As Instagram has become a force in social media marketing, marketing tools have popped up to help businesses manage, maximize, and analyze their Instagram accounts. A Huffington Post article titled “7 Instagram Tools Your Business Needs in 2016” inspired me to start testing them for our clients (and to write this post). I was very excited when I read the article as many seemed very promising. But did they really work? I decided to test drive some of the tools and here are my reviews:
CROWDFIRE
What it is supposed to do: Grow your Instagram followers fast but with control.
My review: Crowdfire is a way to manage your Instagram (and Twitter) followers. It does this by organizing followers into groups such as those that follow you but you don’t want to follow back (“Fans”), and those that you follow and don’t want to ever unfollow (“Whitelist”) and those that you never want to follow (“Blacklist”) etc., You can also “Copy Followers” which allows you to follow the same accounts as another Instagram user and do a “Friend Check” to see if you are following someone that you like and if they are following you. Basically Crowdfire helps you keep very close tabs on your Instagram community. It does say that you can invite other team members to use the account but that is only if you upgrade to paying status. It was easy to navigate around in and the “Help” section answered all my questions as to what the different titles (Blacklist, Fans, etc.,) meant.
Cost: Free for limited use; Starting at $9.99/month up to $199.99/month.
Bottomline: If you want to grow followers fast, and feel the need to categorize your followers, then Crowdfire is for you.
SOCIAL INSIGHT
What it is supposed to do: Give insight into your Instagram account. Monitor engagement, follower growth and interactions.
My review: This sounded great! I love Google Analytics, so I thought this would be similar. After entering my credit card for a free 14 day trial, I logged in and noted there were 3 tabs. The first was “Identify” and clicking on that said it was “Coming Soon”. The second tab was “Analyze” which identified your number of followers and would show you how many you have gained and lost over time. There was a note saying that Instagram doesn’t allow them to pull historical data so my data would start on the day I started their tool. They also showed engagement – telling me how many posts I’ve had, how many likes and comments. Moving on to the third tab, “Optimize”, showed me the best time to post based on engagement and post times of past Instagram posts. For whatever reason, this particular Instagram tool seemed a bit amateur. Checking out their Facebook page, I found that they had 23 followers and their first post was in September of 2015, probably when Social Insight was launched.
Cost: Free trial for 14 days (with credit card); $29/month to $299/month
Bottomline: Don’t give away your credit card information for the 14 day free trial. There is potential for this tool, after it gets out of its infancy stage.
LATERGRAM.ME
What it is supposed to do: Schedule and manage your Instagram posts.
Review: This tool allows you to schedule your Instagram posts online with a written caption (if desired) however it does not have the ability to auto-post for you. Instead, you must download their app on your mobile device and when it is your scheduled day to post, they will send you a reminder on your mobile device to post it to Instagram. I was very excited about this! To be able to queue up my Instagram post on my laptop and have a reminder on my phone to post it is a game changer. To try it out, I uploaded a few pictures, and added my captions and scheduled them to post for future dates. Easy to do and straightforward. My one complaint, thus far, was that I could not add any emoticons to my captions (and I am all about emoticons on Instagram!) I then uploaded a picture and caption to test out immediately. My phone beeped with a notification and it took me to the Latergram.me app. There was my picture. I tapped to try to upload it but I had to log in to Instagram. After doing that, the app uploaded the picture to Instagram but apparently is unable to auto-load the caption. Instead it copies the caption and the user must “paste” in the caption. I had to add in my emoticons and finally, I published the post. After I was done, it felt like I had done double the work. It was too many steps for me.
Cost: Free allows 30 photo posts/month; $19/month to $49/month will allow you to add users and multiple Instagram accounts.
Bottomline: Latergram.me will help you stay organized by scheduling your Instagram posts but won’t necessarily save you time.
SOCIALRANK
What it is supposed to do: SocialRank is used to easily identify, organize, and manage your followers on Instagram and Twitter.
My review: It seems the primary goal of SocialRank is to organize followers and help you gain a better understanding of who is following you. Their dashboard is user-friendly and easy to navigate. SocialRank offers five different ways to organize your followers: Most Valuable, Most Engaged, Best Follower, Most Followed, and Alphabetized. You can filter your followers by keywords in their bio, by location, by hashtags, by activity, and by number of followers. After you have sorted and filtered, you can create custom lists that can be saved to SocialRank or exported to a CVS file. They also have a tool called “Market Intel” that allows you to look up a company (or say, a competitor) to see who is following them. Currently this is only available for Twitter accounts.
Cost: Free. There is a “Billing” tab under account settings, but I could not find a price.
Bottomline: If you want to slice and dice data on your followers – Instagram or Twitter – this is the place to do it. When Market Intel becomes available for Instagram accounts, this will make SocialRank more valuable.
These tools all have potential, depending upon your needs. I’m still looking for the tool that can auto-post Instagram photos and captions (with emoticons) from my laptop without ever touching the phone!
Have you found an Instagram tool that you cannot live without? Share with us in the comments.