Team meeting on whiteboard

It is clear to any business wanting to succeed in the 21st Century that Instagram is a must. The benefits to Instagram appears to know no bounds, with 1 billion monthly users and surpassing 500 million active daily users everyone wants a slice of the pie.

Instagram is a far cry from its original ‘cool pic of what I’m doing today’ concept in 2010 and has grown into a tool that can generate sales and leads and potentially thousands of pounds of business.

When it comes to setting up your first Business Instagram Account the 0 followers mark can seem particularly sad. That’s why many businesses’ (and Instagram influencers) turn to Instagram growth tools to give their account a quick and easy boost with an Instagram growth tool app. I should outline here that there are a few different things on the market: engagement and growth apps, the ability to buy followers and likes and scheduling and/or profile optimising apps. This blog focuses on the former.

Upleap: The trial

The journey of profile growth seemed a bit of a minefield, so I decided to try a free trial of one of the most advertised engagement and growth apps: Upleap.

On first appearances at least, Upleap looks like a struggling Instagrammer’s dream. The website is cool, easy to use and interactive and has a good balance of information, explanation of what the app will do, and glowing 5-star reviews about how many followers users have personally gained. Happy days. I should open with saying you do have to enter your Instagram username and password and turn off two-step authorisation to use the app. It’s terrifying, but you need to get your head around this before you begin using a growth tool.

You select some accounts that are similar to yours and a ‘theme’ or ‘category’ that your profile would fall under, and then a minimum of 3 hashtags for your ‘account manager’ to follow and engage with.

upleap

The USP that this particular app boasts of is an ‘account manager’ that basically looks after your Instagram account for you. They will like and comment on posts, watch stories, live videos and engage with profiles that are similar to yours in order to boost your engagement and therefore ‘organically’ grow your following. Whilst Upleap does not explicitly promise that this is a ‘human’ manager and not a bot, they certainly allude to the idea. This is a screenshot from my ‘account manager’ summary – I have since, with the help of google, realised that this is the same ‘manager’ many are paired with, and all images of ‘managers’ appear to be stock photos.


The Free Trial only lasts 3 days, the paid packages start from $39 per month and go up to $99 per month with different benefits. During the free trial, I noticed you have absolutely no

control about what posts, profiles or accounts are targeted, and the activity appeared to happen in a flurry of about an hour or two each day – (for the first 15 hours absolutely nothing happened). I gained only 2 followers during the trial. Both unfollowed less than 24 hours after I gained them (leading me to believe they were bot accounts and I, therefore, had little promise of proper engagement with my account).

This, in fairness, could have been because I used the trial on my personal Instagram account and it was difficult to match up appropriate ‘themes’ to my general day-to-day Instagram, as well as hashtags. I imagine the tool could be more successful for a business or brand account where themes, interests, and hashtags could be chosen more effectively and accurately. That said, I did not experience any increase in following or engagement with this tool and would certainly not recommend paying for the privilege.

 

 

Benefits of Growth Apps

Whilst Upleap specifically did not appear to grow engagement or following there are some benefits to growth & engagement apps. If Upleap’s business model was true to form, the idea of a real human ‘account manager’ performing lots of mundane tasks which mean your profile shoots up in engagement, would save most people valuable hours of trying to grow an account. The idea of targeting similar profiles and certain hashtags certainly has a clever premise. Even the use of a bot instead of ‘human’ manager, could still save vital time if used discreetly. On checking google reviews some people absolutely swear by growth apps such as Upleap and similar. However, these reviews to me always appear spammy and dodgy (written by Upleap or the app developers themselves as opposed to happy paying customers) –  and there are far more negative reviews than positive.

Risk of Growth Apps

There are a wide variety of risks to growth apps. First, the obvious: you have to surrender your Instagram password to the app. Whether the app works with a ‘human’ or ‘bot’ this does not feel good, and you have to constantly ‘allow access’ from random places in the country to your account.  Particularly for a business, the jury is still out on exactly how safe this is for your own Instagram or Instagram accounts you may be running for different clients (GDPR Friendly?).

Secondly, Instagram was made first and foremost by the developing creators for authenticity and Instagram still prides itself on this. As such, Instagram’s algorithms (much like Google’s) are constantly updating and improving. This means the gram becomes increasingly good at catching and recognising ‘bot behaviour’; this includes following a large number of people quickly and then unfollowing, lots of random likes, and continuous comments that appear generic. As bot use breaches the terms of use, Instagram can freeze and even block your account if it picks up this behaviour from your account (when I initially read about this, it turned my 3-day free trial into quite a hair raising experience).

This does also mean that with any app update from Instagram, your tool app could be a sitting duck for quite some time until it figures a way around the algorithm – bad news if you’re paying $99 per month; yikes. Even if the engagement your bot executes does, in fact, boost your following, it’s rare that this will boost actual engagement on your posts and a large follower count and low engagement is a big Instagram no-no. Lastly, ‘spammy’ or ‘generic’ comments are quite easy to spot and putting the risk of Instagram ousting your account aside, from a customer point of view, your account can end up looking spammy, untrustworthy and unappealing.

Yikes. Don’t end up like Caroline.

Overall, half an hour or so on Google will convince most people that the best way to genuinely improve your engagement or following on Instagram is hard, manual graft. Keep it in-line with your brand, and make genuine likes, comments and posts that people want to engage with. I would liken bot-using growth apps to black-hat SEO practices. These may shoot you up Google’s ranking quickly but ultimately, Google will suss you out and the tactic is not sustainable. Similar to good SEO practice that Google will send you up the rankings for, good organic engagement will see your Instagram profile grow. An alternative, much-liked practice for engagement boosting is the use of ‘Instagram pods’. This is when a group of brands or influencers, create a social media group message and notify each other when they post something new, and everyone in the ‘pod’ will like and comment on the photo.  This way you are creating genuine, organic engagement. An alternative which many celebrities use is, posting your new post on your story, adding a ‘tap here’ icon which links to your new post. (People look at stories more often than the static feed).   The takeaway message in terms of growing your Instagram following is, if it’s quick, easy and (too good to be true) then, most likely, it is.

PING US A MESSAGE 💬

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