Social media has become an essential business platform in this modern world. In particular, Instagram, with over a billion active users, is an effective channel you can incorporate into your digital marketing strategy.
However, building a significant presence and achieving success on Instagram can be time-consuming. Since managing your Instagram account is only one of the numerous tasks on your daily to-do list, it’s easy to slip up on your Instagram marketing strategies.
Fortunately, technology has an answer–Instagram automation tools. This article covers the basics of Instagram automation tools and bots, as well as the good and the bad of these automation tools.
What Are Instagram Automation Tools?
Instagram automation tools allow you to deal with manual tasks efficiently. It can automate several Instagram marketing tasks by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and all kinds of other clever technology.
Some companies can use automation tools to schedule and publish posts at specific times. Others use it to automatically reply to direct messages and interact with the audience. Depending on the tool you have, other tasks can be automated, including following users or replying to comments.
The Benefits of Instagram Automation Tools
-
Save Time
The most obvious advantage of an Instagram automation tool is that it helps you save time.
As mentioned before, Instagram marketing is time-consuming. To become popular on Instagram, you need to be active as possible. This means you need to create new content and publish them strategically. You also need to like and comment on posts to engage your audience. You need to follow relevant Instagram accounts and follow-back people. Plus, you also need to gather insights and analyze what’s working and what’s not. Doing these activities can help set up your Instagram success.
Unfortunately, you can’t keep this up every day. You need to monitor other social media accounts and do other business-related activities.
Instead of manually doing these activities every single day, you can rely on automation tools. With these tools, you can free up time for more important tasks while still achieving a higher reach and engagement among your Instagram community.
-
Increase Followers And Engagement
Automation tools allow you to automatically interact and follow other Instagram accounts that are relevant to your industry niche. Since you become more visible and active on Instagram, it increases your reach. As a result, it also increases the chances of users following your account to see what you have to offer.
In addition, with automation tools, you don’t have to manually search for users that are within your target audience. Some Instagram bots and tools can find them for you based on your preferred settings.
That said, it’s not enough to just increase your followers. You also need to engage them so they won’t have to tap on the ‘Unfollow’ button. Engaging them also ensures word-of-mouth marketing, sharing your services and products with their close circle.
The problem is that engaging them can be cumbersome. However, with Instagram automation tools, you can automate your interactions, which also helps in improving audience engagement.
-
Drive More Sales
Modern-day consumers now search online before buying. In particular, people are using social media to discover new products and taking their time to examine whether or not a particular product or service is suitable for them.
Thus, as a business, you’ve probably experienced an influx of inquiries from potential and interested customers. With an automation tool, you can easily and quickly handle these inquiries. You can configure automation to answer customer questions, provide upselling opportunities and push them down through the marketing funnel.
In addition to driving more sales, automation tools can also improve your customer service experience, especially after-sales. With the right tools, you can respond promptly and help users solve their issues quickly, increasing customer satisfaction.
-
Affordable And Always Available
Instagram automation tools and bots don’t go to sleep unless you shut them down. This means that you can program your software to handle certain Instagram marketing tasks while you’re asleep or on a vacation.
In addition, most Instagram automation software is affordable. You also get to choose from various service providers so you can find the right one for your budget.
Risks Of Instagram Automation Tools
-
Account Restriction Or Banning
According to Instagram’s Terms of Service, scraping, crawling, or accessing any content on the platform via automation is prohibited.
Since these tools rely on automation to gather data from Instagram and carry out required actions, you may be breaching their Terms of Service and risk your account being restricted or banned.
-
Potentially Damage Your Reputation
Artificial intelligence may have advanced in the past years, but it’s not ready to replace real human interaction. This can result in low-quality engagement and awkward situations that can damage your business’s reputation.
For instance, if you’re using an Instagram bot to comment on posts or send generic messages to thousands of people, it’s unlikely that you’ll gain new and quality fans. Since bots don’t consider the captions or context of posts or comments, this can lead to a lot of awkward situations. It may even leave inappropriate interactions that can be damaging to your brand.
-
Messy Feed
Some businesses use an auto-follow bot. Following thousands of accounts can allow you to gain new followers in return. This may seem harmless, but doing so can leave you with a random feed. As the bot adds random followers to your account, you can expect posts from relevant accounts to get buried.
Take note that while you can set a bot to follow accounts based on your preferences, some irrelevant accounts can still slip through.
Take Away
A little Instagram automation won’t hurt your business. Most businesses can benefit from these automation tools and help them improve marketing results and ROI. While there’s nothing wrong with using these tools, relying too heavily on them may backfire.
Blindly setting up an automation tool and using it to replace you for all Instagram activities, it’s highly likely that you’ll get poor engagement from your audience, experience reputational damage, or worse, get banned from Instagram.
So, instead of using an automation tool to replace human interaction, choose to use them with the focus of reducing repetitive tasks and streamlining your workflow.