Have you ever googled the best Instagram growth services? Or how to get 1k followers on Instagram fast? Probably the most common search query is how to buy cheap Instagram followers. What you should ask yourself instead is: can you buy REAL Instagram followers or likes?
Growing a huge fan base in a day seems tempting. However, if it was so easy, then why would people bother inventing so many hacks and marketing strategies to grow a following on Instagram? The point is that most of the followers you get this way are bots or inactive accounts. Either way, they won’t help you improve engagement rate or increase conversions.
It seems so irresistible to just pay for Instagram bots instead of improving your content or genuinely interacting with your audience. Plus, the original reason why people choose to buy the bots is most likely to trick people into thinking you have a huge follower base so that real users start following you too. However, you should first weigh all the positive and negative sides of such an audience growth tool.
Where bots come from
It’s not a secret that there’re services offering to boost your number of followers for money. Some use mass-following schemes: follow a huge number of people and then unfollow both those who follow or unfollow back. In this case, you have to give full access to your account by providing your login and password.
Others hold a database of artificially created fake accounts. Their names usually constitute a meaningless combination of letters and numbers. They can have 0 posts or a couple of stock photos.
There’re special apps that help detect and get rid of fake followers. This shows that nowadays people tend to blog more openly because they realize the cons of the fake following and rely on themselves when it comes to growing their audience.
Why bots will do more harm than good
- Bots will show zero or close to zero activity. They won’t engage: like, comment, send direct messages. Simply because they’re not real.
Some may be programmed to engage but it’s only in the beginning. Later their engagement will wear off.
This will finally result in a steep engagement drop. Instagram will think you’re interesting no more and send you to the bottom of the feed. - Due to what was outlined in the previous paragraph, there will be seen the difference between the number of followers and likes under your posts. It results in a low engagement rate. The agreeable engagement rate for Instagram is between 1% and 3%. It’s about 100-300 likes for 10k followers.
If you’ll have 100k followers and 37 likes a day after posting a photo, real users will suspect fraud. Bots usually leave automated comments like “nice picture”, or “great account”. You’ll lose credibility in real users’ eyes if they spot these comments are irrelevant to the post.
You can’t fool active users into following you with such statistics. It will inevitably influence your reputation and not in a good way. Especially if no effort was put into creating quality content. - To build and promote your brand needs a lot of testing. You should know your target audience and test different ad versions to find what best resonates with it. Bots will spoil your statistics by showing fake activity. If you don’t know what real followers like, you won’t have real data to base your marketing strategy on.
- Instagram certainly doesn’t approve of using fraudulent schemes. It’s fighting back against third-party apps for boosting audience numbers. Buying fake followers is against Instagram Terms of service. Buying bots is not worth the risk of losing your account.
- Bots won’t stay with you forever. Instagram claimed they’re inclined to remove inauthentic activity generated by third-party apps. They remove fake likes, follows and reposts. So in the cleanup process your statistics will significantly drop. You’ll simply waste your money.
- You won’t get any conversions. In case your Instagram account was created with the purpose of promoting your brand and generating sales, bots won’t provide you return on investment. They’re dead weight that can’t be turned into real customers.
What you should do instead
Earlier Instagram used to display posts in the feed chronologically. But since the beginning of 2020 the preference is given to those that you engage with most. So Instagram moves down the posts of those accounts that you like and comment the least. Users who engage most with your account are most likely to see your posts and similar types of accounts in their recommendations.
What you really have to do is to provide value to your followers. Surround yourself with people who are interested in your blog. Here are some tips to keep your followers engaged:
- Start with making your account public. Unless you’re super popular already and people send requests to access your account by someone’s recommendation, you need to make your account public. Most people won’t bother following you if they need to wait to be accepted. If you don’t approve instantly they will simply lose interest and forget about you even before seeing your content.
- Provide quality content. Many nano- and micro-influencers have great levels of engagement. They can boast of a strong community of people who freely comment, DM and give feedback. What do they owe this to? Apparently, it’s about the value they provide to the users. They discuss burning questions, provide informative and useful content. This also includes visual aesthetics and grid layout.
- Post consistently. In order to build a community of engaged people you need to interact with them regularly. It’s the same with any relationship, they need maintaining. There’s no single right posting schedule for everyone, decide for yourself how often you plan on posting and stick to your schedule. Don’t make unreal plans: make sure reality can live up to your expectations.
- Be closer to your audience. Show that you care and actively engage with users. Try to react to the comments quickly, answer to DMs. For sure, there might be negative feedback. Probably everyone with a relatively big audience will sooner or later face hate comments. It’s best not to give in to anger in response but stay calm and reasonable. Customer satisfaction will increase your customer feedback score.
- Analyze. After some time of activity and experimenting with different types of posts and formats you’ll be able to see what your target audience likes most. Remember that you’re working for people and track their reaction to each particular post. Then go with the flow and keep doing what your audience is most interested in.
- Keep up with updates. Instagram is constantly working on improving its service. Not a month goes by without a new update or feature. Use all instagram tools available: posts, both pictures and video, Stories, IGTV, Reels. The more features you use the more engagement you’ll get.
- Collaborate with similar blogs. It’s a great way to expand your following on Instagram through exchanging followers. Collaborate with bloggers sharing similar views and ideas.
- Try follow-to-download strategy.
- Download Gates tool on LeadEnforce is an Instagram growth service. It helps gain followers organically and build a long-term audience. It has nothing to do with bots and doesn’t involve any fake engagement.
To buy or not to buy?
Many people forget that the number of followers is not the most important metric for measuring success on social media. Nowadays blogs with small following may be more valuable due to their audience engagement rate.
You can’t fake organic Instagram growth. It takes time, hard work, testing different opportunities and creative thinking. It’s certainly not something you acquire by using only third-party growth services.
Instead of buying followers do your best to build an engaged audience interested in your content. Hope the advice above will help you do that.
