Your Later content calendar is empty. Not because you forgot to schedule posts, but because nobody created posts to schedule. Later gives you a beautiful visual grid showing exactly when your Instagram posts will go live. The grid is empty because your dental practice does not have a content team writing captions and shooting photos between patient appointments.
TL;DR
Later ($25-$80/month) provides a visual content calendar and Instagram scheduling. The scheduling grid is empty because nobody created the content to fill it. Optimal.dev's AI generates the content — captions, imagery, hashtags — and schedules it automatically. Your staff approves with one tap, not creates from scratch.
Scheduling Without Content vs. Content That Schedules Itself
Later's visual planner is its signature feature — drag and drop posts onto a calendar grid, and they publish at the scheduled time. It supports Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn with platform-specific optimization. For content teams that produce 20+ posts per week, the visual calendar is indispensable.
Key Insight: 90% of service businesses that fail at social media fail at content creation — not scheduling. They know when to post. They do not know what to post. Buying a scheduling tool before solving the creation problem is buying a filing cabinet before having any files to put in it.
Service businesses face a unique content creation challenge. Your expertise is dentistry, law, or HVAC — not social media strategy. You know that before-and-after photos perform well, but you do not have time to shoot, edit, caption, and hashtag them between patients. You know seasonal content gets engagement, but you do not have a content calendar mapping dental health topics to months of the year.
| Factor | Later | Optimal.dev |
|---|---|---|
| Content creation | ❌ Manual | ✅ AI-generated |
| Image generation | ❌ Manual | ✅ AI-generated |
| Scheduling | ✅ Visual calendar | ✅ AI-optimized timing |
| Hashtag strategy | ✅ Suggestions | ✅ AI-selected |
| Multi-platform | ✅ IG, TikTok, Pinterest, LI | ✅ All major |
| CRM connection | ❌ Not included | ✅ Same database |
| Voice AI | ❌ Not included | ✅ Embedded |
| Website & SEO | ❌ Not included | ✅ Enterprise |
The AI Content Engine
Optimal.dev's approach to social media inverts the traditional workflow. Instead of creating content and then scheduling it, the AI generates a content strategy based on your industry, generates the posts, and presents them for approval.
For a dental practice, the AI might generate: a Monday post about winter tooth sensitivity (seasonal), a Wednesday before/after of a Zoom whitening case (service highlight), and a Friday post sharing a recent 5-star Google review (social proof). Each post includes professional captions, relevant hashtags, and AI-generated imagery — ready for one-tap approval.
The content strategy adapts to your CRM data. If the practice just completed a successful full-mouth reconstruction, the AI generates a case study post (with patient consent). If review velocity has slowed, the AI generates a "tag someone who needs to see this" engagement post designed to drive conversations and indirect review requests. If a seasonal service (teeth whitening before wedding season) is approaching, the AI front-loads promotion content.
This CRM-connected content creation is impossible in Later because Later has no access to your patient data, treatment history, or review patterns. It is a content calendar — an empty container waiting to be filled. Optimal.dev fills the container with content that reflects your actual business, your actual patients, and your actual seasonal patterns.
See also: Hootsuite alternative and Buffer alternative.
