Grum, by AppSumo, is probably one of the best social media tool purchases I’ve ever made. I jumped on an amazing lifetime pricing deal that AppSumo was offering in late 2016, and purchased it, Stencil, and Beacon. Grum is a handy and helpful Instagram scheduling tool that also publishes your Instagram images to your Instagram feed without any extra work on your part.

If you’ve used most other Instagram posting tools, you’ve probably encountered the need to be alerted via push notification when it was time to post your Instagram image, and then you’d have to click to manually post that image yourself.

Because I am a stickler for the rules, I do need to address what’s probably on many of your minds: How does this avoid violating Instagram’s Terms of Service? I am using this tool for my own business and not for clients, and I was eager to test it out to see what it’s like. I am OK with taking the risk for myself. Grum does not require you to take that final step to publish your scheduled photo. I can’t honestly tell you that it’s 100% kosher, so if you’ve avoided the other tools that will also publish your scheduled images on your behalf due to concern about Instagram’s TOS, Grum may not be for you. 

But for those of you who are ready to jump in…

Grum: The Awesome Instagram Scheduling & Posting Tool

Start by adding your Instagram username and password in order to connect it to your Grum account.

From your Grum dashboard, you can view your Instagram timeline including your already-published images, and their Likes and Comments, view your upcoming scheduled posts, and add more images to be published in the future by clicking on the large plus sign.

You can edit the crop of the image you are preparing to publish through Grum. If you are like me and also use Stencil with Grum, you can make sure you are working with the correctly-sized image before scheduling.

One of my most favorite parts of using Grum is that you can write your photo caption and also prepare your first comment (for all your hashtags), too, before scheduling your next Instagram post. Your first comment will publish at the same time as your image publishes. 

You are allowed a total of 30 hashtags in your photo caption and first comment. As you add them, Grum will countdown how many hashtags are left to use.

Even cooler, you have access to emojis to include them in your Instagram captions or comments, too.

To schedule your Grum post to publish at a later day and time, use its calendar-style scheduling to select your day and time for publishing. To edit an already-scheduled image, visit the “Scheduled” tab in your dashboard and click on the unpublished image you need to edit.

Bonus: You can connect more than 1 Instagram account to your Grum account and toggle between them.

Grum has been a huge time saver for me so far. It provides the convenience and planning options I need. 

Tip: Once you’ve researched your most commonly used hashtags, you can keep a list somewhere on your laptop to quickly copy and paste into the first comment field each time. That way you don’t have to retype your entire hashtag list for every post.