Scheduling posts and posting from a desktop computer has been possible for a little while using one of the Instagram partner third-party tools, such as Planoly or Later.

But the exciting news is you can now publish and schedule posts to your Instagram feed and IGTV from Facebook Creator Studio. You also get access to Insights and for anyone that struggles to keep up with Instagram direct messages you can see and respond to these too.

We explain how it’s done and what we think of the new features.

To gain access to Facebook Creator Studio head to www.facebook.com/creatorstudio and log in to your Facebook account.

To access the new Instagram features, tap the Instagram icon in the top menu bar and you can then connect your account. You must have either a Business Profile or a Creator account on Instagram to be able to do this, plus you also need to connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page. You can find out how to do this here.

Just be aware that if you’ve added any other admins or moderators to your Facebook page, they will also get access to your Instagram account through Creator Studio.

Once you’ve done that you’re good to go and you can create your first post via Creator Studio, see Insights on all previously published feed posts, Stories and IGTV videos as well as access data on your Instagram audience.

To schedule a post, simply click the blue Create Post button. Select Instagram Feed and your account. Then add your content, write your caption and even add a location if you wish.

It’s possible to crop your image within Creator Studio but you can’t add any of the Instagram filters or tag people in the post.

Then select Schedule from the blue drop down menu next to the Publish button and select the day and time you’d like your post to go out. It’s as east as that!

So, what do we think? Will we be using Creator Studio for Instagram in the future?

In all honesty I don’t think we’re going to be using the Creator Studio instead of our preferred third partner tool – Planoly. Why? well one of our favourite parts of scheduling posts to our Instagram feed is seeing how the posts will look before they are published and this isn’t something you can currently do in Creator Studio.

We do like the fact that Creator Studio is free to use and there isn’t a limit on the number of posts you can schedule. Also it’s great to see all the Insights on a desktop, but all the data available is also available in the Instagram app Insights, so there is nothing new there.

However, there is one feature we are really excited about and do plan to use, the ability to read and respond to Instagram Direct Messages on a desktop. Keeping up with communications to our page via the app was proving tricky, so this is a welcome update. However, at the time of writing this blog we had trouble logging in and accessing this feature, so we’ll have to let you know how it works at a later date.

We’d love to know if you plan to use Facebook Creator Studio to manage your Instagram account and what you think of the new features?