Today we launched Gain’s Instagram integration as beta for our Enterprise customers. After months of tinkering we finally achieved a simple way to create, manage, approve, schedule, and publish content on one of the most engaging social networks today.
Instagram’s usage numbers are just impressive and the image-focused network is now bigger than Twitter with more than 300 million monthly active users. No wonder it has been by far our most requested integration.
Contrary to what you might think, Instagram does not want to make it easy for your brand to post content on Instagram. Their theory is that the harder it is for you to post, the more care you will take to post great content that will be appreciated by the Instagram community. And think about it, it makes total sense. The natural instinct from brands is to blast away as many messages as they can in the hope that they’ll beat you into submission to buy whatever they’re selling, so creating this barrier allows Instagram to control the posting of low quality content.
What our Instagram integration does
Just like our integrations with Facebook and Twitter, the Gain Instagram integration allows for a team to create, visualize, schedule, approve, and publish content on Instagram, all without the content ever leaving our tool to be sent out for approvals, editing, or publishing. Just like Facebook and Twitter, you get a pixel perfect preview of how the Instagram content will look once it’s published.
What it doesn’t do
Our integration does not cannot publish to Instagram automatically for you. Actually, Instagram does not allow any direct publishing of content directly to their platform unless it’s done via one of their official apps. Many companies promise the ability to actually accomplish this in very creative ways, but at the end of the day they are just violating the terms and conditions of Instagram, and putting themselves and all the accounts that post through their service in jeopardy of being penalized, and they risk losing access to their accounts.
How does it work then?
We have released an official iOS app called Gain Notify. This is a companion app that notifies you when there’s Instagram content that’s scheduled to be published. Then, with a simple tap you can publish the content straight into the official Instagram app. No copy, no pasting, no mistakes!
We’ve added some help articles with more details. Take a look at how to connect an Instagram profile, set up the Gain Notify app on your device, and finally how to schedule or post to Instagram using the app.
Not an Enterprise customer? Contact us if you want to be part of the Instagram beta.
Twitter is now available to everyone!
Many of you have waited long enough. Well, the wait is over. You can head over to your Gain account right now and you’ll see the option to add Twitter profiles. Go!
And if you’ve never tried Gain before, head over and start your free trial right away!
