With more than one billion monthly active users , Instagram has opened up huge opportunities for brands to find new customers and get their products seen. But while tactics like running Instagram ads and reaching out to influencers are effective, without the right tools, it can be tough to learn what to post on Instagram and get the results you want.
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It's been a while since Instagram's default filters were the bleeding edge of mobile photo editing. In the meantime, VSCO has emerged as the premier Instagram tool creating beautiful photos on the go. Part photo-editing platform and part social media network, VSCO should be at the heart of every Instagram strategy.
VSCO has an in-depth editing suite and a slew of high-quality default filters that can take your smartphone photos to a completely new level. There's also a huge library of filters available on the premium plan, giving you endless options for customizing your photos and setting them apart from the pack.
Price: Free for basic presets and standard editing tools; $19.99/year for access to VSCO's full suite of presets and image/video editing tools.
Snapseed is another photo-editing app that gives you the option to fine-tune your photos. While Instagram's default filters edit your entire image at once, Snapseed's Instagram tool lets you apply effects with a brush so you can perfect the details of each photo.
Snapseed's Stacks is another great feature, letting you save groups of filters as a template. These Stacks can then be applied to future photos, giving your entire feed a consistent look and saving you time.
Price: Free.
Afterlight is a photo-editing app that boasts a default set of dozens of filters, textures, and frames, giving you lots of different options for tweaking your photos right off the bat. You can create and save your very own filters and work with multiple image formats. Afterlight also includes typography tools to help your images stand out.
Price: $2.99/month or $17.99/year after a seven-day free trial.
Canva is an app you can use to create images that stand out, whether it's in your Instagram feed or in your Stories. You can superimpose text, create multi-image layouts, and pull in a wide range of predesigned graphics to level-up your posts and get your followers' attention.
Price: Free for image design with pay-per-use premium graphics; from $12.95/month for Canva Pro, which includes transparent backgrounds and animation/GIF creation.
While the mobile app doesn't come with every feature of the desktop app, it does offer a powerful image editing experience that gives you a lot of control over your photos. It streamlines the work you'd do on your desktop with handy tools like blemish removal, which can get rid of spots, dirt, and dust from your photo with a single touch.
You also get access to multiple controls, filters, presets, and options you wouldn't get elsewhere, like the ability to add a watermark to your photos.
Price: Free.
You don't need to be a professional videographer to create captivating videos for your business's Instagram account. These Instagram video apps make it easy for anyone to capture quick videos on their phones and turn them into high-quality professional videos without having to whip out a laptop and fire up their video-editing software .
Vimeo Create automatically turns your existing product images and text into polished videos for social media. Just answer a few questions about your product and the videos are generated for you — no video experience required.
Price: Free, with options to upgrade for advanced editing tools and templates
Boomerang is an app created by Instagram that lets you create a GIF-like looping video from a series of photos. When your video is complete, either publish it to Instagram instantly or save it to post later.
Price: Free.
While Boomerang for Instagram is great for creating quick GIF-like videos to share on social media, Life Lapse is a more feature-rich mobile app for creating longer, stop-motion videos to showcase your products. You can take as many photos as you want, customize the size of your video, adjust the speed between images, and even add royalty-free music.
Price: Free, with optional in-app purchases.
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HypeType’s large library of fonts and animations makes it quick and easy to create captions for different sections of a video shot with the app or an uploaded video you’ve already taken. When you’re finished, you can post your video on Instagram without leaving HypeType.
Price: Free with video watermark; in-app purchases are available to remove the watermark or purchase additional fonts.
You're almost ready to hit "post," but to help grow your following and connect with more people, you're going to want to engage with your followers and use some hashtags. The best Instagram marketing apps help you do just that.
You don't always need to be the person behind the lens taking the photos. If you have a community of customers who post user-generated content, you can use Repost for Instagram to curate their images and give them credit at the same time.
To share an image from someone else's Instagram account on your own, just copy the share URL on the post you want to share and open Repost's Instagram tool on your phone. It'll add a credit icon to the image, copy the description, and have you ready to post to your account in seconds.
Price: Free.
AutoHash might be the easiest way to find relevant Instagram hashtags for your images. It uses AI to recognize the objects in your photos and provides you with the best hashtags based on the objects. It will count the hashtags for you so you don't go over the 30-hashtag limit, and you can save your favorite hashtags in the app.
Once you're ready to post, AutoHash will save your selected hashtags to your clipboard so all you have to do is paste them into your image description or comments.
Price: Free.
Display Purposes is a web-based tool that gives you a bit more control over the hashtags you select for your post. Start with a keyword or an existing hashtag and it will recommend additional hashtags to use on your image. It's a nice Instagram marketing tool to help get more followers in your niche.
You can scale up or down the number of hashtags you want to include, and Display Purposes will fill in your hashtags accordingly. If you want to DIY, you can also switch to manual selection and choose from a list that displays each hashtag's relevance and popularity.
Price: Free.
Your Instagram photos aren't just a great way to engage potential customers on social media. They can also show your website visitors how your products look in context or how they can work together.
With Instagram Shoppable Feed, you can easily add your Instagram photos to your store and tag the products featured in each image. And if you use it on your store's homepage, like Hot Shapers, you can promote your products and grow your followers on Instagram at the same time.
Price: $4.99/month after a seven-day free trial.
Like Instagram Shoppable Feed, Covet.pics lets you create galleries on your website from your Instagram photos. But in addition to showcasing the images that your business has posted, this Instagram tool also lets you invite your customers to upload their own images of your products to your gallery.
You can tag products in your gallery photos, show pricing, and include a direct Buy button on your popup. Additionally, Covet.pics offers detailed analytics that reveal how your galleries are performing, with metrics like views, engagements, and orders.
Price: Free for one gallery and one product tag per photo; from $14.99/month for the Basic plan, which includes two galleries, multi-product tagging, and uploading custom photos.
To grow your audience and give your current fans a reason to stick around, you need to be updating your Instagram with fresh content regularly. But let's face it, constantly updating your profile with new photos takes a lot of time—something most entrepreneurs are already short on.
Thankfully, there are a bunch of great platforms out there that give you the resources you need to schedule posts in advance and keep your profile well-stocked with great content. Many of these tools also let you post to Instagram from your computer so you don't need to rely solely on Instagram's mobile app.
Sked also comes with extensive photo-editing features. Using its built-in image editing, you can tweak and fine-tune your photos well beyond Instagram's default filters. Sked also allows for mass uploading, so you can schedule batches of photos at once and shave time off your social media marketing efforts.
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Price: From $25/month for the Freelancer plan after a seven-day free trial.
Later is an intuitive social media scheduling platform that comes with a diverse set of features for planning out your campaigns, including the ability to explore hashtags and share user-generated content.
It also offers Saved Captions, which is handy when planning and implementing your hashtag strategy for Instagram. Save related groups of hashtags together so you never need to type them out again, or reuse your most effective tactics to increase engagement on posts or drive clicks to your website via your Instagram bio .
Learn more: How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
While Hootsuite has made a name for itself by streamlining marketing for platforms like Facebook and Twitter, its Instagram tools take social media management one step further. Hootsuite lets you schedule your Instagram posts in advance, and either notifies you to post with a push notification or posts automatically for you if you have an Instagram Business account.
Price: From $29/month for the Professional plan after a 30-day free trial.
Prepare your posts from mobile or desktop and Buffer will post directly to Instagram for you. And with a Premium plan, you can also create and schedule Instagram Stories, embed a shoppable Instagram grid on your website, and get detailed analytics on the performance of your Instagram posts.
Price: Free for one user, three social accounts, and 10 scheduled posts; from $15/month for the Pro plan or $65/month for the Premium plan after a seven-day free trial.
Sprout Social is a social media management platform with extensive content scheduling and publishing tools. Sprout Social also offers in-depth Instagram analytics, giving you access to detailed reports about how your latest posts have been performing.
With Sprout Social's analytics, you'll be able to track engagement and compare the success of your store's account against the success of other accounts you manage.
Price From $99/user/month for the Standard plan after a 30-day free trial.
With Iconosquare, you can track regular engagement data like followers and likes as well as get specific statistics about your followers, including their location and level of social media influence. By identifying your most influential fans, you'll be able to discover new opportunities for influencer marketing and outreach.
Iconosquare also gives you the chance to compare your performance against your competitors, helping you get a better idea of where you fit into your industry landscape.
Price: From $29/month for the Pro plan after a 3-day free trial.
Have you ever wondered if any of your customers might be a Big Deal on social media? With UserGems, you can find out. This Shopify app pulls in social media information about your customers so you can sort it to find exactly who you're looking for.
You can use UserGems' Instagram analytics tools to identify which of your customers have over 10,000 followers—or which ones use the word “blogger” or “journalist” in their social media profiles—helping you build out an influencer campaign. You can also look through the profiles of all of your customers if you're working on a targeted user-generated content campaign.
Price: Free for up to 100 customers per month; from $19/month for the Starter plan that supports up to 250 customers per month.
Have any more questions about Instagram marketing ? Let us know in the comments below.
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Photo: Elijah O'Donnell
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