Scale. Much more complicated to scale when going manual, that is for sure.
As my experience:
Auto - Program cost/Proxy cost/around 2h of daily work fixing issues, maintaining if you are scaled up.
Manual - Smartphone one time costs/SIM+Plan/Around of 2hour work daily per 50 profiles.
Auto - 60% more problems regarding hard blocks, shadowbans, verifications, compromised.
If you have a clients lists over 50 - communication is harmed and you wait for reply usually between 1-2 days. Thats why for me was more important to go manual and keep satisfaction up.
The result? Practically the same. Yes you can do a little more actions on auto but yet manual actions are more targeted, precise and have character in their actions.
In my experience - Manual has a slighter less Return of Investment but still saves you a lot of headaches. For the future we cannot be certain in which direction it will shift.
One thing is for sure: Automations will be always on a strike against since its violation of their ToS, same goes from the perspective of IG - the profile building/marketing shouldnt be as easy as it is (still) on automation.
My 2 cents, my experience. I wish you will all except that this is my experience and not a attack on Automation nor Manual way.
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I currently run 2 M/S setups with 200 slave accs total for 2 main pages and itâs an absolute headache. I could add more slaves and keep on replacing them as I go but honestly itâs been very hard lately to keep up with EV, blocks and so on. When you say scaling my operation, youâre referring to scaling with automation or with manual?
Thatâs for sure, but I guess itâs better to scale at a slower rate but keep your clients happy. I think even with manual you can run an operation of over 100 clients if you train your employees well and you can put some capital into it when starting out.
How many accounts are you managing atm?
Yes, you just need some more investments 
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110 at the moment (for simple F/UF) other services are not considered here. But it can be done scalable.
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Hello guys! I stopped doing clients management with automation back in 2019 summer and left IM marketing at all. Now, Iâm planning to get back into it by doing manually, cause i have some clients from the past who would like to get instagram growth again.
Letâs say first client can pay 200$ monthly. And I think I can get him on even 300$ / month after the first month + get a referral. But only if I will provide him real, good value.
My question would be , how would you advise me to start? Im thinking of doing 150/150 f/unf daily with likes/comments/dms after follow for some accounts. Also, only after warmup for arround 1 week or so⌠But still, donât think this will bring a lot of followers to this client, maybe maximum 15-20 daily. He is loosing followers atm like 5-10 per dayâŚ
Maybe some of you know some additional things I could do in order to bring to this client really good results? Maybe I can use some of his money to invest(like paid ig ads, giveaways or somethingâŚ) and make results wonderful for him so he can sign up for bigger plan and bring in refferalsâŚ
Let me know! I
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If you manage to get him on a 300$+ monthly retainer, my advise would be to spend some of the budget on payed shoutouts. Of course you wonât get shoutouts from big pages at that budget but it can add up the number of followers he gains overall.
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Guys , I did some of the testings and I have some questions for those who do manual follow.
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How do you search for good sources to follow? My own strategy is: Letâs say a niche is pug dog, so i find accounts on pug dog top hashtags, i find accounts from 10 to 100k and click on âshow similar accountsâ thing. Then I choose accounts that have best engagement and good growth rate on socialblade( which means they are gaining like 50-100+ followers daily) , then i follow these accounts most recent followers. Is this a good strategy to find best accounts to follow? Please share yours.
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Letâs say you follow/unfollow 150 people a day. So do you think its enough to find sources with good engagement rate in your niche? I donât think so. From my small testings I see that not all recent followers are good to follow. You can still see people from poor countries, you can still see teenagers accounts or not serious accounts which are not exactly niche relevant. So I think that if your client needs adult engagement from rich countries , he seels service/products , then you should avoid this.
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How about following followers which are young on Instagram? I donât know if thats really beneficial for your clients which are quite big already , lets say they are at 5-10k followers, but i noticed its much more easier to get followet back by small 50-100 and so accounts. But maybe this is not good for your client either cause they are very young accounts⌠But getting them to follow back is much more easier.
I mean really, when you can follow only 150 people a day, you must do your best to get best follow back ratio. But more importantly - quality. Cause at the end of the day , if you get 50 followers daily , but 1/3 of them are indians or teenagers, does it really count?
Letâs share your ideas guys!
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Following newly created accounts that ig recommends can be a good strategyâŚ
Biggest hurdles to overcome with manual at scale are not following the same accounts over and over, and unfollowing consistently without unfollowing accounts that any clients manually follow.
If you solve those two problems, then its just about margins and scaling the people. We are able to follow and unfollow about 200-300 accounts per day at scale now, but I couldnât imagine a team member managing more than 15 accounts max. Doing Mother/Slave manually would be pretty damn costly through by hand engagements. Thats not even including time to DM etc. Clients would have to pay a LOT of money lol. We are sticking to just client management and engaging on their accounts for now as less than 2% get blocks and its only due to new workers who just dont follow directions haha. That being said, the ultimate solution here is a fully automated phone system through UI automation⌠scaling it currently with partners and continuing to learn by hand⌠but this current by-hand method is helping us scale and stay cashflow positive again finally by end of month I hope!!!
Fuck 2019.
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Also, no longer violating terms of service boys⌠which clients love hearing. Price points of 199-299 are where we are at and 750-1500 in new followers each month seems to be the sweet spot.
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What about the clients account security when you give the login credentials to people that you probably canât trust 100%. Where are your account managers from and how do you handle trust issues?
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well, we control all sessions from one main session, so we can end any sessions when we want. One good feature IG built in haha. But yes there is some level of risk⌠but no more than providing their account details to you bahaha. We also have our internal team there managing and hiring so itâs not much different than the employees we had here in the states.
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That shit is so far away from the initial idea of client management using automation.
I can relate to your situation and understand that you didnât want to lose the turnover but hiring third world people for manually engaging on smartphones is absolutely crazy. 
Keep going!
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Do you scrape a list of people to follow first for your clients?
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Did you find a good solution for not following the same users over and over again? Thatâs my current issue that Iâm trying to figure out. I manage to find a good targeting system for following ( using Jv for scraping with many filters and importing those in google sheets) and for unfollowing Iâm currently using the ,sort by latestââ witch works good if the client doesnât follow anyone while I provide the service.
Also, do you train your Vaâs to impute each username in the search bar and follow this way? I found that Ig seems to recognize this as bot actionsâŚ
Any recommendations would be appreciated 
Interested in this as well. I remember reading somewhere that you can use an app to make the log in for your VAâs without them seeing the credentials for the account and they just get the account logged in and start doing actions
You donât necessarily have to hire 3ârd world countries vaâs⌠Depending on where youâre from, I think the best bet would be to invest in local employees and train them. Of course this very much depends on the minimum/medium wage in your country, but thatâs the best way to control this aspect in your business in my opinion.
Maybe working with a recruitment agency would work good also, thoughts?