Instagram Direct Scheduling has always been a hot topic for marketers since it became accessible.
What is Direct Scheduling? It is the process by which you can post and forget. In essence, you can enter into details of an Instagram post into a social media software, which will then handle it from there. This is different to many social media softwares which require you to login on your phone at the time the post was scheduled to do the final deed. This as you can imagine, is quite time consuming.
The reason why this is a hot topic is because there is some confusion on which tools are breaching Platform Policies and which ones aren’t.
Knackmap, whilst not working 100% within APIs offered by Instagram, is working constantly to ensure that we are best meeting platform policies, terms of use and community guidelines.
Knackmap has developed a solution which automates the posting to Instagram, so that once you’ve uploaded your image and text (and scheduled a time), we handle the work from there! We do this through phone emulators with the official Instagram app installed; meaning that it’s pretty much the same as if you hire an agency or an in house Social Media Marketer to manage your Instagram. This process ensures that we can keep costs of delivering this service down for users, and means that we can handle scale from many users.
Let’s first discuss the community guidelines:
We want Instagram to continue to be an authentic and safe place for inspiration and expression. Help us foster this community. Post only your own photos and videos and always follow the law. Respect everyone on Instagram, don’t spam people or post nudity.
This is the short of it. The vibe and intentions of these guidelines is to encourage authenticity in expression. If you look through deeper into these community guidelines, you’ll see some specifics on what Instagram would expect of users on the platform. We have read through and ensured that our software operates in a way which is encouraging the good spirit of the policies in place. You can read these community guidelines here, as many of these points are in the hands of the user, rather than the software being used.
Secondly, let’s look into the Terms of Use.
The terms of use are set to ensure that people are specifically behaving in a way that isn’t malicious, spammy, insulting or in a way that degrades the community spirit. There are do’s and do not’s, as well as the activity that Instagram reserves the right to do when there are breaches. We have set restrictions in our platform usage to ensure that no spamming can occur, to ensure that marketers using our platform are using it in the good spirit that Instagram intended for it’s use.
Finally, the Platform Policy. We have been approved for API usage with Instagram and will always do our best to work within this Policy. Instagram forbids media uploads via their API, and also forbids companies from reverse engineering what they call their “private API”. Knackmap does not indulge in this sort of activity. Again we state, Knackmap has developed a solution which uses phone emulators using the official Instagram app to post for you – meaning that it’s pretty much the same as if you hire an agency or an in house Social Media Marketer to manage your Instagram.
If you ever have any questions, please get in contact with us as we are always happy to discuss this with you. We are open and transparent in this operation and always will be.
Please also note, Knackmap is not a service provided or endorsed by Instagram or Facebook. We have created a solution to post images to Instagram in a way similar to having a social media manager within a business or an agency who sits on their phone uploading images all day long, however we are not owned, provided or endorsed by Instagram or Facebook.
Remember though, Knackmap offers so much more than this feature, including planning, publishing to other channels, monitoring social media, discovering new content and more!
