Why aren't my Instagram posts sending automatically?
Instagram works differently than other social networks, and not all posts can be published automatically. Learn more about this here. If your Instagram posts are not sending automatically, it could be because you have notifications enabled by default or because your posts don't meet the criteria to publish automatically.
In this article:
Your automatic publishing checklist
There are a few factors that affect whether or not your post is sent out automatically, so we've created this checklist to help you identify any missing pieces and make sure you've got everything in place.
- The "Enable Notifications for all posts" setting should be turned off. If this is turned on, all Instagram posts will be scheduled as notifications. To check, start by selecting your Instagram account on the left hand side of your dashboard. Click on Settings and make sure the General tab is selected. From there, make sure "Enable Notifications by default" is not set to Enabled.
- Does your image or video meet the aspect ratio requirements? Instagram only allows us to publish images and videos automatically if they meet the following size requirements.
- All other posts will be sent to your mobile device as notifications. See our detailed aspect ratio guide for more information.
| Aspect ratio range | Aspect ratio range as numerical values | |
| Image | Between 4:5 and 1.91:1 | Between 0.8 and 1.91 |
| Video | Between 4:5 and 16:9 | Between 0.8 and 1.78 |
| Reels | 9:16 | 0.56 |
- Is your video longer than 60 seconds, or less than 3 seconds? If so, your post will be scheduled as a notification. Videos must be between 3 and 60 seconds in order to be published automatically.
- The same applies to Reels, so if a video is shorter than 5 seconds or longer than 15 minutes, it will be scheduled as a notification
Whenever you're scheduling a post, we'll let you know if it can't be published automatically. Additionally, posts scheduled as notification will display with a "Notification" in the queue. If you haven't worked with notification based publishing before, here's a great guide to get you started!
Where to find posts that didn't publish automatically
If your post was scheduled as a notification, you will find it in the Sent tab with a notification banner. From here, you can send the post to your mobile device to finish it up in the Instagram app and post it manually. You can also share the post again from this tab.
On web
On the web version of Buffer, go to the Sent tab, find the post you'd like to share and select Share Again.
