Hence, why having a content planner is a must.
You want to schedule and plan your posts at least a few days or even weeks in advance to avoid the mishap of posting simply for the sake of posting. Once you begin to run out of content and start to post whatever just to fill up your feed well guess what, your content will begin to suffer and your followers WILL see it.
Remember, you always want to impact and NOT impress your audience.
Luckily, certain companies have realized these pain points and have ingeniously curated solutions to cater to these problems!
I am here to tell you based on my experiences what the best social media planning tool is that has helped me significantly in planning my instagram content. Without further ado, here are some of the pros and cons I have found in testing both of these platforms.
- Tribes for Pinterest
- Chrome extension available to easily repost content you come across while surfing
- Schedule 400 posts / month
- Saved captions feature to save chosen hashtags
- Bulk photo upload
- Drag & drop upload
- Smart Post Scheduling – recommended & optimized posting times
- Reply to comments on your posted content
- Publish & repost old content
- Insights: View top followers, Hashtag monitoring, Trending posts & Peak days and times (upgrade only)
- Recommended hashtag and competitiveness indicators
- Add up to 2 Instagram or Pinterest accounts for free
- Visually appealing & very user-friendly
- App available only on the App Store and exclusive to only iOS users
- Unable to add emoticons within captions
- Photos need to be size specific to be able to upload
- Only free for up to 30 Instagram posts & 100 Pinterest repins
- Don’t get as many features for having the free version
Definitely the feature Tailwind is best known for would be their Pinterest Tribes.
Tailwind focuses more on optimizing and helping you to plan your social media content on mainly Instagram and Pinterest. They don’t allow you to do the same with Facebook, Twitter or any other platform whereas Later does.
Another thing I like about Tailwind compared to Later is the way the platform looks and feels. I personally think Tailwind made its Publisher Draft Scheduling area much more visually appealing and user-friendly compared to its counterpart. I really like that everything is laid out nicely in front of you with the photos and captions altogether. It makes it much easier to organize your drafts, fill in the missing captions and preview what to post next. Later is a little different because you don’t get to see the captions, merely the photos. It is only when you click on the photos themselves and then click on “Edit” that the captions appear. This makes it quite inconvenient, is time-consuming and doesn’t allow me to see an overview of which photos require captions or hashtags.
What I don’t like about Tailwind is that sometimes it doesn’t allow me to upload specific photos that are bigger than 8 mb in size and that exceeds the aspect ratio of 4:5 and 1.91:1. As a result, it doesn’t allow me to upload the photo whatsoever unless I upload within the required dimensions or size. Later on the other hand, still allows me to upload the photo regardless of size but warns me if the aspect ratios are off and in addition gives me the ability to crop or edit the photo directly within the platform itself.
The unique thing about using Tailwind is they have a chrome extension which makes it so much easier to find content to post for your social media. Once you have their extension installed on your browser, you can easily add photos that you find while surfing the net into your Tailwind media library and post it later at a time most convenient for you.
Tailwind also analyzes and recommends when is the best time to publish your posts is based on your post statistics. You get the option to choose either to post at the time you specify or at the suggested time that Tailwind recommends so that your post gets the most engagement. Later does not have this option.
Last but not least, another distinguishing feature of Tailwind compared to Later is the ability to reply to comments on your posted content directly on your desktop whereas Later you need to upgrade to their paid plan first in order to get access to their conversations feature which only then will allow you to reply to comments.
Plus: $15/month or $9.99/month billed yearly (get 4 months free + schedule unlimited posts)
Professional: $1,199/month
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
For more details on plans click here.
Later is another social media scheduler similar to Tailwind. It claims to be the #1 Marketing Platform for Instagram and is another Instagram Partner. It is a great social media scheduler tool if you are looking for a platform that you can use to visually plan & schedule your posts without spending a dime.
- Free 30 Instagram posts, 30 Facebook posts, 30 Pinterest posts & 50 Twitter posts per month (get an extra 10 posts here)
- Bulk photo upload
- Drag & drop upload
- Multi-profile schedule
- Savable hashtag lists
- Able to connect directly to Dropbox & Google Drive to upload photos
- Search & repost feature (searchable by hashtag only)
- Can connect to Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram (up to 4 social profiles)
- Great & responsive customer service
- Able to add emoticons directly into captions while planning my posts for the week
- Better hashtag finder & identifiers
- Analytics feature (upgrade only)
- Linkin.bio feature – landing page that resembles your Instagram feed & displays posts as clickable and shoppable links (upgrade only)
- Conversations feature – reply to comments directly on your desktop computer (upgrade only)
- Available for both Android & iOS users
The cons:
– Have to pay to use upgrades like the Linkin.bio & Conversations feature (to reply to comments directly)
– Photos have to be right format to be able to upload
– Not as user-friendly as Tailwind but still very easy to use
– No recommended & optimized posting times
The most unique feature about Later is probably its Linkin.bio feature where you are able to create a landing page that resembles your Instagram feed & display posts as clickable and shoppable links.
The one thing I love most about Later is the fact that you can connect your Dropbox or Google Drive directly to the platform to easily access your photos to upload to your feed. I am a religious user of Dropbox so having the ability to connect it to my Later account has allowed me to easily and remotely access my photos whenever I want them.
The Search & Repost feature is also a very useful tool even though their latest upgrade discontinued the ability to search by username, I still find that simply having this repost feature within the platform itself is a very useful tool. It will help you to consistently find content to post to your feed so you don’t ever have to worry about always curating content or ever running out of it. Before discovering Later, I always had to use an external phone application called Regrann to be able to repost content manually. Now with Later, I no longer have to do this! It saves time and makes it so much easier to repost other people’s content (Later doesn’t allow you repost unless you mention the photo credits in the caption!)
I also find it a major plus that you can add emoticons into your captions directly from your desktop instead of manually adding them later once it’s posted. Tailwind doesn’t allow you to do this which makes it fairly inconvenient.
In terms of finding and choosing the right hashtags to use for your posts, Later wins yet again. Those of you who are new to the Instagram hashtag game must know that in order to grow your account following and be able to get your posts in front of the right people, you need to know which hashtags to use. The best way of knowing this is to figure out which hashtags your target audience hang out on. There are many ways to figure this out but the key indicator here is to observe which hashtags your competitors are using. Next, you want to choose the hashtags with under 300k posts per hashtag. Later indicates how many posts there are per hashtag and in my opinion has better suggested hashtags than Tailwind. Sometimes the hashtags Tailwind suggests are less niche specific and I feel with Later I have more control over which hashtags appear as a suggestion.
The most unique feature about Later is probably its Linkin.bio feature where you are able to create a landing page that resembles your Instagram feed & display posts as clickable and shoppable links. This is a paid upgrade I have not yet had the chance to test out but I definitely like the idea of it and can really see this as a great strategic tool to use in combination with my affiliate programs.
Plus: $9/month or $7.50/month billed yearly
Premium: $19/month or $16/month billed yearly
Starter: $29/month or $24/month billed yearly
Brand: $49/month or $41/month billed yearly
For more details on plans click here.
The Verdict
I’ve been using both platforms for some time now and have been testing between the two to see which social media scheduler I prefer over the other. So far, I’ve found Later to be more advantageous for growing my Instagram simply because the features I am getting from not paying a single dime has helped me greatly in growing my account.
Keep in mind that you are not limited to merely one platform for your social media posts! Why choose one over the other when you can use both — for free! You can do what I do and use both Tailwind & Later in conjunction with one another to strategically plan your posts and optimize your content. You may go ahead and take advantage of the features on both platforms to grow your Instagram however if you feel that it’s too much hassle having to switch back and forth between the two then hopefully this blog post will help you to decide which is the best platform for you based on the pros and cons described.
X.O.X.O.
– Fifster
