Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
There’s no denying that social media is the latest and greatest frontier for marketers. For a long while, the internet was like the wild west, with marketing teams fighting to be the first to discover the secret formula to capture the broader audience. Thankfully, we’re long past that chaotic era; best practices for social media marketing have been established.
One of the things the best marketing teams do is automate how their company uses Instagram. More than 500 million people are on Instagram every day, and 1 billion people use it every month. Of those 1 billion people, 80% follow a business profile, and more than 200 million users engage with a business profile every day. This is a huge market that businesses are desperately trying to tap into, as shown by the more than 25 million business profiles on the platform today. Smart marketers use specialized tools designed to help automate the many different tasks involved in Instagram profile management. Also there are private providers that can help you to do that as well. All of them are reviewed on Proxyway.
Discovery and following (or unfollowing) of accounts
One of the key parts of the Instagram experience is the ability to find and follow new accounts. Most Instagram tools allow you to follow accounts automatically. All you have to do is give it a few accounts to start with and the hashtags you want it to follow. The tool will automatically start following these accounts and scan the hashtags for new accounts.
Every time you follow an account, a notification appears on the user’s profile page, letting them know that you’ve followed it. This essentially guarantees the user will see your page’s name and give them a quick link to check out your business profile. You can even set how many new accounts your tool should follow every day, so its activities appear natural to Instagram (this is important if you don’t want to get blocked).
It’s estimated that about 1 in 10 users that you follow will actually follow you back. You don’t want your business profile page to have more accounts followed than followers; a bad follower ratio looks terrible on your profile and makes you look desperate for follows. Instagram tools can help you by automating the unfollowing process, too. The tool follows new accounts using the method described above, then, after a certain period, if an account doesn’t give you a follow back, the tool unfollows them.
Scraping follower information from competitors’ pages
Whether you’re an established business with tons of followers or you’re just getting started with social media marketing on Instagram, one of the most effective ways to discover potential customers that are interested in the kinds of products you’re selling is by checking out your competitors’ pages. Many Instagram tools let you automate this process; give it the accounts of your competition then let the tool do the rest. Once it’s done the work, you’ll end up with a huge list of accounts that you can engage with through direct messaging or just by sending a follow.
Post scheduling
Your company’s Instagram page should always appear active, so followers know that you’ve invested in the platform and ready to engage with them. You don’t want to upload too many posts in one day, however, as every post you make pushes the ones before it down in page feed before users can see or interact with it. To maximize post engagement, space out the frequency of your posts. Many Instagram tools let you do this automatically, so you can create a batch of posts at once then order your bots to post them following a predetermined schedule.
Automated liking and commenting
Liking and commenting on posts are two great ways to encourage discussion and engagement with your brand. Liking an account is a quick and cost-free way to have your account appear on the home feeds of the people that you’ve liked. By simply liking a post or picture, you’ve announced the existence of your business page to users that might not have ever known about you otherwise. Much like account following, this allows users to browse through your business page and start following you.
Automated commenting is a great way to start conversations about your product or brand. This is a bit riskier than giving out likes since generic ones can be detected by the Instagram algorithms. You also run the risk of appearing as a spam to users who might be inclined to flag your account. Spend some time crafting neutral but positive comment options that your Instagram bot can rotate through so you don’t appear lifeless or fake to users.
Use multiple accounts to boost productivity
Smart marketers do all of the automated tasks above with multiple accounts. This not only lets you do all of this work at a faster rate; it also appears as a natural activity to followers and other users. However, Instagram doesn’t allow for multiple accounts to be created from a single location. Businesses get around this restriction by using proxies to make each of their bots appear to be accessing Instagram from a different location.
Remember, though these Instagram tools can help make the work of managing your Instagram business profile much easier, you must design the tasks it performs with your followers and target audience in mind. Create posts and foster discussion that serves their interests, and you’ll soon have an army of loyal followers that not only buy your products but also help promote and market your brand through word of mouth.
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