Do Post scheduling services like buffer, hootsuite, hubspot or later forward your IP to Instagram ?

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

Let me explain my scenario properly,
I am trying to schedule posts to about 10 odd instagram profiles via buffer from same IP.
All these 10 instagram pages are connected to same facebook profile(connecting is mandatory for scheduling).
Very often I see for about 50% of my instagram pages, buffer has failed to publish even after retrying, reconnecting also doesn't help.
The ususal error messages are "We're having a slight problem with posting pictures to your Facebook page. Please try again soon" or "Oh we faced some issue publishing your post. Please try again soon"

The possible reasons can be
1) Buffer is forwarding my IP to instagram/facebook.
2) You can not schedule for all instagram accounts if you connect all the instagram pages to same facebook profile.

SirLouen · Sep 18, 2019

You cannot post directly in Instagram with any software. Software like Buffer, Hootsuite, Content Studio or Promo Republic, just send the formated post to your device and you publish it as if you were posting any other post on your own.
And you cannot schedule either in Instagram. It "simulates" a scheduling system where it prompts a notification at the time you scheduled, but ultimately you will be publishing it in real time, as any other post.
You can share to instagram from your FB page, but you can't either schedule it.

Conclusion: your ip is not forwarded by buffer, you are plain publishing with the instagram app...

But be aware that publishing on Facebook works in a different way than Instagram.

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

SirLouen said:
You cannot post directly in Instagram with any software.

You may like to upgrade your knowledge on the subject, there are two group of apps ones who provide end to end scheduling to instagram and the ones which only sends notification to device. Buffer falls in the former group.

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

It's my humble request to the community that if you are not thorough with the subject please avoid replying.
We have been doing it for quite a while across lots and lots of accounts. We have end to end autonomously posted more than 15k images on instagram till date (obviously across multiple accounts). So what's possible or not is not even a question. The question posted is about root-causing an intermittent failure which happens occasionally and is hampering my teams productivity, so lets stick to that.

u2u2u2 · Sep 18, 2019

1. Buffer never forwards your ip.

2. The issue can be with buffer or Instagram or Facebook. you can know better if you talk to buffer support.

SirLouen · Sep 18, 2019

ISHAN DUTTA said:
if you are not thorough with the subject please avoid replying.

Interesting topic, I stopped using Buffer a while ago to go for cheaper solution, so I still supposed that worked like the others.
But as you mention I've tested it now and it seems to be using a new API which is impressive.

I find that it's currently in closed beta, which seems to be fairly new, and not many providers may have managed to get access:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/guides/content-publishing

It seems that it's done via API therefore they are not using your IP for sure.
But considering it's an open beta, it should be exposed to all kind of issues.

As suggested here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/guides/content-publishing#error-codes

Try again 1-2 times in the next 30 seconds to 2 minutes. If unsuccessful, generate a new container ID and use it to try again.

So the second possibility cannot be known for sure: There could be hidden limits, so if you are sending a lot of posts to different IG from the same Facebook page in a day, there might be some limitations.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview/rate-limiting/#instagram

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

u2u2u2 said:
2. The issue can be with buffer or Instagram or Facebook. you can know better if you talk to buffer support.

Well Buffer's support teams reply are as explanatory as the above error message. Whatever I have undderstood chatting with their support team is its a pure nontechnical support they neither understand errors nor do they bother to loop in tech personnels to give a proper reply.

@u2u2u2 Let's keep buffer support aside and think about the other possibility . My hunch is that as I mentioned even though facebook may allow lots of instagram profiles to connect to facebook pages(owned by same admin) but they might have a cap of 5 (like they have from one IP) for automating scheduling or might be any 3rd party app. Or else why would they make it mandatory to connect to facebook for end to end instagram scheduling?

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

SirLouen said:
Interesting topic, I stopped using Buffer a while ago to go for cheaper solution

Buffer is free (I mean has a generous free tier) What can be cheaper than free.

SirLouen · Sep 18, 2019

ISHAN DUTTA said:
Buffer is free (I mean has a generous free tier) What can be cheaper than free.

Yes, but I post dozens of posts for my clients, so after a while it started to become a hassle to keep switching Buffers accounts to stay on the free tier (similarly to Hootsuite). So I switched to an alternate software, which, at that moment had the same capabilities. But now with this Instagram API, I will rethink this because it's pretty comfortable to set and forget posts.

I've sent today some schedules to see how they are published. Maybe I will return to buffer, at least for IG management.

ISHAN DUTTA said:
Or else why would they make it mandatory to connect to facebook for end to end instagram scheduling?

If you read the API request docs, you need a Facebook token in order to publish on Instagram:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/reference/user/media_publish#creating

Therefore, the publishing is done via Facebook and this is why they need you to link your IG profiles to a page, which is the endpoint and this also is why they require for "manage_pages" permission.

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

SirLouen said:
So the second possibility cannot be known for sure: There could be hidden limits, so if you are sending a lot of posts to different IG from the same Facebook page in a day, there might be some limitations.

Focusing on the issue under discussion, it's not same facebook page, they are all different facebook page, 1 fb page mapped to 1 instagram account. However the point of limits can be at
1)These pages might have a common admin user suggesting they are of same user.
2)These pages were accessed/created from same IP address.

SirLouen said:
Therefore, the publishing is done via Facebook and this is why they need you to link your IG profiles to a page, which is the endpoint and this also is why they require for "manage_pages" permission.

This may be a trick to impose these hidden limits.

All these can be verified only with proper experimentations. Do update if you are find anything. Hopefully the fb admin you just connected has less than 5 fb pages and 5 insta account connected. If so do let us know what you find.

SirLouen · Sep 18, 2019

ISHAN DUTTA said:
This may be a trick to impose these hidden limits.

From what I've read in the API docs, the limits are imposed on overall events associated to an account.
So if you have a page or a Instagram account that has thousands of visits per day, it will have higher limits than a page that only is barely visited.

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

@

SirLouen said:
From what I've read in the API docs, the limits are imposed on overall events associated to an account.
So if you have a page or a Instagram account that has thousands of visits per day, it will have higher limits than a page that only is barely visited.

Lets translate visits into account size for simplicity. If I understand correctly what you are saying, small accounts (say <1k followers) can make only small amount(say 1-2) posts a day whereas large accounts (say >100k followers) can make 10s of posts a day via API but while using the instagram app there is no such limit, even a small accounts can post 10 times a day via instagram app ? Is this what you mean ?

SirLouen · Sep 18, 2019

ISHAN DUTTA said:
Lets translate visits into account size for simplicity. If I understand correctly what you are saying, small accounts (say <1k followers) can make only small amount(say 1-2) posts a day whereas large accounts (say >100k followers) can make 10s of posts a day via API but while using the instagram app there is no such limit, even a small accounts can post 10 times a day via instagram app ? Is this what you mean ?

I'm talking about API limits exclusively from what I've read in the API docs.

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 18, 2019

Yeah.. I said the same anyways.. going forward for new accounts I wont dare to post more than twice a day via API lets observe for a month of so if it improves.

@SirLouen Another thing that struck my mind, can buffer themselves have an IP restriction . Is it safe to connect to 100s of buffer accounts from same IP ?

Scorpion Ghost · Sep 18, 2019

u2u2u2 said:
1. Buffer never forwards your ip.

2. The issue can be with buffer or Instagram or Facebook. you can know better if you talk to buffer support.

This

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 20, 2019

SirLouen said:
Therefore, the publishing is done via Facebook and this is why they need you to link your IG profiles to a page, which is the endpoint and this also is why they require for "manage_pages" permission.

Well after 2 days of research my hypothesis remains same, ie you can not connect more than 5 facebook pages to buffer from same IP. (I think just for that instant when I setup connection with fb I need proxy or else they might be noting down that IP.) ie to schedule for N instagram accounts you need N/5 fb accounts(having 5 fb pages each) and N/5 proxies

SirLouen said:
I'm talking about API limits exclusively from what I've read in the API docs.

In failing list There are 20k+ follower accounts as well as new accounts.

ISHAN DUTTA · Sep 20, 2019

Scorpion Ghost said:
This

If buffer support could have answered my questions, obviously this thread wouldn't have been created.

Do Post scheduling services like buffer, hootsuite, hubspot or later forward your IP to Instagram ?

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