You Can Now Schedule Chat Messages On Instagram

For social media managers and ad marketers, the ability to automate your social media workflow is nothing short of a lifeline. However, platforms, especially those like Facebook and Instagram, are not always functionally equipped for such activities due to their self-proclaimed focus on developing personal connections. As a result, users have to rely on third-party hacks and tools to get the job done, but this often comes at a price, both literally and figuratively. Instagram is finally making at least one such aspect of automation easier.

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Meta’s social media platform now allows anyone plan your messages in advance. This function will available to users worldwide on Android and iOS. For now, it appears that users can only schedule messages for up to 29 days. Instagram does not impose any restrictions on the operating system, which means that as long as you are using the latest version of the application, all the convenience will be at your disposal.

You can schedule the original message to be sent and select it to reply to. But before you start scheduling scheduled posts, you should keep in mind an important format limitation. The new messaging feature only supports text and does not allow you to schedule messages in other formats such as images, videos or stickers. Notably, the rollout of scheduled messages began in the third week of December, but they are yet to arrive on all platforms.

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In SlashGear’s tests, scheduling messages worked fine on the Instagram iPhone app, but the feature was not yet available on the Android app. If you want to schedule a message for your Instagram chats on iOS, follow these steps:

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1. Open Direct Messages/Chat in the Instagram mobile app and select a conversation. Then tap the Message field at the bottom of the screen and enter the message you want.

2. When you’ve finished composing your message, touch and hold the send arrow icon to open your scheduler.

3. In the scheduler window that appears in the bottom half of the screen, select a date and time from the vertically scrolling input columns.

4. The date and time you selected for your scheduled message will appear inside the blue button at the bottom. Click on it and the message will be scheduled.

5. Once you’ve scheduled a message, you’ll see a ticker above the compose message sign in the chat that says something like “1 scheduled message.” Clicking on it opens a list of scheduled messages in a small pop-up window. Long pressing on a message bubble will show you controls for instantly sending text, copying content, and deleting it.

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Instagram support page mentions similar message scheduling guidelines on both iOS and Android, so it looks like the feature has begun rolling out in stages starting with iOS and will eventually reach all Android users.