Anyone use instagress for personal account?

[lemon]

I've got a little photography hobby. I used to post it all on my personal account, but I have many professional connections on there so I decided to make a separate account.

I actually had an account from 3-4 years ago I barely used. Had a few shots on there, so I fired it back up and started posting my work. Usually 2-3 posts a day. I was getting 30-40 likes per photo using just hashtags. Started following people in my niche and slooowly getting a couple followers here and there.

I decided to give Instagress a shot. I set it up to like / comment / follow people that use similar hashtags to the ones I use. Mostly moderately popular tags ranging from 200k posts up to 8+ million. Id say that on average most of my tags have around 900k posts.

Because my tags are pretty specific it was easy to find comments that would apply to almost any photo. MANY of the people directly respond to my comments so I hope that gives some authenticity to my account.

I have been using instagress now for 6 days. I started off using the slow setting intermittently, and then moved to the medium setting, still only running for 8-10 hours per day. Recently I decided just to say "fuck it" and run it on fast speed 24 hours a day, only disabling it temporarily for 10 mins when I do a new post.

So far i've got: 1000 followed. 86 followers. Average likes per image is around 80. Seems like roughly half of the likes I get come from people who received a like, comment or follow from me via instagress.

Surprisingly, a popular magazine / blog in my area with over 100k followers reposted an aerial shot I had taken of a certain spot in my hometown. They gave me a direct shoutout and their photo received over 2500 likes! I noticed this within minutes of them posting and shut off instagress immediately. Surprisingly, I only got a couple followers out of this. I was a little disappointed.

Anyway, I guess my point is I just wanted to ask a few questions from people who have botted an account that did not have any sales or marketing material.

Have you had your accounts banned for using bots?

How many followers/likes do you get per day?

What settings do you use on instagress, or another bot to achieve your results?

 

[Trolling4Dollars]

I'm in exactly the same niche - general photography, my own stuff.

I started out manually - follow, like, comment. Rinse & repeat. Way too labor intensive, just didn't have enough time. I decided to buy FL to automate those repetitive tasks.

I'm getting 200+ followers a day & my photos are averaging around 700 likes / 30 comments.

I won't post my FL settings because you really need to tweak them to your account. I'm sure it's the same with instagress. Look at the basic tutorials & build from there.

Some general observations:

• Following seems to be the only real way to grow. I get about an 80% follow back rate. Liking and / or commenting alone only gets me 10% - 15% at best. I follow up to a certain number of users & then start unfollowing. I'll automatically unfollow anyone who has a higher following / follower ratio & see who sticks around. So far this has worked out well for me. I've grown & my own ratio looks good. Search these boards for InstagramManager. It's a handy piece of software.
• Shoutouts don't work. I've gotten legitimate shoutouts / features & I've also tried purchasing from huge accounts with high engagement. My photos on their pages get thousands of likes but I get VERY FEW follows. I really don't know why.
• Post legitimate comments as often as you can. You may not get a follow out of it, but it builds credibility. Whatever you do, make sure you reply to every comment posted to your photos. I do so & I've built a rabid following. I get at least 10 - 15 comments from the same people within 30 minutes of posting any picture. I love them & they love me back.
• Another small thing, I often times have people comment in their native language. Go to google translate & reply in their language. They'll love it. It's a small thing, but it builds loyal followers.
• Don't buy followers. I tried it "just because" and it's a waste of money. You'll get a bump & then be embarrassed as they fall off over the next week.
• Watch your hashtags. It's a waste of time using any that have over 1M posts. You'll get drowned out by the sheer volume, or by spam. Say you were going to post a picture of clouds. I'd go to the cloud tag & look at each of the most popular photos. See what tags they're using. Look for some of the unique ones & then go do the same thing on each of those. Try to find 20 or so that have 500K or fewer posts. You're much more likely to end up as one of the top posts in those tags.

Hope that helps. Seems like a tough niche. I'm not doing it for money - I just love photography & want my photos to be seen by as many people as possible!

EDIT - added a few things I forgot to mention...

 

[notabot]

I'll automatically unfollow anyone who has a higher following / follower ratio & see who sticks around.

Is the follower/following ratio something you can set in the unfollow settings? I've seen the option there but never understood why there was a ratio setting for unfollows. It's crazy how many people keep track of who unfollowed them on their personal accounts, I never realized how many do it until I started unfollowing my followers who post garbage material. I've never even kept track of it on my other (none-photography) account because I guess I never cared enough to look.

 

[Trolling4Dollars]

Is the follower/following ratio something you can set in the unfollow settings? I've seen the option there but never understood why there was a ratio setting for unfollows. It's crazy how many people keep track of who unfollowed them on their personal accounts, I never realized how many do it until I started unfollowing my followers who post garbage material. I've never even kept track of it on my other (none-photography) account because I guess I never cared enough to look.

No, when I say automatically just meant that was my rule. Not sure of any way to actually do it in FL. I always assumed that unfollower ratio was for your account - not someone else's.

Here's what I do (if there's an easier way someone clue me in). Keep in mind I only do this when I hit 5000 followers or so (some people recommend you wait until 7500).

I use Gramfeed (now Picodash) to download a CSV list of all of my followings, which I open in to Excel. I then delete everything but the username.

Then I use Instagram Manager to download the followers / followings of each of those users. You basically just import the CSV file from the previous step, give it a while & it'll give you all the data. Once I have that, I export it back out to excel, delete everything but the username, followers & followings.

I insert a formula in to one of the columns (which I format as Percentage) something like =b1\a1 (where "b" column = following & "a" column = followers) & then I delete anyone who has a percentage higher than 100%. That means they follow more than they get followed. I take the remaining usernames, add it to my existing FL whitelist & then begin the process of unfollowing.

That's how I do it.

 

[notabot]

....That's how I do it.

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense. I wish FL had a way to scrape users to follow with a certain ratio of followers/following, because it seems to yield a better followback percentage. What I was doing for a while for my photography account is target users with 100-500 followers and 500-5000 followings. It takes longer but it's a larger percentage of followbacks. I do that maybe once a week now but the amount of web requests it uses causes a "too many requests" web response, which makes me nervous to do it more than once a week (it hasn't caused any temp bans or verifications yet but I don't want to push it too far). For some reason FL doesn't scrape and store all the data at once, so it makes a separate request each time it looks at a single user's followers or followings.

 

[lemon]

Trolling4dollars, I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for your input. I've applied your strategies to my own account and this has really seemed to improve the rate at which I am growing a following!

 

[Trolling4Dollars]

Trolling4dollars, I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for your input. I've applied your strategies to my own account and this has really seemed to improve the rate at which I am growing a following!

Glad to hear it!

 

[gregg12]

Good post. Photography, fitness, cooking, car tuning, travelling all seem excellent to build your personal brand on IG.

Thanks for the motivation that it's working for you!

 

[darulez]

I had 4 acc banned on this instashit service called instagress. "slow settings", just following. pfff

 

[mladz]

I had 4 acc banned on this instashit service called instagress. "slow settings", just following. pfff

Don't blame Instagress for your stupidity