There’s a big trend in the entrepreneurial community of “automating your business.”
This is a trend that was inspired by Tim Ferris’ “The Four Hour Work Week.” Ferris showed America the power of online advertising and outsourcing parts of your business and creating systems for maximum profitability and work life balance.
In a similar fashion, many of your business’ social media accounts can be automated for maximum growth and profitability.
With all the risk factors involved, it is important that you have a full understanding of how to use third-party applications for any Instagram strategy for your business.
Here’s two tools that will virtually put your Instagram account on autopilot for maximum growth.
Instagress
Instagress is a service that follows, unfollows, likes, and comments on your Instagram page’s account to grow your page rapidly.
Instagress is what you’d call a “bot.” By using Instagress, you can reach certain kinds of users, hashtags, and/or locations.
You can set Instagress to go through cycles of following and unfollowing users. This way, you can set the exact number of followers you want to follow before unfollowing all of those followers or just unfollow the ones that didn’t follow your account back. This is beneficial for you to set it and leave Instagress running while you carry out the more important aspects of your business.
After you start running Instagress, you will see likes, follows and comments start to pour in as more users start to view your content.
Instagress prices their service by time, and their pricing structure is surprisingly affordable. Instagress offers a wide variety of time packages from just 3 days of service for $1.89 ($.63/day) to all the way up to a year for $75.99 ($.21/ day)
The best part about this pricing strategy is that Instagress only takes away your time when you use the service, so you can turn it on and off whenever you like and still have the remainder of your time.
The cons:
The first con is the most nerve racking.
Instagram is pretty strict about using third party applications on their service. If for some reason you are liking, commenting, following and unfollowing past Instagram’s maximum threshold, your account can be subject to becoming banned. Luckily, Instagress puts a plan in place where you can set it to fast, normal, or slow growth in order to stay within the limits of Instagram’s max. parameters.
The second con is the quality of your follower base. Since you are using a paid service, your account isn’t growing organically, so your quality of users can vary depending on the targeting that you put in place. For example, you could end up with 10k followers, but your engagement rate on each picture could be lower than it should be for that large of an account. Just because they follow your account doesn’t necessarily guarantee they’ll engage with your brand.
Instagress can be a great opportunity for your business to build an audience on Instagram. Although it has it’s cons, Instagress is a great way to drive traffic to your website and can be one of the cheapest options to drive sales and get in front of more users online.
Schedugram
Based in Melbourne, Austrailia, Schedugram is one of the only Instagram tools that let’s you upload and schedule Instagram posts in advance that will post on your behalf.
There are plenty of Instagram scheduling services out there, but Schedugram is one of the only services that actually will post for you instead of sending you a reminder to post.
Schedugram allows several users per account so teams can collaborate on the platform.
Not only does it allow you to schedule the post, it also has a great photo editing section of the platform that will allow you to make any customizations where you can crop, add filters, text, and rotate images that will up your Insta game.
Schedugram is a bit more pricey than other services on the market. At a beginning price of $20 a month, it sits at a higher price point than it’s competitors.
The cons:
Again, Schedugram is a third party service that does not have a relationship with Instagram. This puts your Instagram account at risk to be disabled and banned. You will have to weigh the risk reward of saving time and the importance of having your Instagram account as a main source of traffic for your business.
With a combination of these two tools, you can save a lot of time and increase your productivity. For entrepreneurs and social media account managers, it’s always important to maximize results within the few hours you dedicate to your social media strategy each week.
Not sure about the risk and reward? Feel free to hit the Contact button below to contact the social media pros here at Parachute Media.
