Manual Journey Results and questions

Hey folks,

So I am doing some social media work for someone that is going to be appearing on a reality show in the near future. This person already had a decent online presence, as when I took over about 12 days ago they had about 2500 followers and were following about 550. I've decided for safeties sake to do their account manually.

I want to post what I'm doing, and hopefully receive some best practices advice from the experts on here. This person is a friend and I've volunteered my help because they actually have the intention of doing good (animal welfare) with their notoriety and I want them to succeed. Here is what I've been doing:

Every 70 minutes (I set an alarm timer in my phone) I follow 60 new people. I do this from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep generally as it only takes about 60 seconds once every 70 minutes. I intend to do that up until 7500 followers. They just passed 4200 followers now which is an increase of 1700 in under two weeks which I'm very happy with. Their likes per photo have essentially doubled, engagement is good and they make their own posts and do their own comment replies, and I periodically like and comment on other peoples stuff for them.

Here are some questions:

1. This person is first trying to gain a very large following in his home town which is a medium/large city and we believe this is the correct strategy to build him a solid fanbase. So the people I am following are the followers of other local accounts that have between 3k-20k followers, including local media, sports teams etc. So far the return following is about 1/3rd which is following which I'm pleased with. However, I am worried about following someone, unfollowing them two weeks later, and then following them again somewhere down the road and being flagged for something. Is this a legitimate concern?

2. Once I hit the 7500 follow limit, should I wait a period of time before I begin unfollowing? Should I stay at the rate of 60 unfollows every 70 minutes? (we did this to get them down to 550 before we started the follows in the first place).

3. Can you recommend any other steps or best practices to maximize this process and get this persons numbers way up? Definitely hoping to be well above 10k followers once the show launches this September.

Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions. I will keep this thread updated with progress as I implement the methods I learn here.

1) This is sometimes a reason why an account can get flagged/reported.
2) Overnight should be more than enough time.
3) If you are doing it manually, sending real comments and responding to comments in a legitimate way can grow your engagement and growth faster.

Best of luck!

question for you because I am also doing manually.

How do you follow 60 people in only a minute? Are you following private users? Because I follow only public and have to sift through a bunch of private profiles to find a public then follow, hence taking much longer.

If so, how do you unsend that follow request if they do not accept it?

I don't sort through private or not private as I have not come up with a quick strategy to do so. I simple go to a persons list of followers, and scroll on down the list hitting followers counting out to 60 in my head. No real science to it on my end. Is there a reason to not follow private accounts? A great many of them end up accepting my follow, and then follow me back.

Kou7793 said:

question for you because I am also doing manually.

How do you follow 60 people in only a minute? Are you following private users? Because I follow only public and have to sift through a bunch of private profiles to find a public then follow, hence taking much longer.

If so, how do you unsend that follow request if they do not accept it?

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Thank you for your thoughts. As far as #1 goes, my strategy is thus....

After this round of following people that are likely local to my client, I am then going to move on to much broader scale people, animal lover groups, national groups etc. Two weeks of that then unfollows (my method seems to take about two weeks to get to 7500, and then another two weeks to come back down, which is fine). From there, I will likely move on to people that are fans of the genre of show etc, another cycle through, and then perhaps back to local people some time into the future to avoid being flagged. Seems like a decent strategy, no?

I've noticed so far that as the account grows larger, the number grows more rapidly, and I look forward to seeing that 10.0k style number instead of four digits haha

JokerSEO said:

1) This is sometimes a reason why an account can get flagged/reported.
2) Overnight should be more than enough time.
3) If you are doing it manually, sending real comments and responding to comments in a legitimate way can grow your engagement and growth faster.

Best of luck!

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Can anyone comment if having too many outstanding requests of private accounts is detrimental?

Kou7793 said:

If so, how do you unsend that follow request if they do not accept it?

Click to expand...

Richard Northwood said:

I don't sort through private or not private as I have not come up with a quick strategy to do so. I simple go to a persons list of followers, and scroll on down the list hitting followers counting out to 60 in my head. No real science to it on my end. Is there a reason to not follow private accounts? A great many of them end up accepting my follow, and then follow me back.

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I thought the problem was that when you follow private users, ones that don't accept you but have been left as 'requested' will count towards the 7500 following limit. But since you're not actually following them yet they won't be in the "Following" on your account so you wouldn't be able to find those people and thus eventually you'd be screwed over.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, otherwise I'll be doing what youre doing and following private users too.

Richard Northwood said:

Can anyone comment if having too many outstanding requests of private accounts is detrimental?

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I don't think so, but definitely it should be more than certain number of your total followings. I generally avoid private users

So we are inclined to believe that outstanding private requests count towards your 7500? Interesting. The last time through I definitely made it up to 7500, give or take, it didn't stop me at like 6872 or something like that...

Also just read that pending follow requests are possibly cancelled after 2-4 weeks? Can anyone confirm?

good luck on it and wish you the best.

Thank you

yahya778 said:

good luck on it and wish you the best.

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Richard Northwood said:

Thank you

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I have my own journey and I know how hard it is too I know how hard it is to do it manually. if you have iPhone was using a app called captivate its like a mass follow so I used that every 2 hours to follow 200 or 150 people.

Richard Northwood said:

Also just read that pending follow requests are possibly cancelled after 2-4 weeks? Can anyone confirm?

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yeah I wanna know this too, will radically change the way I've been following if true. I've been avoiding the private users and its slow as hell that way compared to following private users.

Well I have a pretty good idea in my head of whose followers I've been scraping to follow myself, so I would just go back and cancel those greyed out pending requests. Some notes on that:

1. If you are using my method, it would then be smart to write down the users whose followers you are following, so that you can return and cancel pending requests...
2. ... if need be. If we find out that they are eventually cancelled that may suffice even if its four weeks. Someone must have this knowledge or a vague idea?
3. Is there an hourly/daily limit of any sort to cancelling pending requests? Can I just do say all 700 outstanding ones consecutively or is there a protocol for this as well, stating I should continue to perhaps use my 60 per hour imposed limit.

This is a good discussion, I hope people see it and add their knowledge for us. Thank you in advance.

Kou7793 said:

yeah I wanna know this too, will radically change the way I've been following if true. I've been avoiding the private users and its slow as hell that way compared to following private users.

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Does a message pop up on Instagram once you've hit your follow limit and attempt to keep going? Anyone have a copy of that?

could use more input somebody

Update:

At 4530 followers now, following 6501. I will keep this updated as the following approaches 7500 which should be by the end of the day tomorrow. I can only image that there are many hundreds of outstanding requests currently. Right now I'm slightly outpacing 1000 new followers a week on this account which will of course grind to a halt as I take the time to unfollow for the next two weeks starting Monday.

Update:

I am now at 4663 followers with that account, and following 6767. It appears as though instagram is preventing me from following anymore accounts. I am going to let the account sit for the rest of the day, other than a couple of actual posts and some liking. Tomorrow I will go through and cancel a few hundred pending follow requests. So I am about 750 following's shy of the 7500 person limit, so it must take into consideration pending requests, although I would have suspected that I had more than 750ish outstanding.

Okay here is today's update with this account:

It stands at 4718 followers and it is following 6807. As I stated in my last post, I have followed no more accounts, and now I am going to begin the long process of unfollowing people back down to about 6-700. From there, I will seek out new accounts to follow to hopefully avoid overlap from the first time through. I do not want to raise any red flags. I will keep updating this thread, as it will be interesting to see how many followers the account loses from the mass unfollowing.