Let someone post for you without giving them your password

At some point an account stops being one person's phone. An editor cuts the reels, a friend answers the messages, someone runs the ads. The usual solution is to send the password around a group chat, and that is the worst version of this.

Shared access exists instead. You invite someone, they sign in as themselves, and they can work on your account without your password ever leaving your head.

What can an invited person actually do?

They can post, like and comment from the account. On a professional account they can also run ads and see the insights, which covers most of what we would hire a manager or an agency to do in the first place.

That is a wide permission, so we would invite people for the work they are doing rather than for the work they might do one day. Somebody cutting reels does not need to be able to run ads.

We would also be clear with ourselves about what this does not solve. Access is a technical answer to a human question, and the human question is whether you trust someone with your voice in public. Nothing in a permissions screen decides that for you.

What can they not do?

The account stays yours. An invited person cannot deactivate it, cannot give anybody else access, and cannot change account information such as the username, the password or the contact details.

How many people can you invite?

It depends on your account, and on a creator plan if you have one: a subscription sets the number of people you can invite to share access. We would check it in your own app rather than assume, because it varies.

For most small teams the number is not the constraint. The constraint is discipline: three people with access and no agreement about who posts what will produce a profile that reads as three accounts.

We run our own account with fewer people than we could, deliberately. Every extra person with access is another version of the brand's voice and another route in if their own login is weak, and neither cost shows up until something goes wrong. Two people who agree beats four who have never discussed it.

How would we set this up?

1. Invite people by role, not by friendship. The person who edits gets access because they edit.
2. Agree who posts and who replies before anyone touches the account. Two people answering the same comment is worse than nobody answering it.
3. Remove access the day someone stops working with you, not the week after. It takes a minute and nobody ever regrets it.
4. Keep your own login on two-factor. Shared access protects the password; it does not protect a weak one.
5. Write down who has access somewhere other than your memory.

We would also decide, early, who owns the voice. Shared access makes it easy for a profile to drift into whoever wrote the last caption, and an account that changes register every third post is harder to follow than a quiet one.

One more habit we would build early: read the account as a stranger once a week. Scroll your own grid from the top with the eyes of somebody who arrived from a reel, and see whether the last nine posts sound like one person. Shared access makes that drift easy and invisible from the inside.

What about answering the comments?

This is where most shared accounts actually fall over. Posting is a scheduled job that one person can own. Replies arrive at nine at night, in numbers, and the person who has access is asleep.

So we would separate the two jobs. Give a person access for the work that needs judgement, and let the repetitive half run on its own, because nobody should be handing out the same link four hundred times by hand.

Access solves who can post. It does not solve who is awake.

For the half that arrives while everyone is asleep, Instoly answers each commenter with the link they asked for, so the person with access can spend their time on the replies that need a human.