Managing Instagram accounts takes lots of time and effort. Replying to comments, direct messages, and continuously search for new influencers to engage with can take up hours in a day.

Some marketers rely on Instagram automation to do some of these tedious tasks. In this article, we will review the pro’s and con’s to help you determine if Instagram automation is worth it for you.

What is Instagram Automation?

Instagram automation works by leveraging software, often known as “bots” to carry out certain tasks such as:

– Likes

– Follow/Unfollow

– Comments

– Direct Messages

– Posting Images and Stories

– Deleting Posts

Bots also have lots of filters to make sure it’s only engaging with users you’re looking to target. With filters, you can target users based on:

– Gender

– Location

– Not Private or Do Not have a Profile Picture

– Last Active

– Follow Ratio

– English Accounts Only

– Who they Follow

– And a lot more…

With bots, you also control how often they are interacting with each user and when. You have control over:

– When the Bot is On or Off

– How Many Actions It Should Complete in An Hour/Day/Week

– Delay Between Each Action

Though the bot has the option to conduct many actions, Instagram is still a social platform, and we advise not to use bots for everything. If you are interested in automation, be sure to read this article: The Do’s and Don’ts When Using Instagram Automation

Benefits of Instagram Automation

1. Perform Tasks that are Beyond Human Abilities

We can’t imagine if you had to check ten different things manually before you follow a user. These are things you also can’t avoid if you’re targetting a specific group of customers, or if you want to make sure the users you’re engaging with are active on Instagram.

2. Saves Time

Unfortunately, you can’t just follow a whole bunch of users or like a few hundred photos in an hour and call it a day. Instagram has action restrictions that only allows you to engage so many times in an hour. Going past the limits will hit your account with an action block or a temporary ban.

To stay active on Instagram, you need to log back into Instagram every hour to engage with users. That’s incredibly time-consuming and unpractical to set aside 30 minutes every hour to be on Instagram.

3. Engage with More People

It’s difficult to keep track of how many posts you like, or people you followed in a particular hour to keep below Instagram’s action thresholds. You will either end up play it too safe and end up way below the thresholds, or overshoot and end up temporarily banned for 24-48 hours.

Instagram bots let you consistently stay within the Instagram thresholds and safely engage with more people every hour. One thing to note is that Instagram’s action threshold is not a fixed number. The thresholds will grow depending on how active you are on your Instagram.

4. Gain More Followers

With more engagement, it’s a no-brainer that you will receive more followers. With automation, we’ve seen increases from 50%-200% a day. From experience, we’ve managed fully automated accounts where the bot would handle everything from posting, liking posts, and follow/unfollowing users, gaining on average 300 followers a day.

5. On 24/7

The best part about bots is that you don’t need to be available for your bot to work. You can be on vacation, relaxing on the Carribean beach, and your bot will continue to operate at 100%.

6. Easy to Get Started

It’s incredibly easy to get started with Instagram bots. There’s no coding required, and the tools are very user-friendly. In addition, there are lots of guides on the internet to help you get everything setup correctly. For those new to Instagram automation, we would recommend you checking out ImRisto’s guide to FollowLiker: The Ultimate FollowLiker Instagram Tutorial

7. It’s Cheap

For $60 one-time and $6 a month, you can get started with FollowLiker. In comparison, there are Instagram bot alternatives such as Popamatic which hires real assistants to perform your actions. Popamatic will cost you $39 a month.

Disadvantages of Instagram Automation

1. It’s Against Instagram’s Terms of Service

“We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or otherwise accessing any content on the Service via automated means, including but not limited to, user profiles and photos (except as may be the result of standard search engine protocols or technologies used by a search engine with Instagram’s express consent).”

Bots rely on automated means to gather data from Instagram. For the bot to function, it needs to collect data on usernames, profile information, post data and much more. Most bot tools are smart enough not to use Instagram’s public API to scrape data, but it relies on its scripts to scrape and cache the information within the tool.

Breaking Instagram’s terms of service will often result in a ban or restriction. In our experience, we’ve never had an account permanently deleted. As long you’re careful and are not too overly aggressive with your automation settings, you can easily fly under the radar.

2. Easy to Learn, Hard to Master

Automation bots are unpredictable when you’re just getting started. There are horror stories where we see bots comment love it on posts where someone has passed away. That’s why we recommend you start with just follow/unfollow and like actions when you first start out.

Getting maximum results from the bots also takes time and continuous improvement. To be effective, you can’t just set up your bot once and forget about it. You need to understand how to track which filters are not working, and frequently adjust your bot settings.

Is Instagram Automation Worth It?

We say completely. Unless you’re blindly setting up your bot, or managing multiple accounts without experience, it’s highly unlikely you will get banned from Instagram. We’ve been using Instagram automation for years, managing over 100+ accounts without issues to date.

Instagram automation isn’t a complete solution to becoming an Influencer or succeeding on Instagram. Automating engagement will only take you so far and is no substitute for low-quality content. For more ways to grow your Instagram account outside of Instagram automation, you must read: Q&A: How Can I Get Followers on Instagram for a Clothing Line?

What’s your experience with Instagram automation? Let us know down in the comments.