What I learned from my 72 hours using Instagress

F.Y.I

I’ll start this post with a warning. Instagram automation is a ‘black hat’ practice in the social media industry. The best way to grow a quality following is by sharing original and/or curated content and by interacting with people who are genuinely interested in the type of content you are posting. Instagram bans following automation and/or any type of bot activity, so by using any automation services you risk getting your account suspended.

Now, onto the post.

Last week I read a blog post by Evan Lepage from Hootsuite talking about his experience using Instagram automation to increase his following. The post was pretty insightful and it was refreshing to hear a non-spammer perspective about this subject but I found that the hashtags Evan chose to follow in order to boost his numbers were pretty generic and therefore bound to attract a large number of spam accounts.

How it works

Instagress is an Instagram bot that likes, comments, follows and unfollows people on your behalf. The bot tracks relevant photos and users based on relevant hashtags.

For instance, if you are a chef wanting to connect with foodies and track conversations surrounding food on Instagram, the hashtags you would choose to track would be: food, foodies, foodporn.

In theory, this sounds good. Having a bot saving you the trouble of manually tracking and following people who share your same interests? Seems like a handy tool to have under your belt. The problem is that Instagram hashtags are not always accurate and people who are interested in boosting likes for the sake of boosting numbers generally tend to use popular hashtags even if they are not related to the image they just posted, this technique is known as hashtag cramming.

Here is where it gets tricky, your bot will follow anything and everyone using the hashtags, so popular search terms will attract large amounts of likes and follows but sadly most of them are spam.

What I did

When it comes to my Instagram profile I love following visual artists, photographers, illustrators and basically fill my feed with beautiful images. For content discovery, I use only a series of targeted hashtags that allow me to find what I want to see without running into much spam.

Evan Lepage chose #Canada, #Montreal, #Vancouver, #PNW, #Fishing, #Water, #Awesome as his hashtags and at first he decided to automate his comments. Taking from his experience I chose to only like and follow people but not comment on their pictures. As for my hashtags, I went with #Canon #Toronto #iphonesia #canonphotography #strobist, overall photography related terms.

What happened

Instagress gives you the option to adjust speed, meaning you can perform your chosen actions slowly, normally or fast. In the beginning, I chose to go at a normal speed but after almost half a day using Instagress I noticed my likes and the number of people I followed kept on growing but I wasn’t getting many follow backs. To my surprise, my feed was filled with new interesting people that I would have probably followed on my own, at least until that point.

I changed my settings to fast and that’s when things got serious. Over the next two days, my number of followers kept on growing and the number of people I followed grew exponentially. I started out with 293 followers and following somewhere around 300 accounts, by the time Instagress’ three-day trial finished, I had 424 followers but I was following a little over 1,600 accounts.

My feed, something that I have spent a lot of time curating, was gone. I really can’t complain much about the quality of accounts the bot followed since I only got a couple of spammers and random accounts, but I just didn’t know who I was following anymore.

I was lost in my own feed and I couldn’t even find the accounts that I had grown to love and follow on a daily basis. In order to regain control of my feed, I had to unfollow a lot of those new accounts.

After my massive account clean-up, I’ve lost around 13 followers, I’m down from following 1,600 to 622 accounts and I’m still clearing some people off my feed.

What I learned

I cannot stress this enough, there is no better way to build a social media following other than organic engagement, but my takeaway from this experience is that Instagress can be used as a community growth tool as long as you keep a few things in mind.

• Instagress should not be considered a primary tactic but a complementary tool for discovery and growth. Providing valuable content, sharing and commenting on users photos are the most valuable tools for community building.
• Target hashtags carefully. First understand the language your target audience is using and then identify what are the most relevant terms. Only target a couple at the time and go slowly.
• Content is king. It doesn’t matter whether you are using automation tools or organic growth, your account is not going to grow unless you have good and relevant content your audience is interested in engaging with.
• Slow and steady wins the race. Both in Evan’s experience and mine, choosing fast only led to us to losing control of our Instagram accounts and the people we followed. Go slow and perform only an action per day, such as like or follow but don’t do it all. It makes it far easier to monitor, engage and still get a quality following using automation.

The main point of using social media as an individual or a business is to connect with people who are interested and want to have conversations about the things you are posting. No matter what tools you choose, keep in mind that having 10,000 fake followers will not translate into likes or website visits, let alone conversions. Don’t put so much effort worrying about numbers, as long as you are creating something share-worthy, your community will grow.

EDIT: Since this post was post was published, Instagress has shot down but there are many tools out there that accomplish the same goal. For more information about what happened with Instagress and other Instagram automation tools, click here.