9 Smart Instagram Tools Your Competitors Are Using but You Aren’t

Soumya Roy
8 min readMar 18, 2019

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Powerful Instagram tools

Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most significant social media channels for brands and businesses to focus on right now. Whether you manage a small business or a large scale enterprise including Instagram in your marketing strategy has become essential.

But after running a business, dealing with various clients, customers, employees you may not want to dedicate your valuable time to yet another social media platform. Fortunately, Instagram has come up with lots of automated scheduling, publishing, and marketing tools to help you out.

So, we at PromozSEO, have listed 11 some of the best Instagram marketing tools that will assist and boost your social media presence.

#1. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a social media management tool which gives insights about your Instagram account and allows you to manage all your Instagram activities using its smart platform.

Using Iconosquare you can track the statistics about your followers, their location, number of likes and comments, daily follower gains, unfollows etc. which will give you a clear idea about how successful and attractive your posts are in your niche and among your fans and followers.

Features:

· Check the performance of your insta posts

· Find the geolocation of your followers

· Compare your hashtag usage with your competitors

· Find the best time for posting

· Create an album to manage all your posted media

· Track competitors to see how they are performing

· Create user feeds and hashtag feeds to find and curate more Instagram contents

Pricing:

· 14 Day free trial

· Monthly Plan: Pro — 39$ per month, Advanced — 79$ per month, Agency — Contact sales

· Monthly Plan: Pro — 29$ per month, Advanced — 59$ per month, Agency — Contact sales

Rating: 4.4/5 on G2Crowd

#2. Later

Later is another popular choice in the world of Instagram marketing tools. The biggest drawback Later had that it couldn’t automatically publish videos or posts on Instagram. But, with the API changes, it has introduced auto-publishing for business profiles.

Features:

· Post-scheduling — You can start scheduling your Instagram posts with its easy to use calendar within a few minutes.

· Drag and drop facility — With its drag and drop option you can create beautiful Instagram posts and preview them before uploading.

· Import and Export media — Import and export various multimedia files such as images, videos, infographics etc. from your phone, desktop, Google Drive, or Dropbox directly.

· Collect User Content from Instagram — Search by hashtag and save the posts directly to your content library.

· Know Your Best Time to Post — Get more engagement by posting your content when most of your audience is online.

· Analyze Content Performance — Track number of likes, followers, and clicks with Later’s Instagram Analytics.

· Link to different landing pages — You can link Instagram posts directly to your product pages that will help your followers to find the products they are looking for.

Pricing:

· For Individuals: Free forever plan, Plus plan — 9$ per month

· For Business: Premium plan — 19$ per month, Starter plan — 29$ per month, Brand plan — 49$ per month

Rating: 4.5/5 on G2Crowd

#3. VSCO

VSCO is one of the best free photo editing software for phones, especially for social media users that are active on Instagram. This powerful photo editing tool allows you to edit photos in just a few minutes with a couple of simple swipes.

Features:

· Filters — VSCO filters are designed to enhance your image quality without distorting their originality. As you click on the sliding bars, the app will automatically take you to the filter section. Slide your finger to the right to see all the preset previews and choose the filter that best fits your image.

· Clarity — Clarity tool makes your images look sharper and clearer. You can slide the bar to the right to add details into your image and create more contrast between the dark and light areas.

· Tint — The tint tool can change the color of your image. By swiping the tint tool to the left, the colors in the image will turn more towards green tone and by swiping the tint slider to the right the colors will turn into a purple tone.

· Fade — Fade is a great tool that gives a vintage look to your images by fading out the dark areas of the image.

Pricing:

· Free plan

· Membership plan — 19.99$ per year

#4. Boomerang

Boomerang from Instagram makes your everyday moment’s fun and exciting. You can create captivating mini videos and share them with your friends and followers.

Features:

· Shoot videos using the front and back facing camera.

· No sign up or account required, you can download and start capturing the videos immediately.

· You can take 10 photos at one go and turn them into a delightful mini video.

· Share your created videos on Instagram and Facebook platforms directly using the application, or share them anytime from your camera.

Pricing: Free

Rating: 4.4/5 on G2Crowd

#5. Snapseed

Snapseed is one of the most downloaded photo editing software available for iPhones and Androids. It is extremely simple and easy to use. Besides various standard editing functions like brightness, crop, and contrast, Snapseed also comes with extra cool features like the brush, ambiance, and perspective.

Features:

· 29 Tools including Healing, Brush, Structure, HDR, Perspective etc.

· It opens JPG and RAW files

· You can save your personal appearance and apply them to new photos later

· You can use selective filter brush

· All styles can be adjusted with fine, precise control

· Snapseed’s Insights feature provides tips and tricks about Snapseed and general photography

Pricing: Free

#6. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another popular software that promotes communication between businesses and their prospective customers. Through its three main functionalities; publishing, engagement, and analytics a company can effectively progress in social communication.

Features:

· Post and schedule posts on multiple networks

· Automatically detect resources in your RSS feed and post them to social media accounts

· Automate your social activities and engagements

· It lets you manage posts using its mobile app

· Analyze the performance of your posts

· Monitor the overall social media performance

Pricing:

· 30 — Day free trial

· Standard plan — 99$ per user per month

· Professional plan — 149$ per user per month

· Advanced plan — 249$ per user per month

Rating: 4.4/5 on G2Crowd

#7. Tagboard

Tagboard is an innovative software that allows businesses to collect multiple social media contents and categorizes them using hashtags. It is a very helpful solution for various agencies, businesses, brands, and marketers.

Features:

· Campaign Management

· Customer Review Platform

· Review Monitoring

· Response Management

· Sentiment Analysis

· Gamification

· Social Media Metrics

· Social Media Monitoring

Pricing: 3 Plans; Basic, Premium, and Custom, contact for price

#8. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is one of the popular marketing tools for Twitter and Instagram that offers smart features, which guarantee rapid growth on social media through its Clean-Engage-Grow philosophy. It helps organizations as well as individuals to reach a wide range of audience and grow their business.

Features:

· Discover relevant content based on your related topics

· Publish content from your blogs and websites

· Pre-schedule all of your contents

· Get tailored posts for every social network

· Get images based on your favorite topics

· Add your own RSS feeds

Pricing:

· Monthly plans: Free plan, Plus plan — 9.99$ per month, Premium plan — 49.99$ per month, VIP plan — 99.99$ per month

· Yearly plans: Free plan, Plus plan — 7.48$ per month, Premium plan — 37.48$ per month, VIP plan — 74.98$ per month

Rating: 3.9/5 on G2Crowd

#9. Hashtagify

Hashtagify is one of the most advanced Instagram Hashtags tracking tools. It lets you search and analyze the best hashtags to reach your followers, gives you custom suggestions, and helps you know your competitors better.

Features:

· Find the right hashtags that work best for you and run your campaign for it

· Monitor your hashtag performance for your Instagram account

· Analyze what your competitors are doing to improve the performance

· Discover top influencers to gain more visibility through influencers marketing

· Automate your reporting and download a CSV or customizable PDF reports

Pricing:

· 7 — Day free trial

· Monthly plans: Personal plan — 29$ + VAT per month, Business plan — 86$ + VAT per month, Enterprise plan — 311$ + VAT per month

· Yearly plans: Personal plan — 19$ + VAT per month, Business plan — 64$ + VAT per month, Enterprise plan — 249$ + VAT per month

Conclusion:

Instagram is getting bigger by every passing year, especially for business owners and entrepreneurs. Instagram constantly releasing new features that will help businesses reach new audiences and increase engagement. Whether you are looking to monitor trends, grow your audience, or sell your products, we are sure some of these Instagram tools will improve your social media performance.

In the end, we would like to hear from you. We would love to know which Instagram tools you are using now and your experience on those. Also do let us know, which of these aforesaid tools you would select to use for your next Instagram campaigns.

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Soumya Roy

Digital Marketing Consultant, Entrepreneur and Coach at PromozSEO Web Marketing Academy, Founder & CEO of PromozSEO.com