We get it, the life of an influencer, especially early on, can be quite a struggle. Juggling all your commitments, from your full-time job (cause we can’t rely on this line of work just yet), to household chores, the blogging and tons of online marketing just to compete in this busy and creative market; it’s only natural for you to seek out means to fast track the process and get to those sponsor magnet numbers.
And when it comes to social media growth at some point or the other, it will present itself to you in the form of bots.
If you haven’t been bothered by them just yet (consider yourself lucky), they perform a variety of automated functions aimed at growing your online presence.
With some of the most common ones like Instagress and others, handling functions such as auto-liking, following and even commenting! That would account for hours upon hours of social media activity and with prices under 10$ or even less, it’s a no brainer right?
Trust us, it isn’t. The repercussions can be severe…
1. Firstly, You Could Get Banned
The fact is, automation is in strict violation of Instagram’s ‘Terms of Use’,and seeing the kind of damage these things do to the quality of content on the platform and the resulting user experience, it’s for good reason.
2. It Can Hurt Your Image
The extent to which that may happen and the severity of the same would depend on the type of function you pick.
For starters, the worst one would have to be the dreaded and hilariously awkward automated comments.
How do these work? You essentially provide the system with a few options for it to choose from, being as generic as possible of course, and then the hashtags to find relevant posts to your brand, where it uses these pre-determined comments.
The idea behind the tactic is by commenting niceties, the person will take notice, check out your profile, and possibly follow you back. A solid natural growth strategy, but only if you’re comments are actually genuine and valuable in some way.
3. Don’t Blindly Auto Like
Auto liking and following, while relatively safe from potential brand image violations, often result in spam and fake accounts liking back. Or the #LikeForLike community.
While that might help boost your followers’ numbers (brace yourself for massive drop off rates, though), it won’t do much else in terms of engagement either. Not to mention, it completely destroys your feed. A well-organised feed will help you efficiently manage and interact with fellow influencers, some of your best followers and present you with content curation opportunities.
4. Don’t Buy Likes
Another dishonorable mention the bought like. Available on practically every platform at this point, if you’re thinking of employing this shortcut, please don’t!
Believe us, it’s not the kinds of followers you want. They’re either bots or fake accounts, both who get targeted and eliminated frequently. On top of which, on Facebook particularly, they ruin your ability to grow through one of the most effective means of advertising, your existing fanbase! This is one of the most effective means of maximizing engagement and expanding reach amongst other like-minded potential fans.
By opening up your pages to these spammy accounts, you’d be wasting tons of advertising dollar in simply reaching much more of the same.
Now if you’re looking for an alternative just as quick, sorry it just doesn’t exist. Building a thriving online presence takes quality content, genuine activity and above all, resilience. But stick it out, stay motivated, check out our guides, and you’ll get there…with your pages intact.