Instagram is finally adding a scheduling feature, sort of

In a move that will bring unbridled joy to social media managers and influencers everywhere, Instagram is now allowing business profiles to schedule posts, the company announced on its Business blog today. Currently, the feature only works for photos, not videos, and it’s only available through third-party social management tools for now. This means that if you want to get your hands on scheduling features, you have to pay for subscription services like HootSuite, Sprout Social, or any one of the companies working as a Facebook Marketing Partner or Instagram Partner.

Post scheduling has never been available until now, despite third-party companies’ best efforts to advertise such features. The only tools around have been ones that let users pre-write post captions and send out push notifications to remind users to post at given times. Though the feature is limited to business profiles for now, Instagram says that the update will make its way to regular profiles by early 2019.

Other updates to the Instagram Graph API today include Business Discovery, which lets users view profile info of other businesses, and Mentions, which allows business profiles to view posts they’ve been tagged in.

It makes sense that it’s taken this long for Instagram to allow scheduled posts, given that the platform has always encouraged sharing photos and videos in the moment. But with changes like Snapchat finally removing the ugly white borders around photos posted from the camera roll and Instagram allowing Stories older than 24 hours to be posted, it seems like platforms are shifting away from real-time sharing. It doesn’t matter so much as long as users just keep posting, right? Parent company Facebook’s constant share prompts are happy as long as you post something, anything!