Working with multiple Instagram accounts
Instagram works a bit differently than other social networks, and not all posts can be published automatically. Posts containing multiple images, or posts containing an image or video that falls outside of Instagram's accepted aspect ratio range, will be scheduled as a notification. Learn more about publishing your Instagram posts when the notification comes to your phone here.
If you’re managing multiple Instagram accounts, it’s important to make sure you’re posting to the correct account. When the notification comes through to your phone, the message will state which Instagram account the post is intended for.
Tapping the alert will bring you to a preview of your Instagram post within the Buffer mobile app. From there, tap Open in Instagram. You'll then be prompted to check if you’re posting to the correct account. If you’re unsure, tap See who is logged on. This will take you to the Instagram app where you can check which account you’re currently using.
Instagram allows you to connect five accounts per device, meaning you can easily switch between them without logging in and out each time. Once in Instagram, head to your profile and if you’re logged into multiple accounts you’ll be able to switch between them by tapping the account name at the top of the screen.
Once you have the right account selected, head back to the Buffer app and share your post as normal (you can do this by clicking < Buffer at the top left of the screen).
Instagram has a limit of five active accounts per device, which means if you’re managing more than that, you will need to fully log out of each account and log back into the correct one that the post is intended for. One thing to note is that you would need to make sure Instagram is not "remembering" the login details for each account, otherwise it wouldn't let you login to a sixth account.
It's worth noting that frequently logging in and out of accounts, especially if it's from different IP addresses, can lead to Instagram raising security flags on these accounts, since this can be interpreted as suspicious activity. This can then result in frequently needing to reconnect your Instagram accounts to Buffer. We appreciate that this is time consuming and frustrating, and for this reason, we do not recommend managing more than five Instagram accounts if you’re likely to use notification publishing on a regular basis, as it’s very likely to lead to these types of issues.