Are you a social media manager or an influencer? Now, you can add video scheduling to your social media management apps, thanks to this latest tweak to Instagram’s API.
Instagram finally launches one of the most anticipated features by business Instagram account managers and social media influencers. The popular photo-sharing social media network updated the Instagram Graph API to facilitate video posts scheduling.
Earlier the Instagram API allowed scheduling of only single-image posts and even third-party tools couldn’t schedule multi-image posts and videos. With the introduction of this feature, you can now use social media management apps to schedule your video posts, eliminating the need to log into the app frequently.
Avoid the “Manual” Smartphone Workaround
Before the availability of this feature, it was common for social media managers and influencers to set a mobile alert to remind them, it’s time to post on Instagram. As social media managers and business Instagram account owners, you would know that videos and images have to be posted at specific times to increase engagement rates.
With the scheduling feature, now you can use third-party content publishing tools to schedule your videos, just like your single-image posts. Most of the popular scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, Social Report, and others are part of this video scheduling API.
Video Scheduling Limited Only to Business Instagram Accounts
Just like photo scheduling, video scheduling is available only to business Instagram accounts.If you are an influencer, you can easily migrate from a personal Instagram account to a business account. All you need is a corresponding Facebook page to link your business account.
Video Guidelines for Instagram:
Instagram is pretty strict with the specifications for videos that you can post on the platform, using this scheduling feature. Here’s what Instagram lists regarding specifications for the videos to be scheduled:
- Format – MP4 or MOV
- Audio Codec – AAC, mono or stereo, 48Khz sample rate maximum
- Video Codec – H264 or HEVC, closed GOP, progressive scan, 4:2:0 subsampling
- Frame Rates – 23 to 60 frames per second
- Picture Size – 1920 (maximum horizontal pixels), maximum aspect ratio –16/9, minimum aspect ratio – 4/5
- Duration – minimum: 3 seconds, maximum: 60 seconds
- File Size – Maximum: 100 MB
Your third-party scheduling tool will ensure that these limitations are implemented.
Which Social Media Management Tools support Video Scheduling?
While video scheduling has been one of the most requested updates from Instagram, it’s a surprise that Instagram made no formal announcements regarding this change to its API. Generally, Instagram announces new features and updates via its business blog. However, this API tweak was simply added to the features page during the end of December last year, without any formal announcements.
Currently, Social Report, one of the popular social media management tools has implemented this feature. With that said, one can expect popular social media management tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and others to adapt to this change quickly.
How will the New Feature Impact Users?
Video scheduling was one of the most anticipated updates. This has the potential to change the social media game for business users and social media marketing houses. Instead of having to manually log into the app to post videos at odd hours or over the weekends, automatic scheduling takes care of it all.
With video scheduling available, social media managers expect multi-image scheduling to follow suit.
