Pros and Cons of Instagram Bots
With each year that passes, technology finds a new way to help us. It allows businesses to become more efficient, consumers to enjoy their lives, and employees to make their jobs easier than ever before. Instagram bots are just one way that changing technology impacts social media.
If you’ve never heard of these bots before, don’t worry because we’ll go through everything you need to know. We’ll cover:
- Instagram automation
- Instagram bots
- The debate between bots and human interaction
By the end, you should know the value and limitations of Instagram bots. From here, you can make a decision about not only Instagram bots with your business but all types of automation when it comes to dealing with customers and interacting with others.
What’s Instagram Automation?
Rather than dealing with everything manually, Instagram automation is where tasks are performed automatically by using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all sorts of other clever technology. While some companies will use these tools to automatically publish posts at specific times, others will go all the way and have bots replying to direct messages.
On the one hand, it’s fair to say that bots and automation allow a business to save time. Rather than sitting at a computer or a phone replying to messages, we can spend time on other tasks instead. However, the biggest problem is with effectiveness. Sure, automation tools will make things easier for you, but will prospective customers enjoy the experience?
What’s an Engaged Audience?
Before we think about bots and whether or not they’re beneficial on Instagram, we first need to discuss the idea of having an engaged audience. If one business has 10,000 followers and the other has 80,000, which is doing better? You might be inclined to say the latter, but this isn’t the case at all if the 80,000 don’t pay attention to what the business is posting. In reality, 10,000 is much better if they’re engaging with posts, commenting, and sharing.
These days, it’s fairly simple to artificially boost the number of followers we have on a given social media platform. In fact, there are services that will sell you a certain number of followers for a fee. As we’ve just discovered, this is useless if these people ‘like’ your page and then never return again. Even with thousands of followers, you can’t tell whether your content is having an impact and the whole exercise becomes a waste of time.
When you have an engaged audience, they comment on posts and even have discussions in the comments sections of posts between one another. Although this might seem like a small thing, what you’re actually doing is creating loyalty and a sense of community around the brand.
With all of this information in mind, this leads to just one question; can Instagram bots generate an engaged audience? Thankfully, many people have tested bots, and this means we can have an in-depth look at how they work and what you can expect by using them.
Pros of Instagram Bots
First and foremost, perhaps the most obvious benefit is the efficiency improvements that bots can bring. Ignoring effectiveness and results for just a moment, bots can consider more data than a human and work towards our objectives using deep learning algorithms and machine learning.
With the very best tools, they recognize certain text patterns in direct messages and respond in a way that makes sense for the person at the other end. What’s more, bots are also now able to read captions and leave appropriate comments on photos.
We should also mention that Instagram automation tools are becoming more affordable — even for small businesses — and can be personalized depending on what you want to achieve
Cons of Instagram Bots
Unfortunately, the ‘cons’ column is significantly longer than the pros for Instagram bots. Earlier, we questioned whether Instagram automation and bots can create and encourage an engaged audience. According to a Hubspot test, we now know the answer to this question…and it’s a firm ‘no’.
As mentioned previously, there are plenty of services that will offer comments, likes, shares, and all sorts of other promises. Yet, these are all rather superficial and won’t contribute to the building of a community, which is incredibly important on social media. After setting up two profiles, one controlled by humans and another by bots, Hubspot came to three main conclusions:
1. Reach Improves with Organic Engagement
Firstly, more influencers and popular profiles followed the human-controlled profile. Therefore, we can say that organic growth opens more doors for partnerships, ‘regramming’, and the like. We believe this to be a result of the personalized and genuine comments; rather than bots leaving and responding to comments, organic profiles can leave a personal touch with engagement.
Without this human touch, potential reach decreases and we’re left with fewer opportunities in the long-term.
2. Engagement Reduces with Automation
Secondly, you might be tempted to look at follower numbers to determine which profile was more successful. After just a short time, the automated profile had 800 while the organic one was back on 620. At first, you might think that automation wins, but the numbers don’t mean everything.
Although the automated profile enjoyed the quicker start, the more engaged audience came from the organic profile. Again, there was a human touch to the comments and liking with which the automated profile could not compete. By the end of the experiment, despite the inferior follower count, the organic profile was enjoying posts with THREE TIMES as much engagement.
3. Bots Tend to Follow and Engage with Bots
Finally, the automated profile actually had a significant number of bot followers by the end of the experiment. Thought to be a result of the bot’s lack of awareness of real comments and generic ones, bots like to get close to bots and this furthers the lack of engagement.
On the other hand, humans find it easier to connect with a human response (and a bot, harder). Rather than simply replying ‘that’s great!’, a human response will lead to more conversations and personal touches.
Our Advice on Building an Engaged Audience
If Instagram bots aren’t the way to go, how can you create an audience that engages with posts and becomes part of the community you desperately want to harness for conversions and exposure?
Firstly, have a member of your team look after your Instagram profile. They don’t need to be online for the whole shift every single day, but a couple of hours will work wonders. Primarily, they should set a foundation of liking posts, posting, and replying to any comments that come in. If they have free time, you can then move onto:
- Commenting on other posts in the industry
- Creating relationships with complementary services
- Connecting with followers
- Communicating with influencers and discussing the possibility of working together
- Getting involved with hashtags and trends for extra exposure
Whenever we get asked about Instagram, we always advise setting up the foundation first and getting into the routine of posting, liking, and replying. If you’re reaching out to influencers and doing everything in the above list before your own profile is running, you aren’t going to see the full benefit.
Tailored Content
When creating content for your Instagram channel, always remember your audience. When we sit down and start creating a mind map of ideas, it’s easy to get carried away and end up producing content that doesn’t resonate with the audience. Always remember why you’re creating content and what the viewer will be getting from every single post idea you have.
Combining Automation and Organic Techniques
So far, we’ve spoken against Instagram automation in this guide because we believe in the value of human-to-human contact. This being said, we aren’t against automation in general. If you find a way to introduce automation without negatively impacting organic growth, go ahead and test. For some companies, they’re able to combine the two and really enjoy progress in the market.
As long as you aren’t ever relying on automation or commenting through a bot, this can work. With these types of tasks, evidence shows humans do it best. After all, social media started as a way of keeping humans connected. Whether keeping up with old school friends, old colleagues, or making new friends, Facebook and Instagram are two examples of platforms built for human connection. Just because we have an opportunity to utilize bots and automation, it doesn’t mean that we have to use it.
If you want an engaged audience, the best way to get started is not with Instagram bots. We understand that it requires more time and effort to have a human on the job, but it will be worth it in the end!
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
