David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Managing Multiple Instagram Accounts

By

screenshot of fotogramme app on my iphoneI recently created an Instagram account for my library (and you can find my own Instagram account here, if you’re interested).

So far, we are having fun with it! I’m in the process of planning (i.e., gathering a team and setting up our first meeting), and we’ll be setting some goals for 2015. More on that later.

After creating the library’s account, I quickly noticed a problem. It’s sorta awkward managing multiple Instagram accounts on my iPhone. If I want to do something on the library’s Instagram account – post a photo or manage the account (i.e., follow people or respond to comments) – I have to log out of my own account and then log into the library’s account, and then back again.

Thankfully, there are some web and app-based tools to help manage multiple Instagram accounts:

  1. Fotogramme: Fotogramme is an Instagram management iPhone app with multiple account support. It allows me to view photos, post Likes and comments, manage followers, and Favorite users and hashtags for easier recall. It also sends alerts to my iPhone, so I know when there’s activity on the library’s Instagram account.
  2. iconosquare: Iconosquare is a web-based tool that lets you manage an Instagram account. It allows you to browse and comment or like photos, and manage your Instagram accounts comments. But the best part of Iconosquare are the statistics. It provides a variety of statistics and trends on your photos, followers, likes, and follower interaction.
  3. unfollowers: This is a handy tool to quickly manage followers. For both Twitter and Instagram, it shows you who’s following you, who unfollowed you, etc. It can help you figure out who to follow. I’m playing with the free version, which limits the activity you can do on a given day. But still – it’s easy to use, and cheap ($6.90 per month for one account) if we wanted to actually pay for it.

face2faceWhat’s missing from each of these tools? Actually taking photos. So yeah – I still have to take a photo, log out of my Instagram account, then log into the library’s account. And then back out again so I don’t post to the wrong account. But the management and statistics help is appreciated.

Here are a couple of articles that mention these and similar Instagram tools:

Have anything else that helps you manage your organization’s Instagram accounts? Please share!

Comments

  3. I’m having the same pain points for @shermanlibrary. I use IFTTT to repost instagram photos to the library’s facebook, but I mostly wish it would work the other way around. This seems like the most logical thing, too, because FB owns Instagram O_o.

  4. I need to play with IFTTT at some point. Lots of people use it – I just haven’t fooled with it yet. But yeah, I hear ya! That IG to FB thing works ok for personal accounts, but not for FB Pages. You’d think FB would make that work!

  6. I have my library’s Instagram account linked to my library’s Twitter account, and ditto for my personal accounts. But the Instagram app routinely posts to the wrong Twitter account!! IFTTT might be a good solution to a potentially embarrassing problem.

  9. I use my personal iPhone to stay logged into and post to my personal Instagram account, and my work-issued iPad Mini to stay logged into and post to my library’s Instagram account. It’s so frustrating that after years of asking, Instagram still has not come up with the functionality to support multiple accounts.

  10. I run an instagram account for a small non-profit group. We’re primary concerned with uploading photos of recent donations, so I use an old smartphone that doesn’t have a sim card. I take photos, then wait until I have wifi access to upload them. Carrying two phones is annoying, but I don’t like logging in and out of my personal instagram on my personal phone.

  11. IFTTT is an awesome tool. Favorite “recipe” so far: when I post a pic to Instagram, it posts it to Twitter as a Twitter pic, rather than as an Instagram link! Also, I have no trouble (so far) having Instagram post to my FB page. But like everyone else here, would love the ability to fully handle two Instagram accounts. 🙁

  13. For uploading to multiple accounts as well as batch uploading, I’ve been using Instapload. It works well for the most part and supports up to 8 accounts. The UI can be confusing, and some field titles like “Add Multi-Hashtag” are misleading because you can add free text too. I’m on iOS. So Instwogram is not an option. http://instapload.com/

  15. I manage Hennepin County Library’s social media (@hclib). We started with a soft launch in Dec. 2013, with just our social media team of 11 contributing. We quickly opened it up to interested and experienced staff. In the spring, we got to the point of having too many posts per day so we started crafting guidelines and scope. Now we have a max of 4 posts.

    Thanks for these resources, as an Android user hopefully Fotogramme will be available someday but I will try it on my work iPad. Iconosquare has been a great resource for us to keep an eye on our monthly progress using the rolling monthly stats.

    Or big goal is to get our teen employees sharing this year. We’ve created a framework that hopefully makes it easy and fun for them to contribute – private Instagram accounts for each library with a teen tech squad that will be followed by the main public @hclib Instagram and gems will be shared on a regular basis.

  16. IFTTT has a recipe that posts your Instagram photo as native Twitter content (great for your followers because they don’t have to leave Twitter to see the photo). The only catch is that IG doesn’t have a character count, so if you go over 140 characters sometimes a hashtag or @username gets cutoff (e.g. #librarybooks could be chopped to #libraryboo). Also, keep in mind that IFTTT adds a shortened URL that leads back to the original Instagram post, which takes up a few of those precious 140 characters.
    Nonetheless, I highly recommend it! Plus, it would definitely help to avoid posting the wrong content to the wrong account 😉
    Here’s the link to the recipe: https://ifttt.com/recipes/103249-post-your-instagram-photos-as-native-twitter-photos

  19. One of my biggest beefs with IG, especially as someone who manages multiple social accounts, is not being able to flip back and forth between accounts. You’d think it would be an easy fix! Fine if you want to keep it mobile only, but at least let me switch accounts easily!!

  20. Be careful when using any sort of apps that it isn’t limiting your search. A lot of platforms that claim to let you use IG through them do NOT allow your hashtags to show up in search results!

  21. Nice article – but the big issue is posting to numerous accounts from within one app!

  22. If the subject of multi-account management bothers you, then you must be in need of some tools able to facilitate your work. First of all, I advice you to try scheduling apps as they can help you keep posting consistently, i use latergram.me and i’m happy about it, but there are many others with pretty much the same functions, so you can choose. Then you might like a service allowing to unfollow up to 5000 users not following you back in one day – fast-unfollow.com. It’s useful when you’re building up your community. And about the multi-account management itself my favorite is onlypult.com, it’s not free but it has many useful functions. Hope it’s useful and i didn’t write this all in vain 😉

  24. I manage my community theatre’s social media. I’d like tips on setting up guidelines for multi-user contributions (we only have 2 users so far, primarily because I want to maintain uniformity but I’d like to start allowing more people to contribute). Who decides which 4 posts are made each day?

  25. Hi, we just ask staff to look at the quantity of posts already posted that day. If there are 4, we ask them to wait until the next day. We also have a shared Outlook calendar for the staff members that like to plan ahead and schedule when they expect to post.

  26. It is too bad IG hasn’t allowed multi users or other apps ability to upload. My current work around is creating multiple user accounts on my Samsung Tab 3. Each account is connected to Dropbox, where a main folder acts as the image clearing house. Somewhat clunky, as the Tab isn’t happy operating multiple users, slows it down.

  27. Exactly to both of you Cinder and Ally. Maybe Facebook will do something about it now that they are going to let us advertise on instagram for our clients. (Grrrr) 😉 Now that they can make more $$ they will surely help us do it. Nothing beats twitter for this functionality though.

  28. Yes, but unfortunately you can’t POST on gramfeed, just like the other IG management tools out there. So since you’re gramfeed’s developer….. anything you can do about that? 😉

  29. Instagram does not allow 3rd party apps to post, it may be a good thing to control the quality of posts, so people cannot just start uploading content from web. I’m sure Instagram will support it soon.

  30. Instagram actually does support 3rd party apps – at least, I’ve successfully used one iOS app to do this. Instapload will upload to multiple accounts! It’s a bear to use though, which is why I haven’t written about it yet. but oddly enough, it does seem to work.

  32. I’m both new to Instagram and to mobil devices ( I was recently given an iPhone 5s, my first, non-dumb phone.). Yet, already I need to create a second account for a friend who has plans down the line. I’m tasked to squat on his business name.

    So, anyway, I’ve yet to figure out how to log out of my Instagram account, so that I can create and log in to another one. As I understand it, one can only create an Instagram account using a mobil device. So, how do I go about logging out of my personal Instagram account so I can then create an account for my friend?

    I’m sorry to be such a lame person, but then I’m pretty much old and used up; also, I spend my days with a 3.3-year old.

Trackbacks