Instagram has reached a mark of half a billion daily active users. It isn’t a causal social media app for teenagers and photographers anymore. It is a powerful marketing platform for all business owners.
There are a bunch of opportunities growing around Instagram lately. Cultivating a strong engagement on Instagram generates a strong customer base and increases your visibility.
200 million+ Instagrammers visit at least one business profile on Instagram daily.
The image sharing platform has revolutionized the way business owners look at it. With business-specific features like Business account, improvised advertisement options, and shopping tags, Instagram has changed the way how businesses promote their products/services online.
Instagram can be a great platform to boost your revenues if you use the right set of tools. We have tried, tested, and curated a list of tools you should use to top-notch your Instagram feed.
Best for: Find, amplify and analyze your hashtag strategy
Price: Free — 7 days Trial
Paid — $19 — $249/ monthly
Hashtags are the best way to reach out to your target audience and gain followers. But any random hashtag won’t help you, Hashtagify can find your target niche hashtags.
How to do it?
Hashtagify is a tool which can be used to find real-time insights about the trending hashtags. It analyses the hashtag ranking, competitor hashtags, trends, and more.
It helps you discover new hashtags which can be valuable and easily rankable for you, it monitors your competitors and influencers.
You can use the dashboard to analyze the popularity, trend, and other metrics of the hashtag over a period of time. It also helps you find the influencers using your hashtag.
You can do basic hashtag research on hashtagify if you don’t have a paid plan. For instance, in a free plan, you find your hashtag popularity and influencers using your hashtag.
Best for: Authentic hashtags
Price: Free (Offers In-App Purchase)
Like hashtagify, Focalmark is a great mobile application to find relevant hashtags. It generates hashtags with the help of personal search and a ranking algorithm. Hence, it is reliable for both Android and IOS, or you can use it as a web-app.
70% of the hashtags on Instagram are brand-specific
Focalmark discovers hashtags according to the style, location, and camera type. Once you’ve entered the deets, Focalmark will filter through thousands of hand-collected hashtags and rank them according to their credibility and authenticity.
This mix of machine and human is both relevant and provides exposure. It is definitely worth a few MB storage space
Best for: Finding day-to-day growth of your brand or any other creator
Price: Free
If you are new on Instagram, former competitor research via this application is quite helpful. Social Blade is a growth analytics application. If you know a competitor, you can type their name find the type of audience they reach out to, their upload frequency and engagement rate.
Also, there are line graphs and tabular data to analyze the growth of your brand or another user. Being free, it is a resourceful app to look up anyone on Instagram and do the guesswork of your future strategy.
Best for: Respost’s images with credits
Price: Free
If you focus on generating content from users, Repost is your friend in need.
You don’t always have to screenshot and upload pictures to give credit to the creator.
Install Repost to save time and maintain the quality of the picture. Just copy the Share URL of the photo and then open Repost. It will automatically create the image with credit and copy the description. Hence, making the post for your account instantly
Repost is both available for IOS and Android.
Best for: Photo Editing
Price: Free
Paid — $19.99 / yearly
Instagram is a visual social platform, but it is not necessary to be a pro-photographer to excel here. If you aren’t good at editing with software, then VSCO is your go-to app.
While Instagram edited pictures are on the verge, VSCO adds a new flair to your images. With in-depth editing suite and high definition filters, it will take your smartphone images a notch higher. It also has additional buyable filters to customize your pictures on a professional level.
VSCO is a pleasure to work with because of its sleek UI, available both on IOS and Android.
Best for: Photo editor
Price: Free
Snapseed is yet another Photo editing tool, which is useful when you want to move away from cliche Instagram filters. While Instagram filters edit the entire image, you can use S napseed to fine-tune your pictures to perfection using a brush.
Snapseed have another feature called Snapseed Stack, it helps you compile all the edits and save them as a template for later use. You can use these templates as a theme to give your IG feed a consistent and unique edge.
Best for: Stories for Instagram
Price: Free ( Offers In-App purchase)
Instagram Stories has 500 Million active users; still, many creators have not harnessed their real power.
Unfold is a relatively young application in the market dedicated to the Instagram stories. It has features like pre-built story templates, fonts, high-quality export. It is flexible for both Photos and Videos.
You don’t even have to create an account, just install the app and start creating your amazing IG stories.
Best for: Social Media Scheduler
Price: Free- Standard
Paid — $15 -$50/ monthly
Recurpost is a time-saver for your mass-posting schedule. Instagram runs on content and timing if either is missed your strategy might take a blow. Recurpost helps in scheduling the upcoming posts on all of your social media platforms — Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter.
You can create a content library and select the accounts you want to post on, recurpost will automatically post your images on your selected time. There is an added feature to let recurpost select the best time for your target audience. Recurpost reports provide a complete analysis report of how your posts are doing.
Recurpost is easy to use, just upload your library, add captions, select platforms, and you are good to go. There is no learning curve to worry about.
Best for: Multiple bio-links
Price: Free- 5 days Trial
Paid- $9 — $99 /monthly
Instagram bio provides an insight into your product, hence to have an informed bio is vital for generating traffic.
However with just a single bio-link, Instagram limits a lot of opportunities. Shorby is an application which allows you to connect multiple links on your bio. Just install the app, set-up the interface you want to go ahead with.
Shorby takes the user to a mobile-optimized landing page with various clickable links of your other accounts. It channelizes the traffic to other web portals or social media platforms.
Best for: Making your feed shoppable
Price: Free — 21 days Trial
Paid — $50- $300/ monthly
Foursixty makes your content shoppable. If you run an e-commerce portal, it is essential your feed is shoppable. Four-sixty is embedded within your Instagram account to generate a similar grid-like interface.
So, if a user likes your product and wishes to take down its details, Four sixty redirects them to a relevant product page on Instagram. This is a compelling way to discover products, rather than listing it on your content in the caption or tagging on pictures.
However, product discovery doesn’t take place on Instagram with this tool. Instead, Instagram’s connection with your products is displayed on the website.
Best for: Changing texts into Graphics
Price: Paid- $4.99 membership
Instagram is a treasure chest for motivational quotes and text-based images. But it’s time to move away from the same solid color background with text is pretty monotonous.
You don’t have to be a designer to make creative posts for your feed, Wordswag will do that for you. You can choose your own text, custom logo, and the template on W ordswag to create rich content for Instagram.
On the days you are confused about what to post, you can select one from pre-built quotes and creatives on Wordswag. Make your content visually appealing with Wordswag.
Best for: Real-time analytics for Instagram
Price: Paid- $25- $199
Owlmetrics helps you collect real-time data for analysis with a robust Instagram analytic platform. It is a marketing tool which can be used to understand your audience.
This tool is capable of collecting data regarding hashtags, competitor research, click analytics, geo data, and API access. It provides a set of analytics to understand the growth of your account and the factors contributing to it. A real-time database for your marketing strategies.
Best for: Gaining organic followers
Price: Paid- $59 — $259 / monthly
Instagram is all about followers, but when your brand is starting out, it is difficult to gain initial followers. According to a survey, about 30% of the people you follow will follow you back.
Instagrowth helps with insights into your competitor’s audience. So if you can reach out to a broad audience from the competition, there are chances that many will find value in your work.
But Instagram sets a limit on the number of people you can follow i.e., 7500, start unfollowing the less active people suggested by Instagrowth.
Instagrowth will manually like, follow/unfollow, and make strategic comments on your target audience’s post. By doing this 24/7, Instagrowth drives traffic to your account.
Best for: Organic followers
Price: $19- $79/ monthly
Rocket social is another manual growth management app. It focuses on growth via likes, follow/unfollow strategy, and commenting on users profile to gain attraction.
Rocket social is an automation tool which will create a customer database for your brand or profile. To ace your social media plan, you should have an organic followers base.
Best for: Video Creation automated
Price: 4.99$ mo
Magisto is a smart social media video creation tool. Instagram is a visual platform, hence it is necessary that you post quality content, whether its photos or videos.
All you have to do is put in your content, and Magisto will create a professional business and personal videos using AI technology. It has an intuitive interface and helps in producing the quality videos that drive engagement on your posts. Now, you don’t have to spend hours making a single one minute video.
For business growth, it is important that you are consistent, especially on social media.
In today’s technology and automation driven world, it is not necessary that you are perfect at everything. These tools will fine-tune your content, and add a professional touch to your Instagram strategies.
Have you used any of these tools?
Share your experience with us in the comments below.
Originally published at https://recurpost.com on June 20, 2019.
