Social Media Scheduler
Hello Indie Hackers. I have been seeing social media schedulers everywhere now. Its not an area I wish to dive into in terms of a product, but it has spark my curiosity of how such applications work. The first thing that came to mind was APIs. Twitters documentation do show you can create tweets with api. However, Instagrams documentation doesn't show much on how scheduling content works. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks
Instagram has been making some big changes to their APIs, which makes it confusing to figure out how things currently work. I'm actually unsure whether it's currently possible to make an app that posts content on behalf of users. Here's what I do know.
There are three APIs currently in play:
Instagram Legacy API Platform is turning off very soon on June 29, 2020. Some older blog posts and documentation may refer to capabilities of this API, which are best ignored at this point. It's accessed through a dashboard here: https://www.instagram.com/developer/
The two newer APIs are instead accessed through the Facebook Developer dashboard. If you find yourself trying to generate a token on the Instagram Developer dashboard, you're gonna have a bad time.
Instagram Basic Display API is very limited, but works for all Instagram accounts. It can basically only tell you about the posts that the authorized user has made. That's it. If you try to use it for a post scheduling app, you're gonna have a bad time.
Instagram Graph API is your only hope, but it comes with two main gotchas. First, it only works with Business or Creator accounts, not the consumer Instagram accounts that most people have. It's free for people to convert their accounts, but it's annoying that you'd have to explain this to your users. But you'll be in good company, as both Buffer and Later share this pain.
The other gotcha is that the permission to publish content via that API has recently disappeared from the officials docs, as discussed here: https://developers.facebook.com/community/threads/258822332165149/
It remains unclear what this means for new apps going forward. In addition to all of the above complication, some features require your app to be approved, and this might be one of those cases. I can't say for sure, because like I said, the docs for this feature have disappeared. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Technically, one last remaining option might be to reverse engineer the protocol their official apps use to publish content, but you're own your own with that one!
There are many SaaS tools available for scheduling your social media post. I have used Feedhive where you can schedule the post for all social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can add your ad copy and also it has an inbuilt hashtag generator and mainly it is simple to use.
Unless your an Instagram Partner, you can't schedule via the API. You can used 3rd party tools such as Zapier. Can check out this for more info on social media scheduler APIs: https://www.ayrshare.com/top-10-social-media-apis-for-developers/
Instagram for Business has the scheduling post functionality, check this link https://business.instagram.com/blog/instagram-api-features-updates?locale=en_GB.
For Twitter its straight forward API if i remember correctly.
there are quite a bit of tutorials out there... have you walked through any?
No I haven't. Would you be able to recommend any?
so, i mean, when i first started working on twitter's api, i walked through a bunch of these: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tutorials