The Instagram Account Growth – How To Check If It’s Organic Or Automated

Social media is used by about 3 billion users worldwide and it means each of them has at least one account in a social network. Let’s take Instagram as an example.

Individual users, celebrities, businesses, bloggers – all of them tend to set up their social media presence there to gain more popularity and engagement.

The more followers you have, the more solid presence and influence your account perform. This affects the opportunity to start earning on Instagram, boosting products and service, attracting new customers to your brand.

To achieve this you can study the large number of tips and tricks on how to enlarge your followers number and grow your community – just browse the Internet with “grow my Instagram account” search.

You’ll get the results with the articles from hundreds of blogs with the descriptions how you should act on Instagram and how you shouldn’t. But basically all the advice can be related to two common types: organic and automated social media growth.

What is the difference?

Actually it’s quite simple: when choosing to grow your account organically, it’s your activity that matters.

To attract more followers to your account you should post regularly, create a bright theme for your photos, add right hashtags and geotags to your posts, run contests and make other useful steps. But the most effective way is surely the engagement.

As the users are constantly liking and commenting on Instagram, the smartest approach is to act the same way – liking the posts of the users from your niche, following them and commenting their posts really helps to draw their attention so they will like and follow you back.

That’s what it means to grow your followers organically.

But there is another method called Instagram automation. In this case the Instagram bots make the actions instead of you. Their behavior is usually targeted on specific hashtags, geotags or users: they like photos on your behalf, follow and unfollow other users and even comment their posts.

All this engagement is directed to boost your following with real people as this way you have a larger social media exposure plus you don’t need to spend all your time on Instagram.

The both ways have their pros and cons and it’s always up to you to decide which of them will be useful for your engagement strategy meanwhile automated or bot-driven growth considered a grey scheme by many social media experts.

Checking other users strategies

When you make up your mind on how other popular bloggers and brands are getting their followers you try to look for the means to figure it out.

You can use the most general one: follow a specific user on Instagram and see in your following feed how many likes, comments and follows he makes regularly.

This way is the most well-known but indeed has a lot of flaws: you need to spend much efforts and time to highlight the activity of a certain user, and even if you succeed the results won’t be accurate as Instagram following feed algorithm doesn’t display all the user actions.

There is an alternative and more effortless method that you can use: monitoring. There is the tool Snoopreport that tracks Instagram user activity.

It’s useful when you need to research the competitors growth strategy, your customers preferences, define new trends on Instagram.

The service provides likes, comments and follows made by users each week in the reports that are effective for exploring user insights and user behavior tendencies.

So Snoopreport can implement the required user activity tracking: all you need is to pick the Instagram users whose engagement strategy you’re interested in, add their usernames in a dashboard and set up the period of time the service will monitor them.

Even 2-3 weeks are already enough to make conclusions on the user’s behavior on Instagram.

Each week you can check the results of monitoring to see likes and follows that the tracked user made. This data will give you insights of a growth strategy of any public Instagram account.

You just need to compare the stats with the average user behavior. The usual activity can vary from 50 to 500 likes and 20-30 follows a week.

However if the user makes more than 600 likes a week you can think he uses mass liking techniques to grow his followers count. If more than 1000 likes you can be sure!:)

The same with the follows – the organic growth doesn’t suppose to increase more than 20 users followed, if you notice the larger number, be aware of automate follow-to-follow method used.

As now you’re acquainted with an easy and effective way to define a user account growth strategy on Instagram, feel free to use it for your future research!

The data for this article is provided by Snoopreport, the service which tracks Instagram user actions such as likes, comments and follows.

It suits not only for the use by marketers who need to learn the competitors, target audience and influencers activity but also for individuals: they can see friends Instagram activity, track Instagram comments of their kids, see every photo a boyfriend/girlfriend likes on Instagram.