Move over Facebook: Instagram is taking over, slowly but surely. Because while Facebook might still have the most users, Instagram is rapidly gaining in popularity, particularly with younger age groups. But the best part about Instagram is that it’s such a great platform for businesses: out of 1 billion accounts and over (who are active every single month!), about 80% of them actually follow at least a business on Instagram.

But all of this opportunity brings some challenges to the table as well: the competition between brands can be fierce. With so much content being shared every day, it’s tough to get people to notice you and engage with you. So, is there a way to get results from Instagram fast?

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to automate your Instagram and grow your followers and engagement – and just to make sure I’m clear about this from the start, it’s all about quality, genuine followers and engagement: those users who actually want to interact with your brand.

Instagram growth: where to start

Growing your Instagram account can be done – don’t worry if you’ve only just started using it and feeling overwhelmed.

All you really need to do, especially if you’re struggling to grow your account – beyond posting quality content, consistently and using the right hashtags – is to…Engage.

It’s that simple.

OK, maybe not that simple, but at the basis of most Instagram growth strategies is engagement.

It’s all about connecting with relevant people, engaging with them and ultimately, getting them to want to engage with you in return.

This is what will get more people to follow you, what will make people want to leave comments on your posts and share them, what will get them to view your Stories and so on.

Here are some of the best practices and tips for boosting your Instagram followers and engagement:

• Follow relevant people regularly (they might not all follow you back – and that’s OK! – but you’ll get some great connections out of it and that’s what’s really matters after all)
• Nurture relationships with followers by engaging with them, whether it’s liking their posts, watching their Stories or leaving comments on their posts (this will help keep them engaged, checking out your content and remembering your brand)
• Get people’s attention by engaging with them first: whenever you encounter an interesting account, you can start building a relationship with them by engaging with their content in some way (likes, comments, views, etc.)

Beyond all this, you’ll also need to post new updates on a regular basis – preferably, at least one post per day, every day. That said, the more active you are, the better!

Plus, make sure to research hashtags and use the best ones to reach as many people as possible – that too can help you get more followers and engagement.

And if you’re worried that all this will simply take up too much of your time…don’t be:

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to automate your #Instagram and grow your followers and engagement ” quote=”How to automate your #Instagram and grow your followers and engagement”]

How to automate your Instagram and grow your followers and engagement

So, how can you generate real Instagram results – followers, comments, views, likes – without spending all of your time finding and engaging with people?

Quite simply…you use an Instagram automation tool that does it all for you.

And I’ve found one that does pretty much anything you can think of: from handling your comments, likes and follows to posting and scheduling your Instagram updates – and that tool is Instazood.

There are plenty of tools and Instagram bots that promise they’ll grow your engagement and followers almost instantly; Instazood, on the other hand, focuses more on helping you get real followers and engagement and on ensuring that you’re always respecting Instagram guidelines.

And look, while it’s great to have lots of followers, it’s not necessarily worth it if those followers aren’t genuine; i.e. people who are genuinely interested in your business and your posts.

Think of it this way: having lots of followers that don’t care about your content is like getting lots of traffic to your website, only most of them leave your website after seconds and none of them take any action whatsoever on your website.

Basically, my point is this: if you’re going to use an Instagram growth tool or bot, use one that will help you grow your genuine followers – not just any followers, no matter who they are or where they are in the world.

Back to Instazood though, this is why I like this tool (apart from the fact that it also has scheduling and comment management features): it’s not just about growing your followers and engagement, but it’s about helping you get relevant followers and engagement from relevant people.

So, while you might not get thousands of followers overnight, you’ll be getting followers that will continue to check out your posts and engage with you – or at least for as long as you keep posting great content.

Here’s how it works.

Once you’ve created your account (you get 3 free days to try it out, by the way) and connected your Instagram account, you’ll be taken directly to your dashboard where you can start setting things up.

One great place to start is by setting up so-called Targets; these are basically signals that tell top Instagram bot what kinds of followers would be interested in your account:

There are several different targets that you can set here to start automating your Instagram:

• Similar Instagram accounts: are there any similar Instagram accounts that have followers that form your target audience? These could be competitors or influencers from your niche who target the same audience. You can add them by their Instagram name or you can even upload a file with multiple accounts to save you time
• Locations: if you only serve certain locations (be they countries, cities or even streets) you can target these specific locations – likewise, this is to ensure you’re getting highly targeted followers, people who can actually be your customers
• Hashtags: another great to find targeted followers is by the hashtags they use. Research hashtags beforehand. Plus, like before, you can upload multiple hashtags in bulk

Quick Tip: If you want to discover more people, then use hashtags that a higher usage rate. However, if you want to make sure that you’ll get more targeted people, don’t use hashtags that are too popular (hashtags with hundreds of thousands or millions of posts).

On the other hand, If you want to make sure that most of the people you find are truly targeted, then go for highly niche hashtags – such as hashtags used only in specific locations and generally, hashtags with fewer posts on average (but make sure they’re definitely still used enough!

Once you’ve set all of these targets up – and I encourage you to experiment with various targets to see how it affects your results – Instazood will come into action and start engaging on your behalf, as per your targets: following relevant users, liking their posts and leaving comments on their posts. It will make sure that it’s acting normally so that it’s not taking too many actions; it even has a “night pause” option, which stops all actions for a few hours, every day.

This way, you can make sure you’re not going to get your account suspended or anything of the sort by following and interacting with too many users.

As for how the comments feature works, you can create as many “canned comments” as you want, which will then be used to comment on relevant users’ posts:

Back to your targets though, once you’ve set them all up, you should ideally start monitoring your results so that you can optimize your targeting strategy as you go along:

Here, you can not only check your results, but you can also turn and off different actions (enabling or disabling likes, comments or following users).

The tool will show you exactly what results you’ve achieved so far for your account (likes, comments and follows) and it also automatically calculates your conversion rate.

Ideally, you want your conversion rate to be at about 15% or more from the first 24 hours that you’ve set your targets. If your conversion rate is under 15%, then you should revisit your targets an experiment with new ones: perhaps the location you put doesn’t have enough Instagrammers, or the hashtags you were targeting were too niche and not getting enough posts each day.

Even if you’ve got a really good conversion rate from the start, it’s still a good idea to keep trying new ways to improve it: try new hashtags and new target accounts to see how it affects your results.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to automate your #Instagram and grow your followers and engagement with @instazood” quote=”How to automate your #Instagram and grow your followers and engagement with @instazood”]

Before you experiment though (and this is for when you’ve found some good targets) you should give Instazood some time to do its job.

Then, to manage your targets and find out which ones you should change, go to your dashboard and select “1 week” under Time:

This will allow you to see exactly how each of your targets has been performing; more so, you can turn actions on and off, and change those targets that used to perform well, but stopped converting high enough.

Keep trying new accounts to target, new hashtags and, if possible, new locations, – this way, you can continue growing your account at a steady and sure pace – both in terms of engagement and in terms of new followers.

Quick Tip: Use between 3 and 10 targets at a time and just change the ones that stop performing as well as you’d like (i.e. conversion rates of under 15%).

As I mentioned earlier, you can also control the rate at which the Instagram bot takes actions:

Another interesting thing you can do is that you can set all kinds of filters to better target users and posts to interact with:

For example, you can make sure to only interact with posts that are less than a day old. Or, you can make sure to interact only with people of a certain gender (for example, if you’re selling men’s products, you’re going to want to target mostly men).

You can even make sure that you’re only targeting active followers by deciding on a minimum amount of posts per user, as well as skip any business accounts (it would be a bit awkward to start interacting with a competitor by mistake!).

As you might also notice in the previous screenshot, you can also add specific accounts to your black list: accounts that you don’t want to engage with or follow.

Beyond all these features, you can also manage your Instagram with Instazood, from managing your posts, as well as drafting and scheduling them:

To sending DMs and managing and responding to your comments:

You can even catch negative comments automatically so that you can deal with them immediately.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to automate your #Instagram and grow your followers and engagement with @instazood” quote=”How to automate your #Instagram and grow your followers and engagement with @instazood”]

Conclusion

Generating great results from Instagram can take up quite a bit time, but with a tool like Instazood to help, you’ll start seeing more engagement and more followers from the start, while also automating your Instagram. Don’t expect hundreds of new followers in the first day; that wouldn’t be very realistic and would most likely mean you’re getting lots of spammy accounts following you, along with accounts that simply don’t care about your business. But if you set the right targets, monitor your results consistently and keep experimenting with new targets, it will allow you to grow your presence in a natural way, focusing on the right types of followers.