Do you feel like you hardly have anytime to utilize social media for your business?
Ever wondered how so many businesses are constantly posting on social media throughout the week while you can barely
manage to get one post out? If you feel like you’re playing catch up when it comes to your social media game, it’s time we introduced
you to one of our all-time favorite platforms here at Step Out Buffalo, Later.com.
Later.com is becoming one of the marketing industry’s easiest and most efficient social media planning platforms. Not only does it give you the ability to visually plan your social posts and publish them automatically, it also gives you tailored insights to help you reach more people.
At SOB HQ we use Later on a daily basis to schedule virtually all of our Instagram posts on @stepoutbuffalo and @stepoutbuffalobusiness. After years of using Later we realized most businesses don’t utilize social media scheduling platforms, so we wanted to let you in on our favorite not-so-secret secret. From our perspective, Later works best with visual content on Instagram and Facebook. It technically works with every social platform, but you’ll get the most out of its features with those two, particularly Instagram.
What it does:
Later is a social media automation tool, which is a fancy way of saying it can schedule social media posts to various platforms and you can just set it and forget it. With Later you can publish and plan a month’s worth of social media posts in minutes. Later will also tell you everything you need to know, including your unique Best Time to post, so you can schedule content in batches and publish them all without a single hitch at the most optimum times for your Instagram account(s) and audience(s).
Here’s some of our favorite features!
Scheduling
What it does: Easily schedule photos, videos & carousel posts with a few clicks.
Auto Publish to Instagram: Schedule single photo and video posts to Instagram, no push notifications required! Auto Publish is currently available for Instagram business profiles (*auto publish not available for carousel posts)
Quick Schedule: Easily bulk schedule Instagram posts! With Quick Schedule, you can create weekly time slots and then just drag + drop to schedule in seconds.
Schedule First Comment on Instagram: Publish a first comment right along with your Instagram posts. It’s a great way to extend your reach to an even wider audience, while keeping your captions neat and tidy. Pro-tip: At SOB we use the First Comment feature to schedule hashtags on our posts! This keeps our captions clean while still helping us reach more people
Instagram Analytics
What it does: Increase your engagement, optimize your stories, drive traffic and more with Later’s new Instagram Analytics.
Get the insights you know and love from the Instagram app, plus additional analytics for calculating engagement rates, best times to post, and more.
Increase Your Engagement Rate: Compare your Instagram posts to discover your most engaging content by automatically calculating your engagement rate, ranking posts by engagement rate to see what content is working (or what isn’t), and seeing your best performing posts at a glance
Optimize Your Posting Times: Get more likes, comments, and views on your content by optimizing your posting times! Later’s Best Time to Post feature automatically calculates your top 7 posting times that get the most engagement, let’s you see when your audience is most active on Instagram, and uses location data to pinpoint your top time zones
Get More Views with Instagram Stories Analytics: Track Instagram Stories views and engagement data for up to 3 months! See how your Instagram Stories are performing and rank them by impressions, reach, completion rate, reply count, and more. Plus, get detailed analytics for each story so you can improve your posting times and test different content types. Note: the Instagram API does not include data for swipe ups, profile clicks, or sticker taps
Improve your Instagram marketing strategy: Later helps you grow your business by understanding what content is performing best. See how your Instagram account is performing overall, deep dive into the detailed performance of each Instagram post and story, and view and rank your posts by impressions, engagement, likes, comments, and saves.
Link In Bio
What it does: Add a link in bio or tag products in Instagram posts to turn your feed into a clickable, optimized landing page.
Get valuable insights including clicks, pageviews, and sales from each post.
Get More Traffic from Instagram: Share more than one link in your Instagram bio! Link individual Instagram posts to specific articles, websites, videos & more to ensure your followers can find what they’re looking for while scrolling through your feed.
Sell Your Products with a Shoppable Instagram Feed: Turn your followers into customers with a shoppable, mobile optimized landing page. Just connect your Shopify store to tag products in posts, then get sales data from Shopify for each Instagram post. No Shopify? No problem: link Instagram posts to product page!
Measure ROI from Instagram: Know exactly how much traffic or sales each Instagram post generated. Track clicks and pageviews from Instagram posts, view revenue and sales from Instagram (Shopify stores), and measure your business goals in Google Analytics with UTM Tracking for Instagram.
User-Generated Content
What it does: Your followers are already posting about you—give your feed an extra touch of authenticity by sharing user-generated content. Find photos and videos that’ll resonate with your fans right from your desktop, then share to your social channels in just a few clicks.
Find shareable content on Instagram—fast: View all the Instagram posts that you are mentioned or tagged in, then add your favorites to your media library, or search by hashtags to find shareable, user-generated content in just seconds.
Repost content from your biggest fans: Give proper photo credit—every time. Later automatically attaches the original Instagram caption and handle from your Mentions and Tags, and you can edit user-generated content to fit your brand voice, then share on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
Find on-brand content from anywhere: See something you want to share that’s not on Instagram? No problem— paste the URL into Later, then add the content directly into your library. If you’re working with influencers or third parties, add them as contributors to submit content directly to your Later account. Or, keep your feed flowing with quality, on-brand content with access to Unsplash’s stock photo library —plus crop, resize, and add text to the images inside Later.
Instagram Hashtags
What it does: A collection of tools that’ll help you extend your reach, get more engagement on your posts, and save a ton of time while managing your profile.
Extend your reach on Instagram: Finding the right followers has never been easier. Use hashtag suggestions to create and save new lists of hashtags to get your posts in front of more people.
Keep your grid, posts, and captions looking 100: Share perfectly captioned posts with an optimized first caption, or find stunning shareable content in just one search. With these Instagram hashtag tools, your profile has never looked better.
See which hashtags are working: Not all ‘tags are created equal. Later’s analytics will tell you which ones are bringing in the most engagement. Compare hashtags side-by-side, or dive into detailed performance metrics.
Recap
Have we convinced you that Later will make your life immensley easier yet? From auto-scheduling to extensive analytics to easily pulling UGC, if social media is something you struggle with while running your business we can’t recommend Later enough.
