flume for mac | Best Affiliate Marketing Tools

Instagram is an awesome social sharing site and is growing every day, but what if you want to be able to post to Instagram from your Mac? Well in this Flume for Instagram review, we will share with the excellent features that are available to do just that. One of the frustrations I have as a blogger, is the fact that Instagram only allows you to upload pictures via your phone. But this app has bridged that gap.

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Flume Overview & Rankings

Product Name: Flume for Instagram

Owners: Rafif Yalda in Berlin

Website URL: flumeapp.com

Product Type: Desktop Tool for Instagram (Mac only)

Price: Free, $10 for Pro (one-off fee)

Best For: Bloggers, Affiliate Marketers, Social Media Influencers, Small Business owners

BestAffiliateMarketingTools.org Rating: 4.8/5

A Quick Flume Summary

Flume for Instagram is a great tool for being able to upload images to Instagram from your mac. As a blogger and affiliate marketer, this makes it really easy and simple to upload my posts to Instagram too. Whilst it would be perfect if it added a Windows version, it is still a strong package for mac users.

Recommended: Yes

What Exactly is Flume?

Flume is a desktop application that you download onto your mac. It isn’t currently available for windows, and it doesn’t look like this is likely to change soon. It allows you to do almost all that you can do on your Instagram app on your phone.

You can upload new content, do reposts, browse, search, comment and like photos – but the only thing you cannot do at the moment is add stories and Instagram live. Which to be honest is more the features you would normally do on your phone anyway due to the accessibility of your phone.

The key features we like about Flume is the ability to upload photos with blog post links and easy hashtag tools. If you are a blogger, then you will hopefully see the benefits from these features being on your desktop.

Who Does Flume Benefit?

Anyone with an online business, bloggers, affiliate marketers, or are a social media influencer would benefit from being able to post from your mac desktop. Whilst the free version is ok, it only costs $10 to upgrade to the full version and you can have 5 accounts active. So, if you have multiple businesses, you can find this a really good feature.

How Does Flume Work?

Once you have logged into Flume, it is a relatively simple layout to get your head around.

Once you have logged in, you will have an easy menu at the bottom. It will start up with your feed at first. Where you can click and each and go into them and like, comment, etc. from the application.

See the image below to see which icons mean which.

Feed: Your usual feed that you would see on your mobile app

Likes: Images that you have liked

Explore: Find Images that might be of interest to you

Search: The Search Function

Activity: This is your notification tab, seeing who is following you, left you comments on your images and likes too

Conversations: This is your message centre, where you can direct message your followers, etc.

Profile: Just like your phone app, you can see and edit your profile from this screen, see how many followers you have, how many posts, etc.

Uploading an Image is really easy. From the top menu, which will be at the top of your mac desktop, you will see in “View”, the option to upload. Clicking this will show you the function below:

Being a mac application, it will allow you to drag and drop your image or video to get started. Once you have done this, it gives you the option to edit your comments, add hashtags, add people and locations, etc.

Flume also gives you the option to edit the image before posting it, this helps you make sure it is Instagram ready for uploading it.

There are some other features that we love too, for example. It is not an easy task to repost photos from Instagram itself, and yet with Flume you can right click on your image from your profile and just click repost. Add any additional comments you want, and you are good to click post.

Clicking Repost will open up the upload screen, ready for you to post it.

You will also find that when you are browsing the images in your feed, there are no distractions like on your phone. It just shows you the images, you can get more detail by clicking on them.

You can choose from two layouts for your feed, either a full image on top of each other or 3×3 type grid system.

I also like the fact that, although there are advertised posts. It is clearly marked with a Blue AD mark. It is also quite clear which are videos and carousel posts too.

What is Good About Flume (PROS)

Let’s go through what we like about Flume for Instagram:

Easily Post Blog Posts

If you are looking into an easy way of posting your content from your mac, Flume makes it easy to do. Without this app, I would need to download my featured image onto my phone to then add it, and let’s face it on a professional manner this is not as easy to do from your phone. But this app has brought all the benefits from the phone and put it easily onto my mac for when I am publishing content. If you are a blogger, social media influencer, etc. tell you would want to make this easier to do – the flume app does just that.

Reposting Photos/Post is Easy

This is not an easy option on your phone. You pretty much have to repost it – but that takes time to choose the image, write effective comments, add your website, hashtags, etc. It takes seconds with the flume app.

Cost Effective for a Productivity App

There are plenty of apps out there to do a similar feature for social media, but this is either free for basic functionality or $10. Whilst this is still all manual functions compared to other tools, the ability of reposting your posts makes this a sound investment regardless of whether you use all of the features.

What Could Flume Improve on? (CONS)

Let’s look at what Flume could do better on:

Platform Specific – Only on Mac

Whilst those who own a mac have the ability of benefiting from Flume, all those people on Windows are stuck. It is a great application to have, but if you haven’t got a mac computer, you will need to find something else. (I will be looking and sharing it when I find one for you)

How Much Does Flume Cost?

Flume has both a free version and a pro version. The Pro version is the one that allows you to upload photos and videos, otherwise it is just a view function in the free version.

But at a $10 one-off fee for the pro version. I find this a fantastic cost for an application that will improve your productivity massively.

You can try or purchase the Flume app from their official website.

There is another way of get Flume, and that is from Setapp. This is a subscription service where you get a few hundred Mac apps for $9.99 a month. Flume is included. Setapp has a free 7-day trial and might be worth having a look.

What Is the Flume Support Like?

If I am honest, there has been only one reason I have had to contact the support team. I found the conversation tab was causing the app to crash a few days ago. (the first issue in about 6 months of using the app). They were quite prompt and stated there was a new software version coming out and it hasn’t been an issue since. Which I think is great support.

My Honest Opinion of Flume

Whilst Instagram is mostly for mobile device use, there are times when you just want to be able to post from your computer. With the fact that bloggers, social media influencers and business owners want to handle bulk post uploads and included links – it is just easier from your desktop.

I have been using the Flume app for about 6 months, and I have enjoyed being able to use it to help grow my brand and online presence on Instagram. The ease at which you can post, edit your images, add tags, reports and more. It doesn’t break the bank and is a great tool for have whether you are blogging, affiliate marketing, have a small business or are a social media influencer. You will benefit massively from this easy to use app.

My only gripe is that it is only available on Mac, and that might be a stumbling block if you are a Windows user.

Flume at a Glance