Insta changes: Recent updates you need to know

It’s no secret Facebook has been making some huge changes to its platform and privacy settings in recent weeks. Since Facebook owns Instagram, its sweeping changes affect both platforms.

This comes after a flood of headlines broke out in March when it was publicly disclosed that the social media giant allowed the data of 10s of millions of users to be accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm. We’ll table that discussion for another post, but in the meantime there are a couple of changes you need to be aware of.

In this post we’ll focus on Instagram, which recently changed its API (application program interface).

What is an API for? In simpler terms, APIs are what application (app) developers use so their apps can talk to a particular social media platform. Third party scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or Later, all need to interact with a social media platform’s API in order to work properly.

3 main things to note for Instagram:

1. You can no longer like or comment on other Instagram posts from your third party posting tool (such as Hootsuite). If you have an Instagram Business account, then you’ll still be allowed to comment on your own posts.

2. You can no longer use a third party ‘bot’ to like, follow, or unfollow Instagram accounts for you. (We’ve always discouraged people and businesses from doing this anyways… friends don’t let friends use bots!)

Note: Because of this, you may see a decrease in engagement as fewer bots like your posts, but that’s not a bad thing if they weren’t genuine interactions anyways!

3. You can no longer mention users in posts from a third party scheduling tool.

All of these changes are rolling out over the next few weeks and months.

It’s now more important than ever to either take ample time to manage your social media organically and directly in each channel (without third party apps) or rely on a team of experts who can do all of this for you.

Changes to social media platforms are constantly occurring, so it’s important to stay on top of them to ensure you’re optimizing your posts. Or, if you don’t have time for this and the thought of it exhausts you, you can rely on our LivelyCo team to stay ahead of these changes and manage your social media for you.