled posts, 50 Tweets, 30 Facebook posts and 30 Pinterest ‘Pins’ per month (Free) seems appealing, so after a bit of growth in your online business, it is probably worth paying the extra $9 to get unlimited tweets and a 100 of each platform posts. 30 scheduled posts a month helps you to plan efficiently for 1 a day posts to build up a regular cadence as you grow your Instagram, or other social accounts.
Watch this blog post (yes, really)
Benefits of Later
If you want to give it a try and benefit from 10 extra posts sign up through this link.
Additionally, although they require you to install the app you can post to Instagram from your computer.
So if you still prefer DSLR or editing on a desktop rather than your phone this helps cut out a bit of labour in moving the files from device to cloud and back again.
Later seamlessly integrates with Dropbox and Google drive and of course, you can upload from your PC, or even drag and drop your files into what looks like exciting bonus feature number 2 – unlimited online storage –
Remember this is a free account! I am really looking forward to getting into using this as the media storage has several really useful features. You can add Labels (tags), Notes and track and sort not only used and unused media, but also the time period since you used it.
The only annoying thing with the import from Google Drive was that shows the image files as one list, you can sort it by name or last modified, but if you are like me and store everything in clearly named folders this removes the ability to see those folders and it becomes difficult to see where stuff is – not sure if this is Later’s fault or google’s
When trying to connect the facebook business profile to allow auto-posting – I got a message that there was an issue – it is still being solved…
But the third surprise bonus feature is the ability to save captions and hashtags for re-use in other posts – which is kind of useful and missing from many of the alternative products in this space. And as this can be done on the desktop no more fiddly typing on the phone and awkward back and forth out of apps to copy and paste.
I will post an update when I can actually auto-post with the tool – but it looks very promising to help me streamline and automate more efficiently. Have you used it to grow your Instagram following?
Yes, I want 'Later' free with 10 Extra posts every month!