If you manage social media for a business or organisation being able to switch between the “official” account you’re working on and your own, private account is a key feature. Twitter’s native iOS app has supported multiple accounts for some time and Facebook’s allows page managers to switch around quite easily in both their desktop and mobile versions.
Instagram, however, didn’t really embrace any of the functions that brand managers were looking for. You either used their official app or you simply couldn’t do anything with it. Sure, a few months ago they finally opened up very limited API access, but all that allowed you to do was to schedule uploads / posts – it didn’t actually allow you to use a 3rd party app like Hootsuite to handle the entire thing for you.
For personal users this kind of functionality might not be that important, but while personal users drive part of the numbers on social networks, they provide zero revenue. That is, unless the social networks are able to successfully monetise their platforms. At the simplest level that means that businesses, brands and other organisations need to be able to manage their profiles on those networks and advertise there as well.
Instagram has finally unveiled the functionality to switch between multiple accounts using their apps. Whether they’ll also expand functionality via their API or not remains to be seen, but this is definitely a welcome move.
Personally I manage multiple social media accounts for various things and one of the reasons I wasn’t using Instagram for anything other than my personal stuff was the lack of this functionality. Having to log out of Instagram completely, log back in, reconnect the various social profiles, check that the settings are correct and then post content was a chore. I did it, but only when I had ample time.
The new functionality means that I should be able to post more content quickly and easily on various non-personal Instagram accounts moving forward – and I’m delighted!
Setting up the extra accounts is pretty easy as long as you’re running version 7.15 (or later) of the app.
Simply follow their instructions and off you go!
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