Schedule feed posts, Reels, Stories and carousels that publish themselves at the time you set. This guide covers what Instagram accepts, when to post, and how to run it from your agent.
Free plan, no card: 2 accounts, 30 posts a month, your agent included. X needs a paid plan.
What planpo.st publishes to Instagram: Feed posts with one image or several, Reels and Stories.
Instagram is four formats pretending to be one app. Feed, Reels, Stories and carousels each want their own shape, their own rhythm, and ideally their own time of day, and doing that by hand every day is how social becomes a job you never applied for.
This page is the complete picture of running Instagram through planpo.st: what you can publish, what Instagram requires from your account, when to post, what to post when you are out of ideas, how to hand it to an agent, and how to find out whether any of it makes money. It is written from what the product actually does, including the parts where Instagram itself sets limits no tool can remove.
Instagram is where visual proof lives. A product photographed well, a before-and-after, a founder showing the thing being made: this is the network where that content is native rather than tolerated. For ecommerce, food, fitness, beauty, travel and most local businesses, it is still the first place a potential customer looks to check you are real. The profile grid works as a second website, and people treat it exactly that way.
The honest counterweight: organic reach on Instagram has been declining for years, and a feed post reaches a fraction of your own followers. That is not a reason to leave. It is a reason to stop treating Instagram as a daily performance and start treating it as a scheduled, deliberate channel: fewer, better posts, published consistently, with Reels doing the discovery work that feed posts no longer do.
Who this channel is for
planpo.st publishes all four as their native type through Instagram's official API. Same composer, different jobs.
Single image or video with a caption up to 2,200 characters. Feed posts age well on your grid, so they suit the things you want a new visitor to see: products, results, announcements. Reach is modest; permanence is the point.
Vertical short video, published as a proper Reel rather than a cropped feed post. Reels are Instagram's discovery surface: they are shown to people who do not follow you, which makes them the format that grows an account. One decent Reel a week beats daily feed posts for reach.
Image or video that lives for 24 hours. Stories reach your existing audience, not new people, which makes them the right place for the daily texture: behind the scenes and quick updates. Instagram's API publishes the image or video itself; stickers such as polls and links can only be added in the Instagram app.
Two to ten images or videos people swipe through, in the order you upload them. The strongest format for teaching and storytelling: step-by-step processes, before-and-after sequences, listicles. Carousels also get a quiet second life, because Instagram often reshows the next slide to people who scrolled past the first.
A working weekly mix for most businesses: two or three Reels for reach, two feed posts or one carousel for the grid, Stories whenever something real happens. planpo.st schedules all of it from one calendar, so the mix is a plan you set rather than a mood you have to summon daily.
Two extras the publisher supports: a first comment, posted right after the post goes out (where the hashtags can live if you prefer a clean caption), and up to three collaborators on an image or carousel post, so the post appears on their profiles too.
Five minutes if your account type is right, and the account type is the only part that trips people up.
Switch to a Business or Creator account
In the Instagram app: Settings, Account type and tools, Switch to professional account. Free, reversible, and required: Instagram's API only allows scheduled publishing for professional accounts. Personal accounts cannot auto-publish from any tool.
Pick a route: Facebook Page or direct login
Two routes work. If the account is already linked to a Facebook Page, use the Instagram row. If it is not, use Instagram (direct login) and skip the Page entirely. Both publish the same posts and pull the same insights.
Connect in planpo.st
Connections, then the Instagram row you picked, and approve Meta's consent screen. planpo.st asks for publishing and insights permissions and stores tokens encrypted. Several Instagram accounts can sit side by side.
Send a test post
Schedule one feed post two minutes out and watch it land. If anything is wrong with permissions, you find out now instead of the night of a launch.
Two connection facts worth knowing upfront
The compose flow is built around writing once. Draft the post, attach media, and select Instagram alongside any other networks; each platform gets its own version with its own caption and its own preview, so the Instagram caption can carry hashtags the LinkedIn version drops. When you schedule, planpo.st checks the post against what Instagram needs (at least one image or video, a caption inside the limit, a working connection), so a post that cannot go out tells you then, not at 9am when it was due.
Scheduling itself is a calendar. Month, week or day view, and a queue that shows what is coming. If an AI agent drafts for you, turn on approval when you connect it and nothing it writes goes live until you approve it, so you can hand the drafting to an agent without surprise posts going out under your name.
Batching is the whole trick
Every year the same recycled studies announce universal best times, and every audience quietly disagrees with them. A B2C audience scrolls at lunch and late evening; a fitness audience is up at 6am; a B2B audience barely opens Instagram on weekends. Generic advice averages all of them into numbers that fit nobody.
planpo.st's best-times suggestion reads your own account's engagement history and proposes slots from that. Early on, before your data says anything, a sane default is to test three windows for two weeks each: morning (7 to 9am), lunch (11am to 1pm) and evening (7 to 9pm) in your audience's timezone, then let the numbers pick. The scheduler makes the test cheap: set the slots once and the calendar runs it.
Filtered for ideas you can batch in advance, because ideas that require posting live defeat the point of a scheduler.
Before-and-after carousel of a real customer result
Proof beats claims, and the swipe is the reveal.
A 20-second Reel showing the product being made or packed
Process video is endlessly watchable and needs zero acting.
One tip per slide: a 6-slide carousel from your best blog post
The writing is done already; design the slides once and upload them as a carousel.
The founder answering one real customer question to camera
Faces stop thumbs, and questions are scripts you did not have to write.
A weekly numbers post: what you shipped, sold or learned
Build-in-public earns trust and compounds week over week.
Screenshot of a customer review with a one-line story
Social proof, thirty seconds of effort, batchable by the dozen.
Staff pick of the week with the person who picked it
Local buyers follow people, not inventory.
The 'what we fixed this week' before-and-after
Trades and services win Instagram with evidence, not aesthetics.
A myth-vs-reality carousel in your niche
Gentle controversy earns saves and shares, the metrics that matter.
Monthly Reels compilation of your best micro-moments
Recycles footage you already shot into a new post.
A Story poll asking your audience to choose the next product or topic
Engagement plus free product research in one tap.
The unpolished 'day in the life' Story sequence, scheduled morning-of
Stories forgive roughness; that is their charm.
The same piece of content rarely dies after one network. A Reel is a TikTok and a YouTube Short with zero extra work, since all three take vertical video. A carousel's images work as a LinkedIn multi-image post. A caption that worked is a Threads post with the hashtags removed. planpo.st is built around this: write once, select networks, and each gets its native version to edit before it goes out.
The practical rule is to lead with the network where the content is native and let the others receive it. Product photography leads on Instagram and echoes to Facebook. A vertical video can lead anywhere, so schedule it to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in one pass and let the platforms compete. The cross-posting playbook on the blog walks the full matrix.
planpo.st ships an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other agents can work your Instagram calendar with the same actions the dashboard uses.
You say
Here are 6 product photos. Write captions in my voice, schedule 3 feed posts and one carousel this week at the best times, and put Stories teasers on the same mornings. Drafts only.
What happens
The agent uploads the media, writes captions inside the character limit, asks the best-times data for slots, and fills the week. With approval on, each post waits for you before it can go out. Total human time: the review.
You say
Which Instagram posts drove the most bio-link clicks and revenue last month?
What happens
On Pro, the agent reads the tracked-link clicks and the revenue next to each post, then answers with specific posts and amounts, which quietly becomes next month's content strategy.
Approval when you want it
To set this up, connect your agent once: one command for Claude Code, a link for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, and no key to paste. Then posting to Instagram from Claude Code lists the settings the publisher reads and the limits that stop a post.
Instagram does not make caption links clickable, and no scheduler can change that. What is clickable: the link in your bio, and link stickers on Stories you post from the Instagram app. Put a planpo.st tracked link there (tracked links are on Pro), so a tap, the visit, and a later Stripe, Shopify or RevenueCat payment all connect back to Instagram as a source.
Read Instagram's revenue number as a floor
In practice this means Instagram gets judged on two numbers together: the attributed revenue from the links you can track, and the reach trend that feeds the untrackable path. planpo.st shows analytics for published posts on Creator and Pro, and revenue next to the post on Pro.
Auto-publish needs a Business or Creator account. Every failed connection story starts here; the switch takes two minutes and fixes it.
A Reel published as a feed video loses the discovery surface Reels exist for. Publish Reels as Reels; planpo.st does this natively.
Instagram rejects images outside its size and ratio bounds. Crop feed images to between 4:5 and 1.91:1 before you upload, and use 9:16 for Reels and Stories.
It declined for everyone. The answer is Reels for reach and consistency over volume, not posting more feed content into the wind.
The accounts that survive are calendars, not moods. One batching hour beats seven daily scrambles.
If the bio link is untracked, Instagram's business case is a guess. A tracked link costs nothing and settles the argument.
Any agent that speaks MCP can, through the planpo.st server. These 8 have a page each for Instagram, with the connect step, the settings the publisher reads and the limits that stop a post.
Free plan, no card: 2 accounts, 30 posts a month, your agent included. X needs a paid plan.