Dealing with numerous Instagram accounts and ensuring each account is growing an engaged audience is a significant challenge. That’s why countless businesses and creators use Instagram Automation tools like SocialMeep and others for automated growth. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the fascinating world of Instagram Automation: tools to use, dos and don’ts, and best practices.
The current state of Instagram
Every day it’s getting harder and harder to grow organically on Instagram. With over 1 billion monthly active users, it’s incredibly hard to stand out amongst all the noise. A few years ago, you could post a simple picture with a hashtag and filter and watch your followers grow.
However, with this growth comes the opportunity to capture a substantial targeted audience, and Instagram bots allow you to do this at a fraction of the price of running ads or doing sponsored posts.
What is an Instagram Bot?
Instagram bots automate your activity by allowing you to control specific parameters at scale, including following, commenting, liking, story viewing, and more. Certain services let you further target the audience that you interact with. Further along in this article, we’ll explore use cases and the best Instagram bots for growth.
What do Instagram Bots do?
Instagram bots (aka automation) tools make growing your account easy. You define your target audience and select what actions you want the bot to make. This can be following, unfollowing, commenting, liking, story viewing, video viewing. Not only will your page become more engaging, but you’ll also receive significant organic engagement on Instagram. Instagram’s algorithm sees this high level of engagement and gives your account a high internal score.
Most of the bots available today offer a similar basic level of service, but differ when it comes to aspects like product experience, targeting features, account safety, and growth levels. For example, if you run a boutique women’s clothing brand, you could target age 18-24 females in New York City who are interested in fashion. You can only target this granularly with Instagram Ads – which are hundreds of times more expensive than the fixed monthly price you pay with a bot.
This sounds great, but why is no one talking about them?
Here’s the thing: While bots save you a lot of time and money, they have a “not so good” reputation. Using bots to automate your activity is technically against Instagram’s terms of service. By using a bot, your account has the potential for being banned – which is not what you want!
I say “technically” because if you use a bot the right way with the right service, your account will look completely natural, and you have zero chance of getting found out by Instagram.
I’ve always been a supporter of automation tools because it levels the playing field for creators and small Instagram businesses that don’t have the big ad budgets that larger companies do. On top of this, bots push the boundaries of what’s possible with technology, which is always great.
Instagram Bot Use Cases
There are many different ways to utilize Instagram bot. In this part of the article, we’ll look at some of the most popular use cases and pros and cons.
Growing Your Followers
Using Instagram Bots to increase your following is undoubtedly the most common use case. Many services allow you to interact with accounts that fall under your target audience criteria. With services like SocialMeep, you can control whether the bot will follow, like, comment, or view profiles and content of target accounts.
Increasing Post Engagement
Some pages have a large following base but lack high engagement rates on content. Instagram bots can help correct this by bringing a targeted audience to your page, which has a very high chance of engaging with your content.
What do recent IG Algorithm changes mean for automation?
Growing a big audience on Instagram used to be incredibly simple. You could Google “buy Instagram followers” or find an app on the App Store that did follow for follow. Not too long ago, you could quickly get 30k followers and have your content featured on the Explore tab. Over the past year, Instagram has implemented changes to its algorithm and cracked down on people buying fake followers by deleting them and shadowbanning their accounts.
Instagram’s algorithm is a black box – no one knows how it works. However, after experimentation, we do know that they favor engagement over follower count. Engagement can be in the form of likes, story views, comments, direct messages, live IGTV viewers, and more. Instagram has even experimented with hiding the follower count altogether in some countries.
Instagram has doubled down on this initiative by adjusting its feed from chronological to having it sorted by people you most engage with. This means that Instagram will show you the content of profiles you spend the most time on, share with others, or interact with the most. On top of that it is important to focus on creating high quality content since Instagram in order to rank higher in Instagram feed algorithm.
If you’ve purchased followers in the past, there’s a big chance they don’t engage with your profile or content. Instagram sees this lack of activity and stops showing your content to even your real followers. Your posts will go to spam where no one ever sees them. This is a surefire way to kill your whole account and stop any potential growth.
Given this new era of Instagram, how are you supposed to grow your account efficiently? The answer is bots.
Pros of Using an Instagram Bot
You can completely customize the settings of your bot to fit your growth needs. Using the right bot and following their best practices, you can make sure your account is safe while enjoying the growth benefits. Unlike general analytics services, Instagram bots can give you deep insight into your account and metrics because they know exactly who your target audience is.
Cons of Using an Instagram Bot
Like any automation service, Instagram bots do have some drawbacks. As I mentioned earlier, using a bot could put your account at risk if you’re using the wrong service. Abusing the capabilities of a bot could also make you look like a spammer to other Instagram users.
How do you keep your account safe?
Because of Instagram’s crackdown on fake followers, keeping your account safe should be a number one priority. Here are some things to look out for when choosing a service.
Dedicated Proxies. When having a third-party tool manage your account, you’ll want the activity to look like it’s coming from your device. Proximity-based residential proxies offer IP’s from real-life machines in a similar location as your Instagram app. This makes it impossible for Instagram to detect that a third-party service is automating your accounts activities.
Rate Limits. The purpose of Instagram Bots is to automate and scale the number of actions a human could perform on a given day. Make sure the service you use allows you to control the number of likes and comments and follows that your account makes each hour. A good rule of thumb is 200 likes, 50 comments, and 50 follows/unfollows per hour.
Common Mistakes
A few things can look suspicious to a regular user who visits your Instagram page from an interaction you made on their account, and your whole account could be at risk.
Here’s what you should avoid:
Little to no content. Instagram is a platform for sharing photos and videos if you have three posts and over 3k followers, it will look like something is off.
Random username. If your username is an arbitrary string of letters and numbers, this is a major red flag that’s extremely easy to detect.
No profile picture: Using a placeholder profile picture is also guaranteed to have your account flagged. No one is going to look at your profile picture and assume your account is legitimate.
What’s the Best Instagram Automation Tool?
Over the past few months, I’ve been primarily using an Instagram growth service called SocialMeep. It’s simple to use, has an incredibly well-built dashboard, and gets the job done. Unlike other services I’ve used in the past, they prioritize and invest in account safety. Safety and security are especially important now that Instagram has changed its algorithms.
Summary
If growing your audience and ultimately your revenue or status on Instagram is your goal, then I highly suggest you give a service like SocialMeep a try. In such a competitive market for attention, Instagram Bots deliver by saving you both time and money.
It’s also essential to create good content. Compelling content is what makes new followers want to stick around. Having an empty page or putting little effort into creating content lessens the benefits of using an Instagram automation tool.
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