We’re a social media management tool for Instagram. We automate your posting and scheduling, so you can grow your account and get more likes, engagement, and followers.
Table of Contents
Instagram Social Media Tools
One of the most important parts of having an effective Instagram presence is filling your feed with stunning visuals that clearly communicate your brand’s identity and the value of your products.
Even if you aren’t a professional photographer, you can create great images with your smartphone and a few of the best Instagram design apps.
1. VSCO (iOS, Android)
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 reigning champ of 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.
2. Snapseed (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows)
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 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.
3. Afterlight (iOS)
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.
With its sleek and straightforward design, Afterlight is an easy-to-use, must-have tool for making your Instagram photos pop.
Price: $2.99/month or $17.99/year after a seven-day free trial.
4. Canva (web, iOS, Android)
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.
It’s especially useful for creating Instagram Stories that stand out, and if you stick to a few consistent image formats and fonts, you can start to make sure your followers always recognize your content.
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.
5. Photoshop Express (iOS, Android, Windows)
That’s right, you can use Photoshop on your phone.
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.
The best Instagram video apps
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.
6. Vimeo Create (iOS, Android)
Vimeo Create automatically turns your existing product images and text into polished videos. 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
7. Boomerang from Instagram (iOS, Android)
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.
8. Life Lapse (iOS, Android)
While Boomerang for Instagram is great for creating quick GIF-like videos, 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.
9. HypeType (iOS)
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.
Turn likes into sales
Ready to take your Instagram to the next level? Learn how Shopify helps you turn likes into sales.
The best Instagram marketing apps
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.
10. Repost for Instagram (Android)
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 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.
11. AutoHash (Android)
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.
12. Display Purposes (web)
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 ally to help get more Instagram 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.
The best Instagram ecommerce apps
While posting your products on Instagram is a great way to grow your following and increase awareness of your business, at the end of the day, you’re probably posting to Instagram to grow your sales.
These apps make it easy to share your Instagram photos in your Shopify store so visitors can easily find products they saw on Instagram and purchase them from your site.
13. Instagram Shoppable Feed (Shopify)
Hot Shapers uses Instagram Shoppable Feed to showcase its Instagram photos on its homepage.
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.
14. Covet.pics (Shopify)
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, Covet.pics 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.
The best Instagram management tools
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 your 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.
15. Sked (web, iOS, Android)
Sked is a scheduling platform with a wide variety of features—including web-browser-based scheduling—for running more effective campaigns.
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.
Price: From $25/month for the Freelancer plan after a seven-day free trial.
16. Later (web, iOS, Android)
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.
Later lets you organize your posts with a handy content calendar and get a preview of your Instagram feed before publishing, making it simple to visualize exactly how your strategy will unfold.
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.
Price: Free for one user and up to 30 Instagram posts per month; from $9/month for the Plus plan for one user and up to 100 posts per month.
17. Hootsuite (web, iOS, Android)
Hootsuite is a powerful social media management platform that can schedule and publish Instagram posts.
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.
18. Buffer (web, iOS, Android)
You probably know Buffer as a great tool to schedule your social media posts for Twitter and Facebook, but you can also use it to schedule your Instagram posts.
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.
instagram tools followers
1. ViralUpgrade
ViralUpgrade is a growth platform for both brands and influencers. It’s more of a white-glove option, as you are assigned an account assistant who takes over your account’s growth. Those assistants engage with your target audience, growing your following base organically with the goal of increasing your website’s traffic and sales.
You provide details about your desired demographics, which you define using the tool’s targeting options. Users receive weekly reports that detail the account’s growth.https://3581e4943299d90240220803a0461c0f.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
2. Hootsuite
Scheduling your Instagram content is easy with Hootsuite. Write captions for your posts, attach the media you wish to include and then pick dates for them to be published. It will post directly to your Instagram feed at the scheduled time, now that Instagram allows post management via third-party tools — something their terms of service didn’t allow in the past.
Additionally, Hootsuite offers tools to monitor activity, track users and measure performance through analytics. It also allows Instagram accounts to be managed by multiple people at once, with the ability to collaborate and assign responsibilities to certain team members.
3. Yotpo
Consumers often post pictures on Instagram of products they have purchased or used, which can be marketing gold. Nothing is more authentic.
Yotpo is a tool that gives brands access to these images by gathering relevant posts, as well as provides a ‘Shop Now’ feature on Instagram, allowing users to easily access products they see in their feed. With Yotpo, businesses are able to make their Instagram accounts more marketable, which has always been a problem for many.
4. Sprout Social
Businesses on Instagram often gauge their success on the platform based on their likes, comments and followers. Sprout Social allows a business to dive into more useful data. The app allows brands to view performance data within specific time periods and between individual posts. In addition, it allows pre-scheduling of posts, making the process of publishing consistent Instagram content much easier.
5. Iconosquare
As powerful as Instagram is in terms of reach potential, extracting information that is useful for analyzing marketing efforts can prove challenging. Comments and likes are quantified, but going through hundreds or thousands of individual posts to find them can be time-consuming.
Iconosquare provides an easy solution by allowing users to view detailed Instagram analytics, track all comments across multiple accounts, organize a library of content and schedule posts. The app also features an Instagram search engine, allowing businesses to reach out to targeted influencers on the platform.
6. Repost
Want to share an image of your product, but you don’t own the legal rights to those images? Repost solves this problem by allowing users to repost content while giving credit to the original poster. Businesses can now maximize brand awareness by re-publishing content from multiple sources.
7. Social Insight
Interacting with followers on Instagram can become difficult as brands become more popular. Social Insight lets businesses schedule posts at specific times, organize and manage followers — and most importantly, monitor follower interactions. The tool also offers users access to in-depth data analytics that can be used to analyze and adjust marketing strategies.
8. Wordswag
On a visually driven platform like Instagram, the best way to attract attention is with eye-catching content. Wordswag is a tool that helps make content stand out by adding various typography to photos.https://3581e4943299d90240220803a0461c0f.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
It’s simple to use — type out the text you want, tap “Save & Close” and it will give you different style options to select from. A lot of brands still manage their Instagram via a mobile device, so apps like this can be very convenient.
9. Soldsie
“Link in bio” is an all-too-common phrase on Instagram. Over time, the link may change or even be removed entirely, creating confusion and preventing consumers from getting what they want.
Soldsie sends users to a custom web page showcasing content curated by the account owner. For example, ecommerce stores may link to a list of products for sale, while blogs may link to a recent popular article, it allows businesses to include another layer of relevant information in their Instagram profiles without confusing the consumer.
10. SocialRank
On Instagram, diving into your followers can be a difficult task. The followers icon leads to a single-stream list of all the accounts following you. For businesses with large followings, this tab is of little use for viewing specific followers. SocialRank has a popular follower search engine, making it easier for businesses to reach out to specific followers. Knowing who follows your brand on Instagram is key — you always need to be familiar with your customer base.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines