Set up Ninecast in ten minutes

You need three things. Have them ready and the whole setup takes about ten minutes.

• A Notion account (free is fine), or an Airtable account if that is where you plan.
• An Instagram professional account. Instagram only lets tools publish to Business or Creator accounts. If yours is personal: Instagram → Settings and activity → Account type and tools → Switch to professional account. It takes a minute and changes nothing visible on your profile.
• A computer for two of the steps (accepting the Instagram invite, and embedding the widget). Everything else works from anywhere.

Ninecast never asks you to create an account or remember a password. Your planner link is your login. Keep it private, the way you would a password.

1. Go to getninecast.com and press Start free.
2. Type your email address (step 1 of 5) and press Confirm and get my link.

The trial is 30 days, with everything switched on and no card. Nothing is charged at the end; if you want to keep going, you choose a plan then.

1. Open the email from Ninecast. The subject is about confirming your address, and it comes from send.getninecast.com. Check spam or Promotions if it is not in your inbox within a minute.
2. Press the button in it. That opens step 2 of 5 in your browser, and your email is confirmed.

Nothing is created until you confirm. If the email never arrives, go back to the start page and enter the address again; we send a fresh one.

Step 3 asks where your content calendar lives. Choose Notion to follow this guide as written; choose Airtable and skip to Using Airtable instead.

Step 4 offers the Ninecast Content Planner, a ready-made Notion database with every column the grid needs: name, caption, images, scheduled date, status, platforms, post type, and the columns your analytics will be written into.

1. Press Get the template. It opens in Notion.
2. Press Duplicate in Notion’s top-right corner and choose your workspace. You now own a copy.

You do not have to use it. If you already have a calendar in Notion, skip this step and connect your own database later; Ninecast lets you tell it which column is which. The template just means nothing to map.

Step 5 shows your planner link, and emails it to you as well. It looks like getninecast.com/e/ followed by a long code.

• Copy it. You will paste it into Notion in the next step.
• Keep it private. Anyone with the link can see your planner and connect accounts to it. Do not post it publicly.
• Lost it? It is in the email we sent. On a paid plan you can also regenerate it from your dashboard, which makes the old one stop working.

1. In Notion, open the page where your content calendar lives. With the template, that is the page you just duplicated.
2. On a new line, paste your planner link. Notion asks what to do with it.
3. Choose Embed.
4. Drag the corner to make it taller. Side by side with your calendar works well: the database on the left, the grid on the right.

The widget appears with a grey avatar, three counters and a button that says Connect your Notion.

1. Press Connect your Notion. A small window opens on Notion’s own screen. (If nothing opens, your browser blocked the popup; allow popups for notion.so and press again.)
2. Sign in to Notion if it asks.
3. Notion asks which pages to share. Tick the page that holds your content planner (or the planner database itself) and press Allow access.
4. The window closes on its own. The widget says Your calendar is live and any rows you already have appear as tiles.

If you shared several databases, the widget asks which one is your calendar. If you connected a database that is not our template, it opens the column list so you can confirm which column is the date, the caption and the images. You can change that at any time under Settings → Grid columns.

Add a row to your database and fill in:

• Name — for you; it is not published.
• Caption + Keywords — exactly what will be posted, hashtags included.
• Files & media — one image for a post, several for a carousel, a video for a Reel. PNGs and odd shapes are converted and padded for you; Instagram would otherwise refuse them.
• Scheduled date — the date and time to publish. Add a time; without one, the planner’s default posting time is used.
• Platforms and Post type — Instagram, and post, carousel or Reel.

The tile appears in the grid within a second of the row having a date or an image. Change the date and it moves. Delete the row and it goes.

Connecting Instagram takes one short extra step the first time: we add your account on our side, and you accept the invite. Here is the whole sequence.

1. Make sure the Instagram account is a professional account (see Before you start).
2. Under the widget’s header press Connect your Instagram. The settings panel opens.
3. Type your Instagram username and press Request access. The widget then shows “Invite on its way”.
4. We add your username on our side, usually within minutes, and within a day at most. You will get an email when it is done if we have your address.
5. On a computer, sign in to Instagram at instagram.com/accounts/manage_access with the account you gave us.
6. Open the Tester Invites tab and press Accept next to Ninecast.
7. Back in the widget, open settings (the small ‹ in the top-left corner) → Link accounts → press Instagram.
8. A window opens on Instagram. Sign in with the same account and press Allow. The window closes and your avatar and username appear in the widget header.

The Tester Invites tab only exists on the Instagram website. The phone app’s “Apps and websites” screen does not show it, so step 5 has to be done in a browser on a computer.

• On schedule. Open settings → Grid → switch on Auto-post. Every row then publishes at its scheduled date and time. A newly connected account starts with this off, so connecting never posts anything by itself.
• Right now. Press a tile, then Posted. It publishes immediately.
• After a post goes out, the Published link column in your database fills in with the post’s URL, and the tile shows ✅ Published.
• A post can never go out twice. A double tap, a retry or a changed date cannot produce a second copy.

After publishing, Ninecast keeps reading each post’s performance from Instagram and writes it into your database: Likes, Comments, Reposts, Saves, Reach and Views. With the template these columns already exist; with your own database, map them once under Settings → Grid columns.

• Every night, for every post published in the last 14 days.
• Right now: settings → Analytics → Update analytics now → Refresh. It reports what it checked and updated.
• If you delete a post on Instagram, its tile changes to 🔴 Deleted the next time analytics run, so the grid never shows what is no longer there.

No Zapier, no Make, no spreadsheet. Nothing to set up beyond the columns.

Everything is behind the small ‹ in the widget’s top-left corner.

• Grid order — by scheduled date (either direction), by creation, or a manual order column you control.
• Show post details — captions and dates on the tiles, or a clean grid.
• Hide completed posts — hides rows whose Status is your “done” value. Hide deleted posts hides the 🔴 ones.
• Bio — the text under your name in the header, so the preview looks like your profile.
• Grid columns — change which column is which, at any time.

In Airtable you get the same live grid beside your records, and one-tap publishing from any tile. Scheduled publishing and analytics written back into the base are built and being switched on now; this page will say so plainly the day they are confirmed working, and not before.

Getting it into your base is the one part that is not self-serve yet. Airtable does not let a custom extension be installed from a link the way Notion lets you paste an embed, so until our listing in the Airtable Marketplace is approved, we set it up with you. It takes about fifteen minutes, you install nothing, and you can watch the whole thing.

1. Choose Airtable at step 3, or email support@getninecast.com and say so.
2. You invite us to the base as a collaborator for the length of the setup, and we add the extension to it. You can remove that access the moment we are done.
3. In the extension’s settings, paste your planner link and choose the table your posts live in. The fields are guessed for you and you confirm them.
4. Press Connect Airtable in the same panel. That is what lets publishing happen at a scheduled time and analytics come back while nobody has the base open.
5. Connect Instagram exactly as in step 10, then switch on auto-post.

Once the Marketplace listing is live this becomes two clicks and no email, and we will tell every Airtable customer the day it does.

I pasted my link and it says the planner link is no longer valid.

The link was regenerated or the planner was deleted. Use the newest link from your email, or ask whoever gave you the link for the current one.

Pressing Connect took me to a page that says Sign in and asks for a password.

That is the customer dashboard, which is only for paid plans; there is nothing to sign in with on a trial. Go back to the widget and use the button inside it. Every connection happens from the widget.

Pressing Connect does nothing.

Your browser blocked the popup. Allow popups for the page you are on (notion.so, or airtable.com) and press again.

I connected Notion, but the grid still says Connect your Notion.

Reload the Notion page; it keeps a cached copy of the widget. If it then says “Choose your database”, Notion shared more than one database and you need to pick the calendar. If it says “Confirm your columns”, tell it which column is which.

The grid shows 0 posts, but my database has rows.

A row appears once it has a scheduled date or an image. Rows with neither are not posts yet, so they stay off the grid.

I cannot find Tester Invites in Instagram.

It is on the website only, at instagram.com/accounts/manage_access, in a browser on a computer. The phone app does not show it. If it is not there either, we have not added you yet; check for our email, or write to us.

Instagram opened, I signed in, and nothing happened.

Two usual causes: the account is personal rather than professional, or you signed in with a different account from the one you gave us. Switch the account type, or sign out of Instagram and connect again with the right account.

I deleted a post on Instagram but the tile still says Published.

It updates the next time analytics run. Press Update analytics now in settings and it changes to 🔴 Deleted.

Nothing published when it should have? Why a Notion Instagram planner stops posting walks through every reason a scheduled post does not go out, in the order worth checking them.

Write to support@getninecast.com. Say which step you are on and what the screen says; a screenshot helps. Replies come from a person.