If you want to grow your following on Instagram, there are several tools available to make your life easier.
In the last decade, Instagram has grown from a niche app for photographers and creatives to one of the web’s most successful social networks, with over one billion active users.
Instagram is no longer just a place to post pictures of your breakfast and get interior design inspiration. Instagram can be a seriously powerful business tool too.
But to get the most out of it, you’ll need to grow your following and optimize your post for maximum engagement.
To help you do this, there are dozens of apps and tools available to do everything you could possible want, including:
- Automating likes and follows.
- Finding new hashtags to use in your posts.
- Scheduling your posts at the best time for the Instagram algorithm.
- Making better Instagram Stories.
- Analyzing your best posts.
- Finding influencers.
- Identifying your most engaged followers.
- Directing followers to landing pages and websites.
If you’re looking for Instagram marketing apps and tools, you should find whatever you need in this list!
Instagram Scheduling and Automation Tools
Running a successful Instagram account can be very time consuming. You can optimize the time you spend working on Instagram by using an automated tool to schedule posts in advance.
1. Agorapulse
Agorapulse enables you to easily manage several Instagram business profiles with the option to bulk upload posts and schedule or queue them for optimal times. As well as standard Instagram posts, you can also schedule carousel posts and stories.
You can see all your planned content on a calendar with color-coded posts and see content for several accounts on one calendar.
Agorapulse includes built-in management for hashtags, hashtag monitoring, and alerts for mentions of your username. You can also sort and track your most engaged followers and track the performance of your posts.
As well as providing management and scheduling tools for Instagram, Agorapulse also integrates with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, so you can plan out all your content for multiple social platforms in one place.
Pricing: From $79 a month for 2 users and 10 social profiles. 14-day free trial available.
2. Sendible
Sendible is an all-in-one social media management tool that integrates with several social networking apps including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn as well as Instagram.
From the Sendible dashboard you can plan out and schedule all your social content as far in advance as you need. You can also group posts into campaigns and drip them out on specific days and times for optimal engagement.
The Sendible content calendar gives you an at-a-glance view of all your scheduled social content
As well as the automated publishing functionality, Sendible also includes several other features to help you manage your social media.
Collaboration tools means that teams can easily work together on content
Tailwind, and there’s a built-in messaging system and permission management.
The analytics module enables you to create custom reports from your Instagram account data. You can easily identify your optimal posting times, most engaged followers, and top performing posts.
To help you to build relationships with your followers, Sendible also includes a listening module to track conversations and mentions and respond to comments all from one dashboard.
Pricing: From $29 per month for one user with support for up to 12 social services. All plans include a free 14-day trial.
3. Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a full social media management tool that helps you to curate images and articles from across the web, publish your own content to multiple platforms from one place, schedule your content in advance, and automatically customize your content for each social network.
You can schedule content for any time in the future or choose to automatically post at the best times for each network. You can also queue up content and the queue meter will show you how many posts you have scheduled over the next seven days.
A built-in analytics platform helps you to analyze your post performance and carry out competitor analysis. You can also track mentions of your brand and reply instantly.
Pricing: Free to try out up to 10 scheduled posts. From $7.48 per month for up to 2 social accounts and 100 scheduled posts each month.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s publishing platform enables you to plan, create, and schedule content for multiple social accounts from a single dashboard.
The built-in post composer integrates stock libraries, your own content assets, image editing features, and a video optimizer to easily create posts for each platform.
The auto-scheduler makes it easy to schedule content in advance, and multiple team members can collaborate on draft posts.
Hootsuite also includes an analytics platform and a monitoring module for brand mentions, tracking post performance, monitoring competitors, and engaging with your audience.
Pricing: Free account is available for one user, supporting up to 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled posts. From $29 a month for up to 10 social profiles and unlimited scheduled posts for one user. Free 30-day trial available.
Buffer is a fully automated publishing, analytics, and engagement platform that supports multiple social networks.
With Buffer, you can plan and publish all your content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, all from one central dashboard. Multiple team members can collaborate on posts with full account management and permissions built into the platform.
Instagram posts can be planned within Buffer and scheduled to post automatically. You can also set a first comment to post. All your scheduled content can be seen at a glance on your content calendar.
Pricing: From $15 a month for 1 user, 8 social accounts, and 100 scheduled posts. 14-day free trial available.
6. Planoly
Planoly is another visually focused Instagram planner and scheduler. You may think, because of the millennial-pink branding that it’s aimed at solo influencers rather than businesses, but several major beauty and lifestyle brands use Planoly to plan their content.
The Planoly IG planner is designed to keep your Instagram feed looking attractive, with drag and drop functionality to plan out your posts in advance. There’s also a splitter tool to make one of those annoying photos spread over several images in your grid.
Planoly also includes a visual storyboard editor for stories with drag and drop to change the order of stories and functionality to upload multiple stories at once. This tool comes with a selection of templates, designs, and stickers to make your stories look amazing.
There’s also an analytics feature, which enables you to monitor your followers and post engagement and analyze your content performance.
Planoly plans also include access to their Pinterest planner to plan out content for Pinterest in the same way.
Pricing: Free for two social profiles (one Instagram and one Pinterest) with 30 uploads per month, per profile. From $7 a month for unlimited uploads on one account and additional features including auto-scheduling at the best time to post.
Sprout Social’s publishing tools are designed to save you time when planning out and publishing content for several different social accounts. The visual calendar makes it easy to see what posts you have scheduled over different networks in the coming days and weeks.
The tool is aimed at teams and enterprises with features for collaboration, automated workflow, and content approval. There’s also an integrated asset library and content suggestions for curation.
Sprout Social uses sophisticated algorithms to automatically detect the best time for you to post on each platform. There are also tools available to optimize engagement, for brand monitoring and social listening, and detailed analytics.
Pricing: from $99 per user, per month, supporting up to 5 social profiles.
Later is an easy-to-use scheduler for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. The tool comes with some handy visual tools that make it particularly useful for scheduling Instagram posts.
Posts can be scheduled to auto-post at any time in the future. You can also bulk-schedule posts with a drag and drop calendar. This visual planner makes it easy for you to plan out your feed and rearrange posts for a more attractive grid.
Later comes with a storyboard planner for Instagram stories with tools for editing and resizing images and videos. You can also use the built-in analytics to find the best times to post.
Pricing: Free for individuals, supporting one social profile per platform and up to 30 posts per platform. From $7.50 a month for up to $100 posts per platform.
9. Sked
Sked is a visual Instagram planner and scheduler for posting images, videos, carousel posts, and stories.
You can easily add content to a queue and set it to post automatically across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter at an optimal time, wherever in the world your followers are.
The Sked in-app photo editor also includes tools for filtering, cropping, and adding overlays and stickers to images.
The tool also comes with Sked Link – a landing page tool that enables you to link to as many pages from your bio as you wish.
Pricing: From $25 a month for one Instagram account and unlimited post scheduling. Free 7-day trial available.
Instagram Management and Growth Tools
Scheduling your Instagram posts in advance can help you to save time. But your Instagram won’t grow unless you actively focus on increasing your followers and improving engagement.
The following tools will help your posts to reach a wider audience and build engagement with your current followers.
10. Awario
Awario is a social listening tool that detects mentions of your brand from across the web and makes it easy for you to join in the conversation.
It crawls over 13 billion web pages daily as well as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more, so you’ll know instantly when someone is talking about your brand.
You can also use Awario to conduct market research and uncover valuable insights in your industry.
The analytics module enables you to quickly identify influencers and reach out to them to build relationships.
Pricing: From $29 a month to monitor up to 3 topics and 30,000 mentions per month.
11. Ninja Outreach
Influencer marketing is well known as being an effective way to drive sales. It can also be used to increase brand awareness and grow your social media account.
Getting an Instagram influencer to mention your account or share your content could result in a flood of new followers in a short time. And unlike buying followers in bulk, these accounts will be real users who are actually interested in your content.
Identifying an appropriate influencer in your niche with a large and engaged following can be a challenge. But NinjaOutreach is an Instagram user search engine that makes it easy for you to find influencers to target.
Ninja Outreach also includes tools for scheduling campaigns, automating outreach campaigns, and automatic follow-ups.
Pricing: From $119 per month (billed yearly) to access their database of 64,000,000 Instagram influencers, 7,000,000 Twitter influencers, 19,500,000 business emails, and 6,000,000 bloggers. 7-day free trial available.
As anyone who uses Instagram knows, one of its most frustrating aspects is the fact that you can only include a single clickable link in your bio (and none in your posts!)
Because of this shortcoming, several services have popped up to help you improve your linking from Instagram.
Shorby creates a responsive landing page to link to fro your bio that includes as many links as you wish. There’s a visual editor to create this page, which enables you to easily import images from the web or your social media accounts, and add button links to websites and social media profiles.
With Shorby you can also create direct messenger buttons to services like WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook Messenger. This means you can easily set up a landing page that directs to your preferred chat service with a set message like “Give me further information about…”
Pricing: From $12 a month (billed annual) including up to 5 “smart” pages, direct messenger buttons, and insights. Free 5-day trial available.
Running a contest on your Instagram account can be an effective way to get more engagement and followers.
Shortstack is software designed to make it easy for you to run contests on your social accounts and create landing pages for giveaways.
With Shortstack, it’s quick and simple to create hashtag contests on Instagram to collect user-generated content. The software will automatically collect all images, video, text, and usernames associated with hashtags you specify.
There’s also a rights management tool to ensure you can use all content you collect. A random entry selector makes it easy for you to pick a winner. From a hashtag or comment contest. You can also easily create a landing page with a visual editor to collect email addresses if you wish.
Pricing: from $99 a month for up to 10,000 entries and 50,000 views. Free trial available for up to 250 entries and 1,000 views.
SocialRank is a tool for managing your audience on social media, identifying your most valuable and influential followers, analyzing your content, and conducting competitor analysis.
There are a number of ways you can use SocialRank in your Instagram marketing. You can use it to identify accounts to select for an influencer marketing campaign or create targeted audiences based on location, engagement rate, and more.
You can also compare your audience to your competition and analyze the performance of your content to see which topics are getting the most engagement.
SocialRank can also be used to analyze your Twitter audience.
Pricing: From $24 a month for up to 25k followers.
15. Linktree
Linktree is another Instagram “link from bio” that’s very popular because it offers a completely free account and a pro account option that’s very affordable.
You can use Linktree to create a single page to link to as many websites and social posts as you wish with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. Linktree analytics will show you your link page views, click through rate, and other valuable insights.
Pricing: Free account available including unlimited links. Pro account is $6 a month for extra features including link thumbnails, video links, newsletter signup, and more.
16. HypeAuditor
When choosing influencers to work with, it’s important to do due diligence. Influencer fraud is a real thing, and some Instagram users buy follower to artificially raise their profiles.
HypeAuditor is an analytical platform that will help you to check the audience quality of Instagram accounts you’re considering working with. You can easily check engagement levels and fake followers as well as seeing the demographics and interests of the audience.
You can also use HypeAuditor to conduct market research, competitor analysis, and to track your ad campaigns and account performance over time.
Pricing: $299 a month
17. Combin
Combin is a tool for attracting new Instagram followers, managing your audience, and planning and scheduling content. You can manage up to 15 Instagram accounts and communicate with your audience from a single dashboard.
The Instagram growth tools enable you to measure the quality of your audience, monitor audience activity, detect who doesn’t follow you back, and find influencers.
The scheduler helps you to style your Instagram grid and create dozens of stories in one click.
Pricing: Free starter account allows you to try out the application with 25 user search results and 50 post search results. Paid accounts start from $15 a month with 1000 post and user search results.
18. Kicksta
Kicksta is an Instagram growth service that uses artificial intelligence to find profiles similar to yours and automatically like their posts. This encourages organic growth, as users who post and follow similar content will often follow you back.
The service automatically likes around 10,000 photos a month and you should start seeing results within 24 hours.
Pricing: From $49 a month
Instagram Analytics Tools
Having a large number of followers isn’t enough to make sure you’re getting the most out of your Instagram account. You also need to track the success of your posts, optimize your engagement levels, and measure your ROI. These Instagram analytics tools enable you to track your account performance over time and create easy-to-follow reports to send out to your team and clients.
19. Buffer Analyze
As well as its scheduling tool, Buffer also offers an analytics dashboard to create reports for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter in one place. You can easily measure the reach and effectiveness of individual posts and stories.
Buffer Analytics aggregates your performance across all your social media channels as well as measuring the performance of individual posts, stories, and hashtags.
You can also set up custom reports and have them updated automatically daily.
Pricing: From $35 a month for up to 8 social accounts.
20. Socialinsider
Socialinsider is a social profile analytics and benchmarking tool you can use to compare your social channels and strategy to others in your industry.
Designed for social media managers and agencies, the tool makes it easy for you to create branded reports in seconds, track KPIs on multiple social profiles, and measure performance.
Pricing: From $83 a month for 15 social profiles and 6 months of post history. 14-day free trial available.
21. Unbox Social
Unbox Social is an influencer marketing platform designed to help you make data-based decisions and track campaign performance at scale.
With its large database of Instagram and YouTube users, you can easily identify influencers that fit your audience and business goals and generate automated reports.
A competition tracking module provides you with insights to improve your own social performance and the dashboard brings all your social media analytics together in one place with at-a-glance color-coded charts.
Pricing: from $99 a month.
22. Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an advanced analytics, management, and scheduling tool designed for brands and agencies.
A customized dashboard allows you to see the metrics that are important to you at a glance, and you can also schedule reports to be generated automatically.
Industry benchmarks are available for over 100 industries, which enable you to track your performance against competitors.
Instagram stories metrics help you to work out the type of stories that work best for your audience including story type and the best time to post.
You can also measure and track analytics of links in your profile, your followers, competitors, and hashtags.
Pricing: From $29 a month for up to 3 social profiles. Free 14-day trial available.
Owlmetrics is an Instagram Analytics tool that promises to help you to understand your audience, create content that resonates with them, and track how much traffic you’re driving to your website from Instagram.
With the platform you can track metrics like follower growth, engagement, hashtag activity, competitor activity, and follower demographics.
Pricing: From $25 a month for up to 25k followers. Free trial available.
24. Keyhole
Keyhole is an Instagram tool that concentrates on hashtag analytics and tracking.
The tool tracks hashtag and influencer data, measures metrics such as reach, impressions, and engagement, and calculates campaign ROI. You can easily and automatically create PDF reports and share them with your team and clients in real-time.
You can use Keyhole for campaign monitoring, influencer marketing, brand monitoring, event monitoring, and market research.
Pricing: From $29 a month for up to 3 social media accounts. Free trial available.
25. Minter.io
Minter.io provides advanced Instagram analytics and hashtag analytics for brands and agencies. Data is updated daily and you can use the date picker to view trends and statistics across your campaigns.
The industry benchmark tools shows how your brand stacks up against your competitors in terms of follower growth, engagement rate, reach, likes, and comments.
You can also export reports and data in a variety of formats and give your team and clients access to only the data you want them to see.
Pricing: From $9 per month, per account. Free 14-day trial available.
26. Social Insight
Social Insight is a full Instagram marketing platform with a detailed analytics module that includes dozens of metrics.
You can measure and track follower growth, engagement rate, best time to post, most engaging post types, top photo filters, and more.
Follow insights help you to identify and track your most valuable followers, find by location or keyword, and easily identify influencers.
Pricing: From $29 a month for one Instagram account. 14-day free trial available.
Instagram Hashtag Tools
While many Instagram tools include some kind of hashtag functionality, hashtags are so important for Instagram growth that it’s often worth using a dedicated tool. The trick to using hashtags is to find tags that are trending but not so popular that your posts will get lost alongside tens of thousands of others. These tools will help you to find the best hashtags to use.
27. AutoHash
AutoHash is a simple and free app that will help you to find all the most popular hashtags to use on your posts with smart algorithms.
To use the app, just select a photo from your phone or social account and the app will automatically detect the objects in the image. It will then suggest some hashtags to use.
You can save your favorite hashtags, add them in one click, copy to clipboard, and share photos directly to Instagram.
Pricing: free
28. Photerloo Instagram Hashtag Generator
Photerloo is primarily a tool for selling photos on stock sites, but it also has a very handy web-based hashtag generator.
Just like AutoHash, this tool uses AI to detect the subject of the photo. It will then suggest up to 30 Instagram hashtags.
The nice thing about this tool is that it has a slider to adjust popularity of the hashtags. The more popular tags have more traffic but it’s easier to get seen on the less popular tags. You might want to experiment with this or use a mixture of both.
Pricing: free
All Hashtag is a website with a number of tools for generating and analyzing hashtags for social media.
To use the hashtag generator, simply enter a keyword and choose from the top (most popular) hashtags based on your keyword, random hashtags that include your keyword, live hashtags that other users are using on their posts containing your keyword, and similar hashtags to your keyword. You can then simply copy all the generated hashtags in one click and paste them into your Instagram post.
The hashtag creator saves you time by simply adding a hash symbol to each word you type in the box. You can then copy and paste all your hashtags at once.
There’s a free hashtag analytics tool that will show you a hashtag’s ranking, how many times it was used, and how many similar hashtags there are.
All Hashtags also displays charts of the top 100 hashtags of the day, week, month, and all time, popular hashtags, hashtags to attract likes and follows, and hashtags by subject.
Pricing: free
30. Hashtagify
Hashtagify gives you detailed metrics for any hashtag, including popularity, trends, reach, best time to post, top influencers and more.
You can see the most popular hashtags of the last week and month and explore how they are trending over timer.
There’s also a tool for suggesting custom hashtags based on your content, analysis of your hashtag strategy, and insights into your competitors’ accounts.
Pricing: From $29 a month. 7-day free trial available.
31. Hashtagsforlikes
Hashtagsforlikes is a tool that will help you to find the best hashtags to use on your posts and grow your following.
To get started, just enter a seed hashtag and hit search. The tool will return a list of the most popular, trending, and related keywords, as well as information about the hashtag reach and popularity. A difficulty score for each hashtag shows you how hard it is to rank for.
You can also opt to analyze an Instagram account, which will show you data including top hashtags, top posts, engagement, future account projections, and more.
Pricing: From $19.99 per week
32. Display Purposes
Display Purposes is a free Instagram hashtag generator that will display a list of related hashtags based on one you type in, along with each hashtag’s popularity and relevance score.
You can see detailed statistics for each hashtag including demographics, top countries, and top posts using the hashtag.
The tool will also display a visual chart of related hashtags, which can be quite useful for brainstorming ideas.
Want to see the most popular hashtags users in Amsterdam or Hollywood are using? Check out the list by city. You can also see best hashtag lists by account type, age, interest, and gender.
If you’re really stuck for ideas, you can simply browse a catalog of thousands of hashtags organized alphabetically.
