Instagram is a huge powerhouse tool for expanding your business reach and driving more interest in your company or brand. With over 1 billion active monthly users, there is a huge potential for expanding profit lines through the Instagram platform.
Not only that, marketing has changed due to the overwhelming impact of social media. Frankly, if your business or brand doesn’t have an Instagram presence, it can ultimately hurt your business and reputation because many people expect to be able to connect with businesses via Instagram.
In fact, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account. So! That begs the question, if you’re not using Instagram for marketing and connecting with people, why not?
There are so many types of businesses on Instagram that literally no niche or market has a good excuse for opting out of the platform. You can find anything from homemade products to influencers partnering with brands for exposure, to your local restaurant, to huge hotel chains and so much more. There are literally no limits to what you can find on Instagram.
But with so many options comes a lot of competition. That’s why it’s really important to use all valuable Instagram tools to help you manage your platform.
There are tools for so many different elements of Instagram, it can be hard to keep track. That’s why we’ve created this article– to let you know about the top Instagram tools out there that can streamline your Instagram workflow and boost your success.
Let’s get into it!
Top Instagram Tools in 2020
These Instagram tools range from analytics to follower growth to content creation, and more. If you feel that you’re probably not being as effective in one area of your Instagram platform as you could be, there’s probably a tool to help you.
Some Instagram tools are free, and some of them charge. With the popularity of Instagram being so high, these third-party apps and Instagram tool companies know that there is a high need for their product. Thus, most of them charge at the very minimum a small fee.
If there is a free version, it’ll normally be limited to some certain functions, but depending on your business needs, that may work just fine. Then, you can take advantage of the free services that work for you and invest more in tools that you find valuable for the business with no free options.
That being said, you should always have a budget for your Instagram marketing and productivity tools. There’s no right or wrong answer on how much you should budget for Instagram tools, but in all honesty, you should be using at least a few tools.
The most successful Instagram profiles didn’t get that way by doing the bare minimum and hoping for the best– they invest in tools that help them to increase productivity, boost content and expand reach, as well as build their following. This is a really important part of the game today, and if you’re naively thinking that you’ll never need to invest in any Instagram tools, it’s probably time to reconsider. After all, you’re just limiting your potential!
We’re now going to divide up these tools into categories so you can easily navigate their purposes and in what way they can help you.
Best Instagram Tools for Real Follower Growth
Looking to build your real Instagram followers, but find yourself lacking the time to do so? It’s tough to find a balanced workflow, especially when you really need more eyes on your content.
These tools can help take over your Instagram growth while you focus your attention on putting out great content that engages your followers.
Growthoid
We’re going to start with a follower growth tool that has truly set themselves apart from the rest. Growthoid is one of the top Instagram growth tools out there because they don’t use any type of automation– they do everything manually.
This is a huge game-changer, especially since follower growth and expanding your audience can be a very tiresome and time-consuming task.
Most users on the platform use a strategy that is typically known as follow/unfollow, but there can be other interactions involved. When someone is trying to build their Instagram following, they’ll find users in their target audience.
Target audience users are typically identified by finding similar accounts, users that follow competitor accounts, users that fall into certain demographics, as well as users that use or follow specific hashtags.
After identifying these users, in order to grow your Instagram, you have to engage with them through things like following, commenting, liking photos, story reactions, as well as DMs.
Now we can see why it would be time-consuming to take care of all of these factors yourself, and there are so many other important tasks to take care of, one or more of them is bound to take a hit in productivity.
That’s why Growthoid is so great– you get a dedicated account manager after signing up to take care of your growth. You provide them with your targeting instructions, and they take over from there.
It’s a really effective service and so straightforward that you get total peace of mind knowing your Instagram growth is in good hands while you spend time focusing on other important elements of your Instagram platform and business.
The followers are real, organic followers, so you won’t have to worry about your engagement to follower ratio going down, and your engagement will see healthier numbers, enhancing your position in terms of the Instagram ratio.
Growthoid is our top pick for Instagram follower growth because of their top service, manual growth techniques, responsive support team, and transparent business operations.
Price: 2 pricing tiers: Basic – $49/mo (originally $99), and Premium – $99/mo (originally $149); no service contract.
Combin
Combin is a great tool that can work hand in hand with Growthoid. It offers you a platform that includes for audience targeting, analysis, management and engagement. Using this tool, you can analyze the quality of your followers, find out who isn’t following you back, check out how to engage with them and also get feedback on how to have even more specific targeting.
Once you know more information about targeting and analytics, you can then tailor your Growthoid service to align with that information and make sure you’re getting as much out of your audience reach as possible.
You can also monitor influencers that are related to your accounts and see what accounts are performing well; this is a good way to get ideas and follow trending strategies to boost engagement and performance.
Looking for Instagram tools that complement each other in function and practicality is an excellent way to optimize your use of tools for Instagram. Just because you use a variety of tools doesn’t mean they have to be mutually exclusive; oftentimes, they all work hand in hand to provide you with the best Instagram performance possible.
Price: Combin has 3 pricing tiers: starter – free, personal – $15/mo, business – $30/mo; no service contract.
Top Instagram Tools for Scheduling
Another element that needs to be on point in order to max your Instagram success is content scheduling. There are so many Instagram scheduling tools on the market these days that it can be overwhelming when you’re trying to select the right one.
A key benefit of many Instagram schedulers is that it helps you to plan out your content and stay organized. Then, through analytics and research, you can identify when your posts are performing at their best, and create a posting schedule that will get you optimal reach and engagement.
This is very important even if you use an Instagram growth service; people often think that just because you’re using a follower growth service, you don’t have to do much else in order to keep a healthy Instagram follower count.
Unfortunately, that’s a misconception. Because growth services work on interactions, just as you would if you were growing your account yourself, your content has to be valuable and attractive enough to get them to follow. Not only that, Your content absolutely must be top-notch if you want to retain these followers over time.
Not producing high-quality content is a problem, and if you don’t have a clear idea of when to post, your content isn’t going to get as much reach as it could, thus performing worse.
Remember, Instagram tools work hand in hand, and they all have a very distinct purpose for your success on the platform. Let’s take a look at the best Instagram scheduling tools that can help you visualize, plan, and schedule your content for posting.
Later
Later is a great Instagram scheduling tool that offers a lot of top features. In terms of post scheduling, Later has a very user-friendly platform that offers a valuable visual schedule planner. That way, when scheduling out your posts, you can see how your content will appear to users and confirm that your aesthetic and visuals are on point and consistent.
Not only that, they have functions for auto-posting, quick scheduling, as well as scheduling in your first comment. This can be a great way to use hashtags if you don’t want them to appear in the caption, so it’s very convenient to be able to schedule them out.
Not all Instagram tools offer these features, so you’ve got to pay close attention when looking for scheduling tools. For example, most scheduling tools won’t be able to offer story scheduling based on the way third-party Instagram tools are allowed to interact with the Instagram platform.
For example, Later can publish single photo and video content to your feed, but won’t be able to auto-publish stories or carousel posts. This has less to do with the service and more to do with the permissions allowed by Instagram.
You can still schedule stories, but you’ll have to hit the “post” button when it’s time to make it live.
Other features offered by Later include analytics, user-generated content finder, linkin.bio as well as hashtag scheduling and information. All in all, Later is a user-friendly platform that helps you to keep organized with your content and visualize it before it goes live.
Price: 4 pricing tiers, Free – $0/mo, Starter – $9/mo, Growth – $20/mo, Advanced – $40/mo. You can also purchase yearly, which will give you a cheaper price overall.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is also a competitive Instagram scheduling tool that works across other platforms; you can plan out your posts for not only Instagram but other social networks and see them all on the same calendar. If you’re running multiple accounts, this could be a good feature.
It also gives you optimal send times and has a user-friendly platform. The only thing that Sprout won’t offer is auto-posting– they allow you to schedule posts, but you’ll have to follow the prompts when it’s time to go live.
In addition to scheduling, Sprout also offers a variety of services, including engagement, analytics, and listening tools that you can pair with your scheduling tools.
While there are a variety of Instagram tools that can do all of these functions separately, it’s common for Instagram schedulers to offer them as part of a package. Depending on how you prefer to operate, it may be helpful to keep things all in one place if you find that the services offer what you’re looking for.
Price: 3 pricing tiers, Standard – $99/user/month, Professional – $149/user/month Advanced – $249/user/month, no contract service.
Top Instagram Tools for Content Creating and Editing
Now that we’ve got Instagram growth and content scheduling out of the way, we’ve got to make sure that you’ve got all of the best Instagram tools for creating content as well as photo editing.
As we mentioned above, if you have all of your organizational procedures and tools in order, but don’t put out the best content that you can possibly create, you won’t see much in terms of results. Instagram tools can help you in the process, but you’ve got to be able to offer users of Instagram something valuable; you have to give them a reason to follow you.
This means you need to have a plan in terms of content. You should always be clear about what content you’re going to shoot and when you’re going to publish it. A best practice is to do all of your content shooting on a weekly basis so that your workflow is streamlined and don’t have to deal with breaking it up into different days and trying to stay organized.
If you need to switch between locations, of course it’s not a problem to find a working balance that makes sense for your business. Even still, you should have a plan and stay as organized as possible.
There are many Instagram tools for content creation and editing, which can help to set your content apart from the rest and also give your brand a clear image as well as a voice to your platform.
Let’s take a look at the top Instagram tools for doing these tasks.
Canva
Canva is an excellent tool for adding flavor to your content and giving your content a specific image and keeping things consistent. It’s basically a design website that helps you to create professional and attractive content without having to worry about starting designs from scratch.
This is super useful if you don’t have much experience with graphic design, or don’t currently have a budget to include a designer. It’s pretty straightforward and you can easily pick up how it works and even how to customize some elements so that your content stays unique.
Because the platform is basically free and anyone can access it, you run the risk of having similar or duplicate content as other users. Even still, there are many options on Canva and many subtle ways to give each design your own personal touch, so it won’t be too big of an issue.
Canva offers a huge variety of templates for social media, but they also offer templates for other elements of business and digital design, so you can keep things consistent across a variety of platforms and media.
In terms of social media templates, they have templates for Instagram stories, posts, highlights, animated social media posts, Facebook posts and covers, and many more. This is especially useful if you work cross-platform and want to integrate a similar aesthetic.
While there are many Instagram tools that offer templates and graphics, Canva is definitely a standout performer both in ease of use as well as high-quality offerings.
Price: The basic Canva is free, and it offers a lot. But, if you want to go pro, it will cost you roughly $120 for the year, or $12.95/mo. Free trial offered
VSCO
VSCO is another popular and well-known Instagram tool for photo editing. VSCO can only be used via a mobile app, so it’s available in the iPhone app store as well as the Google play store. This is one downside to VSCO if you prefer to do your editing on a desktop, but you can access it via iPad or tablet as well, so that might be a good option for you.
Aside from the lack of desktop platform, VSCO offers a lot of useful tools for editing in terms of filter presets, as well as editing tools.
Price: Basic VSCO- Free, VSCO membership – $19.99/year. Free trial offered
Top Tools for Instagram Analytics
Instagram offers its own way to track the performance of your posts, Instagram insights. This is a useful tool and as long as you have your profile set up as a professional profile (business or creator), you’ll have access to these insights and each post will come with a variety of post-performance information.
Even still, some people prefer to contract their own Instagram tools for analytics because it can help present the information in a more streamlined way and will also record it for you, giving recommendations based on the information provided.
There are no shortage of Instagram tools for analytics, but we have the top ones that can help take your performance analysis to the next level if you need more than insights can provide.
Iconosquare
Probably the most well known of the Instagram tools for analytics, Iconosquare truly provides an excellent user experience. Iconosquare will offer you advanced and more specific analytics, allowing you to make data-driven decisions about your content, posting times, hashtags, and more.
They also have an integrated Instagram scheduler and a monitor for competitor accounts that can help you see where you stack up.
Pricing: 2 tier options, Pro – $39/mo, Advanced – $79/mo, discounts for paying annually. 14-day free trial offered
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is also a great Instagram tool for teams that need extended information on analytics. They offer beautifully graphed profile analysis, keyword listening, campaign reporting, competitive analysis, and research tools to help make decisions based on performance.
They can also offer you combined reports that monitor all of your social media platforms, which is great for those who are working cross-platform.
It’s especially useful for marketing teams or people who are really serious about amping up their marketing efforts via social media. The data you can get from Union Metrics is reliable and will help you to consider new possibilities for your social media platform and tailor your content to ideal posting times and performance metrics.
Price: 3 pricing tiers, Social Manager – $49/mo, Social Marketer – $99/mo, Marketing Team – $199/mo
Wrap-Up: Top Instagram Tools You Should Be Using
So there you have it! Some of the top Instagram tools across areas like Instagram follower growth, Instagram content scheduling and posting, Instagram content creation and editing, as well as Instagram analytics.
Now that you have some of the top Instagram tools to choose from, think about what your needs are and how you can combine these tools to work at an optimal level for you.
Using Instagram for brand or business development isn’t a hit or miss guessing game; you need to be using Instagram tools that help lead you to success and give you the functions necessary to be competitive in your market and provide users with something valuable for them.
Follower growth is really important, so using a tool like Growthoid will help to get your content in front of more people. If you have top-notch content, you’re bound to see good results. Partnering Growthoid with tools like Later and Canva will give you a big leg up on the competition.
All in all, there are many Instagram tools out there. Know what you need, and what will work best for you!
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