What are Bots on Instagram

Being one of the most rapidly-growing social media platforms, Instagram is moving forward by leaps and bounds. It introduces new features and updates every passing day, prompting users to develop alongside it. When all methods of promotion have already been tested but haven’t brought coveted results, users start giving in to a forbidden temptation. Have you managed to guess what’s it all about? Instagram Bots! They make a semblance of activity in your account and create an illusion of your popularity. Instagram users are seduced with high ER (engagement rate) that bots can generate for their accounts, therefore, they join the game without rumination. Is it safe to use bots on Instagram? What benefits and harm can they bring to your account? Let’s cut to the chase and find out the answers.

What are Instagram bots?

Knowing that “bot” is short for “robot”, we can understand that it is somehow connected with the automatic performance of actions. However, bots are programmed the way that they have some kind of resemblance to a person while doing the tasks.

So, what are Instagram bots? These are mainly empty accounts that follow other accounts, upvote, comment, view Stories, etc. Being an automation tool, bots perform actions instead of you within Instagram.

There is no content in their accounts as well as followers and sometimes even avatars. It is believed that their activity helps to increase reach and ER in your account. To be honest, they can assist you in getting a fine number of likes and followers, but nothing more. We are going to discuss it further.

How do bots on Instagram work?

As far as you understood, bots imitate the behavior of real users: from simple following to reposting. Usually, their activity is abnormal. They engage and interact with other accounts like mad. Instagram bots randomly like, comment, follow by the targets you’ve assigned. By targets, I mean hashtags, location, and so on. There is no guarantee that people bots have interacted with will reciprocate your effort. However, sometimes driven by curiosity they can pay a visit to your account, stay there, and/or react to your posts in response.

Although authenticity and simplicity are core values of 2020, people are still there for Instagram bots. They can’t stop artificially inflating Instagram stats. There are still a lot of apps and programs that can easily help anyone automate interactions within Instagram. Compared to 2019, the demand for bots has slackened. Instagram is actively struggling with automation, therefore, it’s not that easy to get around its refined algorithm at present.

5 reasons why you should avoid using Instagram bots

It makes no sense for anyone to use Instagram bots. Sooner or later, this will become known to the audience that you have been cheating on them. These machinations will not lead to anything but a loss of interest in your account and injury to your reputation. If I have not managed to convince you of refusing the idea of automation yet, here are 7 other reasons to avoid using Insta bots.

They kill your ER

One of the reasons why people are tempted by Instagram bots is increasing ER. Actually, they rather kill it than increase. When it comes to Instagram follow bots, they are dead weight and show no activity. It affects (read lowers) the percentage of engagement in your account. Instagram like bots is the same story. Their likes don’t bring any value.

In addition, as soon as your followers find out that you resort to foul play, they will feel deceived and stop displaying an interest in your persona. Again, this will undermine your ER, and it will be not that easy to rehabilitate it.

Negative influence on ranking

As you are likely to know, Instagram has dropped the chronological order of posts. According to the relatively new algorithm, Instagram considers your interests and shows the content that you are most likely to appreciate. The more real audience sees your post, the more actions are taken in relation to it. When your account is overloaded with bots, the interaction with your content is obviously lower. It means that your posts have a low chance to appear at the beginning of the feed and be seen by more users.

Awkward comments on your behalf

Bots are bots. They are not able to write meaningful comments. All they can do is to leave emojis or write too trivial word combinations. It happens very often that these comments do not match the picture or the caption at all. This is that very awkward moment.

It’s half the problem if such comments are left under your posts. However, if bots write them on your behalf under other people’s posts, it’s a disaster. Soulless phrases and also inappropriate most frequently. In pursuit of popularity, you will hardly get it and just make yourself look stupid.

Messy feed

Bots clog up your pastime on Instagram. They make your feed a mess if you follow a heap of strange accounts waiting that they will follow you in response. It will be impossible to scroll to your friends’ posts because the ones from random people will get them buried. I am saying on behalf of folk wisdom: “Messy feed – messy mind!” Not sure this is what you strive for.

Insta Bots scare potential advertisers off

If you are engaged in the promotion of a personal brand and want to do advertising for companies, you should know that your cheating will be revealed one day. Marketers treat advertising budgets with care, so they check every blogger for honesty. If you have ever become keen on fake followers, comments, likes, it will definitely come out, and you will find yourself in an awkward position.

At present, lucky for marketers, there are plenty of tools for checking bloggers.

trendHERO with its 90+ metrics is a godsend. It allows analyzing any Insta profile very quickly and getting a full picture of its stats and metrics. One of the charts “Audience Type” shows mass followers and suspicious accounts in the percentage of the entire audience. It’s obvious that if 50 % are mass followers and 20% percent are suspicious accounts, an influencer resorts to cheating.

Have a look at the chart “Followers Growth”. Basically, the number of followers should grow gradually if it is organic growth. If you see a sharp leap in the growth, then in 99% of cases this points to a cheat or Giveaway.

ER is also worth considering while checking. A low engagement rate indicates that the account has either bad content or followers were bought. Bots do not show any activity on the account and significantly reduce engagement.

Can you get banned on Instagram for using bots?

Using bots is against the rules of Instagram. It’s a violation in its pure form. Instagram is actively struggling with bots by blocking and deleting suspicious accounts. The service is experienced enough in finding fakes, therefore, cleanings are quite regular. As soon as Instagram detects bots among your followers, they will be destroyed and there is a risk of account blocking. Social media can warn you for the first time you are suspected of dishonest actions, but for the second your account will be either shadow-banned or forever deleted.

Familiarize yourself with Instagram Policy, and make sure that the platform really bans for using bots.

Are there any benefits of using Instagram bots?

To put it shortly, there are no benefits. Everyone with good intentions towards you will tell you the truth. Ecological methods of promotion are time-, money-, and energy-consuming. However, they are worth making an effort because they provide a long-term effect. Bots for Instagram are not an option. Instagram automation is an appealing trap that inveigles and then is difficult to get out of. It’s one of the dangers of Instagram that hooks a lot of people.

Nevertheless, I am going to tell you about the benefits-delusions that tempt people to get into this thankless game.

An Instant Result

The audience is growing at the speed of light, comments are written immediately. You don’t have to spend months and years creating original content to grab the spotlight. Quite an attractive option from the first sight but later you will see that’s a total failure. After a while your fake audience will gradually decrease: Insta arm of the law will block bots. Immediate results are usually unstable and, as a result, you will end up with nothing but a damaged reputation.

Shortcut method of becoming an influencer

People still believe that a nice number in the graph “followers” is a decisive factor for advertisers. No, it is not. At present, the engagement rate is way more important than other stats. As I have already mentioned, bots do not generate any activity in your account, therefore, the percentage of ER will be in a sorry state. Cheating, on the contrary, carries you away further from becoming an influencer. Don’t be tricked!

Fixed budget

If you use third-party tools for buying bots, you are likely to pay a certain amount of money and not go beyond it. When promoting an account using traditional methods like targeting, it is impossible to calculate the amount of funds to be invested in advance. In the case of specially designed tools, the price remains stable. But you remember from the first item that the result you get is unstable. A stable price doesn’t save the situation in general. You will just waste your “fixed budget” and then regret a vain attempt.

Basically, all the “benefits” are connected with the audience’s growth rate. However, such a quick result kills your Insta account instead of making it thrive.

How to check any account on Instagram for fake followers?

To keep the budget safe and get the coveted results after an influencer marketing campaign, it’s vital to analyze the audience of chosen social media stars before the start. Besides marketers and advertisers, common users are also interested in checking their friends or acquaintances for cheating on Instagram.

Let’s consider two key ways of checking any Insta accounts for bots and learn to detect deceivers.

A manual check

It is quite complicated and draining to do such investigations manually. However, there are supporters of this method who really enjoy the process.

So, the first thing to take a careful look is the list of followers. If there are a lot of accounts without avatars and content among them and, what is more, they follow more than 1000 people, you have got on the scent of fake accounts. Another important metric to look intently at is ER. Correlate the number of likes and comments to posts and the total number of followers, and you will calculate ER this way. Having thousands of followers but 50 likes and three comments look suspicious, doesn’t it? Comments are another story. The artificiality of 100 comments in the spirit of “nice” and “beautiful” cannot go unnoticed.

You can dive deeper and deeper into this analysis. However, if the account under examination raises doubts already at this stage, then do not waste your time and feel free to reward yourself with a medal for revealing a cheat.

Using specially designed tools

Special tools that assume the responsibility for checking is an easier but still effective method. All you have to do is to switch on analytical thinking and attention to details. Oh, yes, and switch off aspirations for justice. Why? Every other Instagram user has ever resorted to buying bots, therefore, the metrics found are unlikely to completely please you.

One of the main advantages of such tools is that they give data that you are unlikely to collect manually.

trendHERO provides a detailed report with an array of metrics such as quality audience, ER, post frequency and percentage of likes and their spread, type of comments, etc. Being a skilled digital detective, it will be light and breezy for you to tell the true from the false with the aid of a great tool.

By the way, it takes just a few minutes to get the metrics from trendHERO compared to a manual check that is time-consuming.

I would recommend going over the manual analysis of simple metrics where cheating can be seen with the unaided eye. And after to get down to a deeper investigation.

Conclusion

It’s a popular fallacy that Instagram bots can improve your account exposure and bring your Instagram presence to the next level. Actually, it is a slippery path that is worth neither taking nor even considering. Instagram bots destroy accounts and are able to do just harm. Meanwhile, organic promotion is a long-term strategy but highly effective to create a meaningful presence on social media. Be smart and do not fall for such a treacherous trap.