What is Lately Social?
Lately Social is a third party website that allows you to post to your social media platforms from one dashboard. Supported social media platfroms are Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. This review focuses exclusively on using Lately Social to schedule Instagram posts.
This review is not sponsored.
Why Use Lately Social?
As mentioned above, Lately Social lets you schedule Instagram posts in advance. Therefore, you can pick a day to prepare your Instagram content with captions and tags and your content will post throughout the week without you needing to log in every day. Especially if you have a busy schedule and aren’t able to access a computer on one of your regular posting days, you don’t need to worry because Lately Social will post it for you.
Now, if you use Instagram a lot, you know that it can be a pain to post from your computer. This is even more true if you prepare your content on your computer and have to move it over to your phone to post or find a workaround. Instagram makes it difficult to access their platform from your computer because they want to encourage phone usage.
In my case, I can post from my computer using a Firefox workaround. However, this doesn’t allow me to post carousels or videos, tag people, tag my location, add filters, or any of the other features that are available on the phone app. With Lately Social, I can do all these things except add filters. You also have the option to upload your content directly from your computer or import it from Dropbox or Google Drive.
Free or Paid?
I tested out the free version, but Lately Social also has several paid options. With the Free Plan, you can add up to six social media accounts (one per platform) and queue photo and video posts. However, you can only upload files that are a maximum of 2 MBs, and you only get 2MBs of storage. If you save your photos as .PNG files for higher quality, this eats up your storage space very quickly. I tested it out, and I could only upload around two .PNG images at a time. If you delete your images from Lately Social’s storage, it will affect your queued posts, so you have to wait until that image is posted before you can delete it. If you want to save as .PNG and use the free plan option, be aware that the storage limits will affect how many posts you can schedule. I recommend saving your photos as .JPG or .JPEG files if you use the Free Plan.
The cheapest paid option is the Personal Plan, which costs $9.00 per month. It limits you to the same number of accounts and has much of the same features, but your are upgraded to 1 GB of storage and a 200 MB file upload size limit. If you try out Lately Social and decide you like it, I would recommend choosing this option for the convenience of a higher storage limit.
There are four other paid plan options, but they are intended for people who have more than six social accounts or more than one social account per platform. If you run a business and a personal account, several businesses, or you post content for your clients’ social accounts, you may want to look into these options.
Analytics
Lately Social also allows you to track whether your scheduled posts were successfully posted or not through the dashboard. By going to the analytics page under the social media platform tab, you can also check your average engagement rate, such as the average number of likes and comments. You can also see how many followers you have, and how your following has grown over time.
Did it Work to Schedule Instagram Posts?
I tested Lately Social on my Instagram account for a two week period. During that time, I made 7 successful posts through their website. I attempted to schedule three Instagram posts. However, only one actually posted. Lately Social will show you on the dashboard page that your post failed, but you do not receive a notification that something went wrong. Lately Social also does not provide the reason it failed to post. The fact that the post failed is the only information you get. After the second post failed, I stopped trying to schedule Instagram posts altogether. Lately Social does not save a copy of the failed post. It simply disappears. After having to re-write two posts, I decided the risk was not worth the possible convenience.
My analytics page is also inaccurate. Yes, my account is small, but my analytics page says I only have 2 posts and 14 followers. As of the time of this article, I have made 8 posts and have 20 followers. I would rely on a different app if accurate analytics are important to you.
While scheduling Instagram posts was a disappointing flop for me, posting manually worked perfectly. Every post that I prepared through the website and posted immediately was successful and appeared on my Instagram page within seconds. This includes both photo posts and carousels, as I did not test videos.
Other Minor Complaint
Lately Social offers support, which is fine. The chat bubble that takes up a significant portion of the screen every time I log in, asking if I have questions, which I have to close each time I go to a new page at least three times before it disappears, is annoying.
Will I Continue to Use Lately Social?
For the time being. The only thing it gives me that my Firefox workaround does not is the ability to post carousels and an easier to use interface. Since one of the reasons I looked into it was to schedule posts and that did not work, I’m going to keep looking for something that does. Once I find something that works the way I want it to both for posting manually and post scheduling, I will most likely stop using Lately Social altogether.
If you enjoy my content, please follow me on Instagram! I’m also in the process of preparing a program to help fiction writers reach their writing goals and finish projects. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, this post has more information.
Edit: Since writing this review, I have had three more posts successfully publish, so your mileage may vary.
Edit 2: I’ve solved the posts failing issue. Please read my addendum.
If you want to try Lately Social for yourself, read my guide on how to schedule posts using Lately Social.
