Hey Product Hunters!
I'm one of the co-founders of Prime, a small startup platform based in Australia.
We're on a mission to make content marketing easier!
So, what's your Instagram Prime time? 6pm Sunday night? Tuesday morning?
Now you can actually *know* what time you should post that ripper pic to Instagram! Prime has a powerful new algorithm which analyzes all of your Instagram followers' interactions to calculate your Prime times. You can also schedule posts for later and see how well your past posts did. We've been hard at work on it for 8 months, and testing for the past 2.
We're really excited about this launch, and would love your feedback 😊
@byjacksolomon My understanding is that any of the methods currently used to schedule posts for later are against the instagram API terms and conditions... how have you overcome that?
@rossdcurrie We send you a notification at the time for which you scheduled a post, and that opens Instagram with your photo. All you have to do is paste in the caption and press "Post"!
We have gone through all of Instagram's new review processes, and been 100% approved. Scheduling is impossible to automate with Instagram at the moment - so this is the closest we could get.
Would love to hear your thoughts on the app if you get a chance to download it (it's free at the moment).
@raudaschl see my full response below (to @rossdcurrie). Pretty much, it's not entirely automated, it has to send you a notification which you have to manually open in order to post to Instagram. Otherwise, though, Prime has been (after a lot of effort) fully approved by Insta!
@byjacksolomon@raudaschl Oh, that's really not post scheduling then. That's post reminding. Being a fellow Aussie, I'm sure you can appreciate that the #1 reason I need post scheduling is because my biggest audience is awake while I'm asleep. The last thing I want is a notification popping up at 4am telling me I need to post on instagram.
This is a feature that most of the scheduling companies are using in lieu of actual scheduling capability within Instagram and honestly, it ticks a box but it doesn't offer me any value.. Personally I'd be more interested in using your app long-term if it had more analytical data for me to consume.
I quite like the idea, and the organic interface.
You guys should probably put a lot of effort into marketing this for top-Instagramers, since they'd be most interested in the product. Would love to see this being used more – Growth Hacking for Instagram.
@oskar Yep - exactly! We're in contact with a lot of big Instagrammers (including a number of celebrities with verified Insta accounts), and are growing pretty quickly at the moment.
By the way, if you have any feedback on the app itself, I'd love to hear it.
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Hello.
Great product!
This will be great for anyone who has a business or is a business (celebrities) because they can keep up with Instagram based on their own scheduling needs and get optimal impact whilst doing so!
Thanks,
Jaswinder Brar
@jay_bee12345 Thanks very much! Great to get your encouraging feedback :) Brands make up a huge percentage of our user base, because Prime allows them to connect with more of their followers (before having to worry about actually getting more followers, brands may as well first engage with all of their current ones!)
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@byjacksolomon No problem. I would also like to add this is really a "must have" for any Instagram user as it optimizes response for their postings! Cheers!
The onboarding experience is a bit frustrating.. the app got stuck on Step 2 for a lot more than 30 minutes, and in the meantime if I closed and re-opened the app it wouldn't go past the splash screen. Would be nice if it brought me into the app and gave me some sort of preview of features, or a status bar indicator at the top to let me know something is happening. Perhaps an explanation of what it's doing at each stage, or a series of tasks it can check off.
The calculation of the optimal posting time seems to be based solely on engagement - I get the most likes/comments at a certain time, so the app assumes that's the best time for me to post. Is that really the best time for me to post? For example, I tend to post photos late at night (Australia time), which means they hit US early morning commuters, and slowly get likes/comments over the day so that by the US afternoon, my photos are now in the "top posts" for the hashtags I use. Meanwhile, if I were to post my photos at the time they were getting the most engagement, I feel like the "top posts" event would occur while the US audience is asleep.
I'd feel a bit better if it showed me that it was somehow taking historical post data into account as well.
@rossdcurrie Thanks for the feedback - as the screen says, step 2 can take longer. I had a look at our backend's usage; are you sure loading took more than 30 minutes? Because of the app's high traffic right now, the notification telling you your time was ready might have been delayed a bit (+ 15 minutes or so), but it shouldn't have taken more than 30 to actually calculate.
The calculation is definitely not just based on engagement. There's a huge amount of processing going on on our backend. If you look at your graphs of likes and comments, their peaks might be, at, say, 7:30, but your Prime time might be 7:07 (so that should make it clear that we're looking at more than just the data you can see). Prime takes into account the importance of each follower by their relationship with you and the size of their accounts, and takes into account when people are posting the most (so your post doesn't get lost), when people are engaging with posts the most vs. just browsing, and so on.
The best way to test its effectiveness would be to, if you get a chance, simply post to Instagram at the recommended Prime time and see whether you get a better engagement rate (Prime can even tell you that, scroll to the top screen!).
Happy Priming! ☺️
@byjacksolomon Thank you. I've been looking for something like this. I will def give it a try and will be happy provide some feedback. Instagram is the "Prime" resource for getting new users on my website, so Im curious to see how this compares to my own "prime times". Best Nik
@nemtrd Thanks Nik! We've been working on optimising the algorithm for months now, and we're seeing increases in audience engagement by huge amounts - good luck with your website and Insta 👌!
Cool idea 👍 I look forward to testing it out. Always good to be able to optimize your social media marketing :)
Friendly feedback: I felt like the onboarding messages disappeared rather quickly - I wasn't able to read some of the messages. Maybe you could increase the on-screen time or have a "click to dismiss" feature?
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